The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
In rural southern Ohio, about two hours south of Columbus, sits one of the most perplexing structures in the Western Hemisphere. Rising from gently sloping woods on the edge of Wayne National Forest is a massive earthen mound in the shape of a serpent devouring an egg. And when I say massive, I mean massive. The mound is more than a quarter mile long and covers 60 acres.
I first encountered the Great Serpent Mound as a picture in my eighth-grade Ohio history book. It was included in a chapter on the indigenous peoples of what would eventually become Ohio and was attributed to the prehistoric Adena people, although the textbook noted that archaeologists weren’t certain when it was built or what its purpose was.
I next encountered the mound in a college anthropology class where its origin had been reassigned by carbon dating to the later (1,000-1,500 AD) Fort Ancient Civilization. But that story never made a lot of sense to me. How does a semi-nomadic subsistence culture find the time and the engineering and organizational skills to create something so large and complex?
To be fair, it’s not a question that has kept me up at night, but when I saw an image of the mound in a trailer for a new Netflix series called “Ancient Apocalypse,” I was intrigued. The series was created by a researcher and author named Graham Hancock. I’d never heard of him, but through a quick Google search, I learned that he has quite a reputation among folks who get their science from The National Enquirer and the Joe Rogan Experience.
Hancock hypothesizes, to the chagrin of more legitimate archeological scholars, that near the end of the last ice age, some 12,000 years ago, an “advanced civilization” thrived, but was subsequently wiped out by a cataclysmic event. A handful of survivors managed to travel around the globe and “seed” the various hunter-gatherer populations with their relatively advanced understanding of astronomy, farming, engineering and science. Hancock makes it clear he is not talking about some science fiction super race with ray guns and time-travel portals, just a civilization on a par with those of ancient Egypt or Babylon.
Each of the series’ eight episodes is devoted to an ancient megalithic structure, from Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey to Ggantija on the island of Malta, and their stories are woven into a narrative that makes a vaguely plausible, if not entirely convincing, case for Hancock’s ideas.
The episode featuring the Great Serpent Mound notes archaeology’s waffling about the actual age and origin of the structure. Recent carbon dating has reestablished its origin to the Adena people and its date of construction to around 320 BCE. Hancock believes it is much older and that the material that suggested the latest date was deposited when the native Adena repaired the mound thousands of years after its original construction.
Whether you believe some ancient civilization helped build Great Serpent Mound or not, it’s an impressive achievement by any standard and well worth a visit if you are ever in southern Ohio.