Page 208 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

of Austria, Italy and France. (Known technically as the Wurm Glaciation,
13
this European Ice Age started about 70,000 years ago, a little later than
its American counterpart, but attained its maximum extent at the same
time, 17,000 years ago, and then experienced the same rapid withdrawal,
and shared the same terminal date).
14
The crucial stages of Ice Age chronology thus appear to be:
1 around 60,000 years ago, when the Wurm, the Wisconsin and other
glaciations were well under way;

2 around 17,000 years ago, when the ice sheets had reached their
maximum extent in both the Old World and the New;

3 the 7000 years of deglaciation that followed.

The emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens thus coincided with a lengthy
period of geological and climatic turbulence, a period marked, above all
else, by ferocious freezing and flooding. The many millennia during
which the ice was remorselessly expanding must have been terrifying and
awful for our ancestors. But those final 7000 years of deglaciation,
particularly the episodes of very rapid and extensive melting, must have
been worse.
Let us not jump to conclusions about the state of social, or religious, or
scientific, or intellectual development of the human beings who lived
through the sustained collapse of that tumultuous epoch. The popular
stereotype may be wrong in assuming that they were all primitive cave
dwellers. In reality little is known about them and almost the only thing
that can be said is that they were men and women exactly like ourselves
physiologically and psychologically.
It is possible that they came close to total extinction on several
occasions during the upheavals they experienced; it is also possible that
the great myths of cataclysm, to which scholars attribute no historical
value, may contain accurate records and eyewitness accounts of real
events. As we see in the next chapter, if we are looking for an epoch that
fits those myths as snugly as the slipper on Cinderella’s foot, it would
seem that the last Ice Age is it.

13 John Imbrie and Katherine Palmer Imbrie, Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery, Enslow
Publishers, New Jersey, 1979, p. 11.
Ibid., p. 120; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 12:783; Human Evolution, p. 73.
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