Fingerprints of the Gods

by Graham Hancock

  were heavily glaciated in what we think of as the last Ice Age, it was not

  because of some mysterious slow-acting climatic factor, but rather

  because those areas of land were then situated much closer to the North

  Pole than they are today. Similarly, when the Wisconsin and Wurm

  glaciations described in Part IV began to go into their meltdown at

  around 15,000 BC the trigger was not global climate change but a shift of

  the ice-caps into warmer latitudes ...

  In other words: there is an Ice Age going on right now—inside the

  Arctic Circle and in Antarctica.

  The lost continent

  The second connection the Flem-Aths made followed logically from the

  first: if there was such a recurrent, cyclical geological phenomenon as

  earth-crust displacement, and if the last displacement had shifted the

  enormous landmass we call Antarctica out of temperate latitudes and into

  the Antarctic Circle, it was possible that the substantial remains of a lost

  civilization of remote antiquity might today be lying under two miles of

  ice at the South Pole.

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  It was suddenly clear to me how a continent-sized landmass, which had

  been the home of a large and prosperous society for thousands of years,

  could indeed get lost almost without trace. As the Flem-Aths concluded:

  ‘It is to icy Antarctica that we look to find answers to the very roots of

  civilization—answers which may yet be preserved in the frozen depths of

  the forgotten island continent.’

  I hauled out my researcher’s resignation letter from the files and

  started to check off his preconditions for the emergence of an advanced

  civilization. He wanted ‘major mountain ranges’. He wanted ‘huge river

  systems’. He wanted ‘a vast region which occupied a land area at least a

  couple of thousand miles across’. He also wanted a stable, congenial

  climate for ten thousand years, to allow time for a developed culture to

  evolve.

  Antarctica is by no means a needle in a haystack. It’s a huge landmass,

  much, much bigger than the Gulf of Mexico, about seven times larger

  than Madagascar—indeed roughly the size of the continental USA.

  Moreover, as seismic surveys have demonstrated, there are major

  mountain ranges in Antarctica. And as several of the ancient maps seem

  to prove, unknown prehistoric cartographers, who possessed a scientific

  understanding of latitude and longitude, depicted these mountain ranges

  before they disappeared beneath the ice-cap that covers them today.

  These same ancient maps also show ‘huge river systems’ flowing down

  from the mountains, watering the extensive valleys and plains below and

  running into the surrounding ocean. And these rivers, as I already knew

  from the Ross Sea cores,6 had left physical evidence of their presence in

  the composition of ocean bottom sediments.

  Last but not least, I noted that the earth-crust displacement theory did

  not conflict with the requirement for 10,000 years of stable climate. Prior

  to the supposed sudden shift of the crust, at around the end of the last

  Ice Age in the northern hemisphere, the climate of Antarctica would have

  been stable, perhaps for a great deal longer than 10,000 years. And if the

  theory was right in suggesting that Antarctica’s latitude in that epoch had

  been about 2000 miles (30 degrees of arc) further north than it is today,

  the northernmost parts of it would have been situated in the vicinity of

  latitude 30° South and would, indeed, have enjoyed a Mediterranean to

  sub-tropical climate.

  Had the earth’s crust really shifted? And could the ruins of a lost

  civilization really lie beneath the ice of the southern continent?

  As we see in the following chapters, it might have ... and they could.

  6 Ibid. See Part I and Chapter Fifty-one for details.

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  Chapter 51

  The Hammer and the Pendulum

  Although beyond the scope of this book, a detailed exposition of the

  earth-crust displacement theory is to be found in Rand and Rose FlemAth’s When the Sky Fell (published by Stoddart, Canada, 1995).

  As noted, this geological theory was formulated by Professor Charles

  Hapgood and supported by Albert Einstein. In brief, what it suggests is a

  complete slippage of our planet’s thirty-mile-thick lithosphere over its

  nearly 8000-mile-thick central core, forcing large parts of the western

  hemisphere southward towards the equator and thence towards the

  Antarctic Circle. This movement is not seen as taking place along a due

  north-south meridian but on a swivelling course—pivoting, as it were,

  around the central plains of what is now the United States. The result is

  that the north-eastern segment of North America (in which the North Pole

  was formerly located in Hudson’s Bay) is dragged southwards out of the

  Arctic Circle and into more temperate latitudes while at the same time the

  north-western segment (Alaska and the Yukon) swivels northwards into

  the Arctic Circle along with large parts of northern Siberia.

  In the southern hemisphere, Hapgood’s model shows the landmass that

  we now call Antarctica, much of which was previously at temperate or

  even warm latitudes, being shifted in its entirety inside the Antarctic

  Circle. The overall movement is seen as having been in the region of 30

  degrees (approximately 2000 miles) and as having been concentrated, in

  the main, between the years 14,500 BC and 12,500 BC—but with massive

  aftershocks on a planetary scale continuing at widely-separated intervals

  down to about 9500 BC.

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  According to the earth-crust displacement theory, large parts of

  Antarctica were positioned outside the Antarctic circle prior to 15,000

  BC and thus could have been inhabited, with a climate and resources

  suitable for the development of civilization. A cataclysmic slippage of

  the crust then shifted the continent to the position it occupies

  today—dead centre within the Antarctic circle.

  Suppose that, before the displacement of the earth’s crust, a great

  civilization had grown up in Antarctica, when much of it was located at

  green and pleasant latitudes? If so, that civilization might easily have

  been destroyed by the effects of the displacement: the tidal waves, the

  hurricane-force winds and electric storms, the volcanic eruptions as

  seismic faults split open all around the planet, the darkened skies, and

  the remorselessly expanding ice-cap. Moreover, as the millennia passed,

  the ruins left behind—the cities, the monuments, the great libraries, and

  the engineering works of the destroyed civilization—would have been

  ever more deeply buried beneath the mantle of ice.

  Little wonder, if the earth-crust displacement theory is correct, that all

  that can be found today, scattered around the world, are the tantalizing

  fingerprints of the gods. These would be the traces, the echoes of the

  works and deeds, the much misunderstood teachings and the

  geometri
cal edifices left behind by the few survivors of Antarctica’s

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  former civilization who had made it across the turbulent oceans in great

  ships and settled themselves in faraway lands: in the Nile Valley, for

  example (or perhaps, first, around Lake Tana at the headwaters of the

  Blue Nile), and in the Valley of Mexico, and near Lake Titicaca in the

  Andes—and no doubt in several other places as well ...

  Here and there around the globe, in other words, the fingerprints of a

  lost civilization remain faintly visible. The body is out of sight, buried

  under two miles of Antarctic ice and almost as inaccessible to

  archaeologists as if it were located on the dark side of the moon.

  Fact?

  Or fiction?

  Possibility?

  Or impossibility?

  Is it a geophysical possibility or a geophysical impossibility that

  Antarctica, the world’s fifth-largest continent (with a surface area of

  almost six million square miles) could (a) previously have been located in

  a more temperate zone and (b) have been shifted out of that zone and

  into the Antarctic Circle within the last 20,000 years?

  Is Antarctica movable?

  A lifeless polar desert

  ‘Continental drift’ and/or ‘plate-tectonics’ are key terms used to describe

  an important geological theory that has become increasingly well

  understood by the general public since the 1950s. It is unnecessary to go

  into the basic mechanisms here. But most of us are aware that the

  continents in some way ‘float around’, relocate and change position on

  the earth’s surface. Common sense confirms this: if you take a look at a

  map of the west coast of Africa and the east coast of South America it’s

  pretty obvious that these two landmasses were once joined. The timescale according to which continental drift operates is, however, immense:

  continents can typically be expected to float apart (or together) at a rate

  of no more than 2000 miles every 200 million years or so: in other words,

  very, very slowly.1

  Plate-tectonics and Charles Hapgood’s earth-crust displacement theory

  are by no means mutually contradictory. Hapgood envisaged that both

  could occur: that the earth’s crust did indeed exhibit continental drift as

  the geologists claimed—almost imperceptibly, over hundreds of millions

  of years—but that it also occasionally experienced very rapid one-piece

  displacements which had no effect on the relationships between

  individual landmasses but which thrust entire continents (or parts of

  them) into and out of the planet’s two fixed polar zones (the perennially

  cold and icy regions surrounding the North and South Poles of the axis of

  1 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 3:584.

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  spin).

  Continental drift?

  Earth-crust displacement?

  Both?

  Some other cause?

  I honestly don’t know. Nevertheless, the simple facts about Antarctica

  are really strange and difficult to explain without invoking some notion of

  sudden, catastrophic and geologically recent change.

  Before reviewing a few of these facts, let us remind ourselves that we

  are referring to a landmass today oriented by the curvature of the earth

  so that the sun never rises on it during the six winter months and never

  sets during the six summer months (but rather, as viewed from the Pole,

  remains low above the horizon, appearing to transcribe a circular path

  around the sky during each twenty-four hours of daylight).

  Antarctica is also by far the world’s coldest continent, where

  temperatures on the polar plain can fall as low as minus 89.2 degrees

  centigrade. Although the coastal areas are slightly warmer (minus 60

  degrees centigrade) and shelter huge numbers of seabird rookeries, there

  are no native land mammals and there is only a small community of coldtolerant plants capable of surviving lengthy winter periods of total or

  near-total darkness. The Encyclopaedia Britannica lists these plants

  laconically: ‘Lichens, mosses and liverworts, moulds, yeasts, other fungi,

  algae and bacteria ...’2

  In other words, although magnificent to behold in the long-drawn-out

  antipodean dawn, Antarctica is a freezing, unforgiving, almost lifeless

  polar desert, as it has been throughout mankind’s entire 5000-year

  ‘historical’ period.

  Was it always so?

  Exhibit 1

  Discover The World Of Science Magazine, February 1993, page 17:

  ‘Some 260 million years ago, during the Permian period, deciduous trees

  adapted to a warm climate grew in Antarctica. This is the conclusion

  palaeobotanists are drawing from a stand of fossilized tree stumps

  discovered at an altitude of 7000 feet on Mount Achernar in the

  Transantarctic mountains. The site is at 84° 22’ south, some 500 miles

  north of the South Pole.

  ‘ “The interesting thing about this find is that it’s really the only forest,

  living or fossil, that’s been found at 80 or 85 degrees latitude,” says Ohio

  State University palaeobotanist Edith Taylor, who has studied the fossil

  trees. “The first thing we palaeobotanists do is look for something in the

  modern records that is comparable, and there are no forests growing at

  2 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 1:440.

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  that latitude today. We can go to the tropics and find trees growing in a

  warm environment, but we can’t find trees growing in a warm

  environment with the light regime these trees had: 24 hours of light in

  the summer and 24 hours of dark in the winter.” ’3

  Exhibit 2

  Geologists have found no evidence of any glaciation having been present

  anywhere on the Antarctic continent prior to the Eocene (about 60 million

  years ago.)4 And if we go as far back as the Cambrian ( c. 550 million

  years ago) we find irrefutable evidence of a warm sea stretching nearly or

  right across Antarctica, in the form of thick limestones rich in reefbuilding Archaeocyathidae: ‘Millions of years later, when these marine

  formations had appeared above the sea, warm climates brought forth a

  luxuriant vegetation in Antarctica. Thus Sir Ernest Shackleton found coal

  beds within 200 miles of the South Pole, and later, during the Byrd

  expedition of 1935, geologists made a rich discovery of fossils on the

  lofty sides of Mount Weaver, in latitude 86° 58’ S., about the same

  distance from the Pole and about two miles above sea level. These

  included leaf and stem impressions and fossilized wood. In 1952 Dr

  Lyman H. Dougherty, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington,

  completing a study of these fossils, identified two species of a tree fern

  called Glossopteris, once common to the other southern continents

  (Africa, South America, Australia) and a giant fern tree of another species

  ...’5

  3 Discover The World Of Science, February 1993, p. 17. The fifteen mineralized tree

  stumps, presumably the remnant of a much larger forest, range from three and a half to

  seven i
nches in diameter. They were saplings of a well-known genus of seed fern,

  Glossopteris [found in much of the southern hemisphere’s coal]. Unlike true ferns, seed

  ferns had seeds instead of spores, were often treelike, and are now extinct ... All around

  the Mount Achernar tree stumps, Taylor’s colleagues found the tongue-shaped imprints

  of fallen Glossopteris leaves.

  Deciduous trees are an indicator of a warm climate, and so is the absence of ‘frost

  rings’. When Taylor analysed the growth rings in samples from the stumps she found

  none of the ice-swollen cells and gaps between cells that arise when the growth of a tree

  is disrupted by frost. That means there wasn’t any frost in the Antarctic at that time.

  ‘In our memory Antarctica has always been cold,’ says Taylor. ‘It’s only by looking at

  fossil floras that we can see what potential there is for plant communities. This fossil

  forest, growing at 85 degrees latitude, gives us some idea of what is possible with

  catastrophic climate change.’ N.B. The trees were killed by a flood or mudflow—another

  impossibility in Antarctica today.

  4 The Path of the Pole, p. 61.

  5 Ibid., pp. 62-3.

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  Exhibit 3

  Admiral Byrd’s own comment on the significance of the Mount Weaver

  finds: ‘Here at the southernmost known mountain in the world, scarcely

  two hundred miles from the South Pole, was found conclusive evidence

  that the climate of Antarctica was once temperate or even sub-tropical.’6

  Exhibit 4

  ‘Soviet scientists have reported finding evidence of tropical flora in

  Graham Land, another part of Antarctica, dating from the early Tertiary

  Period (perhaps the Paleocene or Eocene) ... Further evidence is provided

  by the discovery by British geologists of great fossil forests in Antarctica,

  of the same type that grew on the Pacific coast of the United States 20

  million years ago. This of course shows that after the earliest known

  Antarctic glaciation in the Eocene [60 million years ago] the continent did

  not remain glacial but had later episodes of warm climate.’7

  Exhibit 5

  ‘On 25 December 1990 geologists Barrie McKelvey and David Harwood

  were working 1830 metres above sea level and 400 kilometres [250

  miles] from the South Pole in Antarctica. The geologists discovered fossils