About
Who is doing this, and why
Before the Record is written by Sotiris Spyrou and published under the Verity AI imprint. It exists because the gap in this subject is not information. It is trust.
Sotiris Spyrou. Writes this, and runs the surveys it reports on.
The gap
Two groups write about human prehistory. Academic researchers publish carefully, slowly, and mostly to each other. The alternative-history shelf writes vividly, sells hard, and does not survive checking. Between them sits a very large audience that finds the second group more interesting and has noticed the claims never quite resolve.
That audience is not gullible. It is underserved. Before the Record is written for it: the same discoveries, told properly, with every claim labelled by how far it can actually be pushed.
How this is written
Machine assistance is used in drafting, and it is checked. Every chapter and page is drafted, then fact-checked cold by a different system that did not write it, then edited by a person. The checks find real errors. In the first chapter of the first book, the checker found 14 invented specifics: temperatures, distances, survey rates. All were plausible. None were sourced. All were removed.
That is the failure mode of machine-written prose, and it is precisely why nothing here ships without the check. If we would not tell you how a claim was made, we would not deserve to be believed about the claim.
The fiction is kept separate
Sotiris Spyrou also writes science fiction, including a series involving an ancient civilisation that never existed. That work never shares a name, a logo, or a page with this one. Where we examine what a novel or a documentary imagined, the page says so at the top.
How it is funded
Books and prints. There is no advertising on this site, no sponsored content, and no paywall on anything factual. If that changes, this page changes first.
Elsewhere
Sotiris Spyrou writes across several projects. Before the Record is the evidence-first one.
- spspyrou.com is the author hub: the other books, the consulting work, and the way to get in touch about any of it.
- theulyssesuniverse.com is the science fiction. It shares an author and nothing else. Where this site examines what a novel imagined, the page says so at the top.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to know, and the correction gets published rather than quietly edited in. Contact us.