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among the coldest parts of the world), remained unglaciated until the Ice
Age was near its end. They acquired their present climate only about
35 Ibid., p. 137. A major change from glacial to post-glacial conditions occurred about
11,000 years ago. This temperature change was ‘sharp and abrupt’ (Polar Wandering
and Continental Drift, Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists, Special
Publication No. 10, Tulsa, 1953, p. 159). Dramatic climate change around 12,000 years
ago is also reported in C.C. Langway and B. Lyle Hansen, The Frozen Future: A Prophetic
Report from Antarctica, Quadrangle, New York, 1973, p. 202. See also Ice Ages, pp.
129, 142; see also Quaternary Extinctions, p. 357: ‘The last 100,000 years of glacial
expansion, as recorded by oxygen-isotope ratios in deep-sea cores from the Atlantic and
the Equatorial Pacific, terminated ABRUPTLY around 12,000 years ago. A very rapid ice
melt caused a rapid rise in sea level... Detailed land fossils show a major movement of
plant and animal species at the time, especially into formerly glaciated terrain. American
megafaunal extinctions occurred during a time of rapid climatic change as seen in fossil
pollen and small animal records.’
36 Ice Ages, p. 129.
37 Path of the Pole, p. 137.
38 ‘The relative change is shown by the change in the relative abundance of cold and
warm water planktonic foraminfera, and the absolute change is given by oxygen isotope
ratio determinations on the fauna.’ Polar Wandering, p. 96.
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12,000 years ago, apparently very abruptly, when the mammoths and
other large mammals were frozen in their tracks.39
Elsewhere the picture was different. Most of Europe was buried under
ice two miles thick.40 So too was most of North America where the ice-cap
had spread from centres near Hudson Bay to enshroud all of eastern
Canada, New England and much of the Midwest down to the 37th
parallel—well to the south of Cincinnati in the Mississippi Valley and
more than halfway to the equator.41
At its peak 17,000 years ago, it is calculated that the total ice volume
covering the northern hemisphere was in the region of six million cubic
miles, and of course there were extensive glaciations in the southern
hemisphere too as we noted. The surplus water flow from which these
numerous ice-caps were formed had been provided by the world’s seas
and oceans which were then about 400 feet lower than they are today.42
It was at this moment that the pendulum of climate swung violently in
the opposite direction. The great meltdown began so suddenly and over
such vast areas that it has been described ‘as a sort of miracle’.43
Geologists refer to it as the Bolling phase of warm climate in Europe and
as the Brady interstadial in North America. In both regions:
An ice-cap that may have taken 40,000 years to develop disappeared for the most
part, in 2000. It must be obvious that this could not have been the result of
gradually acting climatic factors usually called upon to explain ice ages ... The
rapidity of the deglaciation suggests that some extraordinary factor was affecting
the climate. The dates suggest that this factor first made itself felt about 16,500
years ago, that it had destroyed most, perhaps three-quarters of the glaciers by
2000 years later, and that [the vast bulk of these dramatic developments took
place] in a millennium or less.’44
39 The reader may recall that inexplicably warm conditions prevailed in the New Siberian
Islands until this time, and it is worth noting that many other islands in the Arctic Ocean
were also unaffected for a long while by the widespread glaciations elsewhere (e.g. on
Baffin Island the remains of alder and birch trees preserved in peat indicate a relatively
warm climate extending at least from 30,000 to 17,000 years ago. It is also certain that
large parts of Greenland remained enigmatically ice-free during the Ice Age. Path of the
Pole, p. 93, 96.
40 The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 114; Path of the Pole, pp. 47-8.
41 Ice Ages, p. 11. Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 117; Path of the Pole, p. 47.
42 Ice Ages, p. 11; Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 114.
43 Path of the Pole, p. 150.
44 Path of the Pole, pp. 148-9, 152, 162-3. In North America, where the ice reached its
maximum extent between 17,000 and 16,500 years ago, geologists have made the
following discoveries: ‘Leaves, needles and fruits’ that flourished around 15,300 years
ago in Massachusetts; ‘A bog which developed over glacial material in New Jersey at
least 16,280 years ago, immediately after the interruption of the ice advance.’; ‘In Ohio
we have a postglacial sample dated about 14,000 years ago. And that was spruce wood,
suggesting a forest that must have taken a few thousand years, by conservative
estimate, to get established. What, indeed, does this mean? Does it not clearly suggest
that the ice cap, estimated to have been at its maximum at least a mile thick in Ohio,
disappeared from Delaware County in that state within only a few centuries?’
Likewise, ‘in the Soviet Union, in the Irkutsk area, deglaciation was complete and
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Inevitably the first consequence was a precipitous rise in sea levels,
perhaps as much as 350 feet.45 Islands and land bridges disappeared and
vast sections of low-lying continental coastline were submerged. From
time to time great tidal waves rose up to engulf higher land as well. They
ebbed away, but in the process left unmistakable traces of their presence.
In the United States, ‘Ice Age marine features are present along the Gulf
coast east of the Mississippi River, in some places at altitudes that may
exceed 200 feet.’46 In bogs covering glacial deposits in Michigan,
skeletons of two whales were discovered. In Georgia marine deposits
occur at altitudes of 160 feet, and in northern Florida at altitudes of at
least 240 feet. In Texas, well to the south of the farthest extent of the
Wisconsin Glaciation, the remains of Ice Age land mammals are found in
marine deposits. Another marine deposit, containing walrus, seals and at
least five genera of whales, overlies the seaboard of the north-eastern
states and the Arctic coast of Canada. In many areas along the Pacific
coast of North America Ice Age marine deposits extend ‘more than 200
miles inland.’47 The bones of a whale have been found north of Lake
Ontario, about 440 feet above sea level, a skeleton of another whale in
Vermont, more than 500 feet above sea level, and another in the
Montreal-Quebec area about 600 feet above sea level.48
Flood myths from all over the world characteristically and recurrently
describe scenes when humans and animals flee the rising tides and take
refuge on mountain tops. The fossil record confirms that this did indeed
happen during the melting of the ice sheets and that the mountains were
not always high enough to save the refugees from disaster. For example,
fissures in the rocks on the tops of isolated hills in central France are
filled with what is known as ‘osseous
breccia’, consisting of the
splintered bones of mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses and other animals.
The 1430 feet peak of Mount Genay in Burgundy ‘is capped by a breccia
containing remains of mammoth, reindeer, horse and other animals’.49
Much farther south, so too is the Rock of Gibraltar where ‘a human molar
and some flints worked by Paleolithic man were discovered among the
animal bones.’50
Hippo remains, together with mammoth, rhinoceros, horse, bear, bison,
postglacial life fully established by 14,500 years ago. In Lithuania another bog
developed as early as 15,620 years ago. These two dates taken together are rather
suggestive. A bog can develop much faster than a forest. First, however, the ice must
disappear. And let us not forget that there was a great deal of ice.’
45 Ice Ages, p. 11, Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 117, Path of the Pole, p. 47.
46 R. F. Flint, Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch, 1947, pp. 294-5.
47 Ibid., p. 362.
48 Earth in Upheaval, p. 43; in general, pp. 42-4.
49 Ibid., p. 47. Joseph Prestwich, On Certain Phenomena Belonging to the Close of the
Last Geological Period and on their Bearing upon the Tradition of the Flood, Macmillan,
London, 1895, p. 36.
50 On Certain Phenomena, p. 48.
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wolf and lion, have been found in England, in the neighbourhood of
Plymouth on the Channel.51 The hills around Palermo in Sicily disclosed an
‘extraordinary quantity of bones of hippopotami—in complete
hecatombs’.52 On the basis of this and other evidence, Joseph Prestwich,
formerly professor of Geology at Oxford University, concluded that
Central Europe, England, and the Mediterranean islands of Corsica,
Sardinia and Sicily were all completely submerged on several occasions
during the rapid melting of the ice sheets:
The animals naturally retreated, as the waters advanced, deeper into the hills until
they found themselves embayed ... They thronged together in vast multitudes,
crushing into the more accessible caves, until overtaken by the waters and
destroyed ... Rocky debris and large blocks from the sides of the hills were hurled
down by the currents of water, crushing and smashing the bones ... Certain
communities of early man must have suffered in this general catastrophe.53
It is probable that similar flood disasters occurred in China at much the
same time. In caves near Peking, bones of mammoths and buffaloes have
been found in association with human skeletal remains.54 A number of
authorities attribute the violent intermingling of mammoth carcasses with
splintered and broken trees in Siberia ‘to a great tidal wave that uprooted
forests and buried the tangled carnage in a flood of mud. In the polar
region this froze solid and has preserved the evidence in permafrost to
the present.’55
All over South America, too, Ice-Age fossils have been unearthed, ‘in
which incongruous animal types (carnivores and herbivores) are mixed
promiscuously with human bones. No less significant is the association,
over truly widespread areas, of fossilized land and sea creatures mingled
in no order and yet entombed in the same geological horizon.’56
North America was also badly affected by flooding. As the great
Wisconsin ice sheets melted they created huge but temporary lakes which
filled up with incredible speed, drowning everything in their paths, then
drained away in a few hundred years. Lake Agassiz, for example, the
largest glacial lake in the New World, once occupied an area of 110,000
square miles, covering large parts of what are now Manitoba, Ontario and
Saskatchewan in Canada, and North Dakota and Minnesota in the United
States.57 Remarkably, it endured for less than a millennium, indicating a
catastrophically sudden episode of melting and flooding followed by a
period of quiescence.58
51 Ibid., p. 25-6.
52 Ibid., p. 50.
53 Ibid., p. 51-2.
54 J. S. Lee, The Geology of China, London, 1939, p. 370.
55 Polar Wandering, p. 165.
56 J. B. Delair and E.F. Oppe, ‘The Evidence of Violent Extinction in South America’, in
Path of the Pole p. 292.
57 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1:141.
58 Warren Upham, The Glacial Lake Agassiz, 1895, p. 240.
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A token of good faith
It was long believed that human beings did not reach the New World until
around 11,000 years ago, but recent finds have steadily pushed that
horizon back. Stone implements dating to 25,000 BC have been identified
by Canadian researchers in the Old Crow Basin in the Yukon Territory of
Alaska.59 In South America (as far south as Peru and Tierra del Fuego)
human remains and artefacts have been found which have been reliably
dated to 12,000 BC—with another group between 19,000 BC and 23,000
BC.60 With this and other evidence taken into account, ‘a very reasonable
conclusion on the peopling of the Americas is that it began at least
35,000 years ago, but may well have included waves of immigrants at
later dates too.’61
Those newly arriving Ice Age Americans, trekking in from Siberia across
the Bering land bridge, would have faced the most appalling conditions
between 17,000 and 10,000 years ago. It was then that the Wisconsin
glaciers, all at once, went into their ferocious meltdown, forcing a 350foot rise in global sea levels amid scenes of unprecedented climatic and
geological turmoil. For seven thousand years of human experience,
earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and immense floods, interspersed with
eerie periods of peace, must have dominated the day-to-day lives of the
New World peoples. Perhaps this is why so many of their myths speak
with such conviction of fire and floods and times of darkness and of the
creation and destruction of Suns.
Moreover, as we have seen, the myths of the New World are not in this
respect isolated from those of the Old. All around the globe, a
remarkable uniformity reveals itself over issues such as ‘the great flood’
and ‘the great cold’ and ‘the time of the great upheaval’. It is not just that
the same experiences are being recounted again and again; that, on its
own, would be quite understandable since the Ice Age and its aftereffects were global phenomena. More curious by far is the way in which
the same symbolic motifs keep recurring: the one good man and his
family, the warning given by a god, the seeds of all living things saved,
the survival ship, the enclosure against the cold, the trunk of a tree in
which the pregenitors of future humanity hide themselves, the birds and
other creatures released after the flood to find land ... and so on.
Isn’t it also odd that so many of the myths turn out to contain
descriptions of figures like Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha, said to have come
in the time of darkness, after the flood, to teach architecture, astronomy,
science and the rule of law to the scattered and devastated tribes of
survivors.
Who were these civilizing heroes? Were they figments of
the primitive
59 Human Evolution, p. 92.
60 Ibid.; see also Quaternary Extinctions, p. 375.
61 Human Evolution, p. 92.
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imagination? Or gods? Or men? If they were men, could they have
tampered with the myths in some way, turning them into vehicles for
transporting knowledge through time?
Such notions seem fanciful. But, as we shall see in Part V, astronomical
data of a disturbingly accurate and scientific nature turns up repeatedly
in certain myths, as time-worn and as universal in their distribution as
those of the great flood.
Where did their scientific content come from?
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Part V
The Mystery of the Myths
2. The Precessional Code
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The Celestial Sphere.
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Chapter 28
The Machinery of Heaven
Although a modern reader does not expect a text on celestial mechanics to read
like a lullaby, he insists on his capacity to understand mythical ‘images’ instantly,
because he can respect as ‘scientific’ only page-long approximation formulas, and
the like.
He does not think of the possibility that equally relevant knowledge might once
have been expressed in everyday language. He never suspects such a possibility,
although the visible accomplishments of ancient cultures—to mention only the
pyramids or metallurgy—should be a cogent reason for concluding that serious
and intelligent men were at work behind the stage, men who were bound to have
used a technical language ...1
The quotation is from the late Giorgio de Santillana, professor of the
History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the
chapters that follow, we shall be learning about his revolutionary
investigations into ancient mythology. In brief, however, his proposition
is this: long ages ago, serious and intelligent people devised a system for
veiling the technical terminology of an advanced astronomical science
behind the everyday language of myth.
Is Santillana right? And if he is right, who were these serious and