The first hour may had been spent discovering peers then syncing "block headers",
Normally it should be finished in a few minutes but if you keep on getting slow peers and limited to 11 (when no inbound peers), that could take a while.

That will even be inconsistent in the later blocks.
Take note that Bitcoin Core has a hard-coded "assumed valid" block which dictates to skip the script verifications from the blocks before it.
Means that it would take longer to verify blocks later than that indicated blocks hash.
Each older versions of Bitcoin Core have lower block height than the newer ones but you can set it with assumevalid=<block_hash> setting or --assumevalid=<block_hash> arg.