Page 211 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

animals were apparently killed together, overcome by some common power ...
Such piles of bodies of animals or men simply do not occur by any ordinary
natural means ...’
11
At various levels stone artefacts have been found ‘frozen in situ at great
depths, and in association with Ice Age fauna, which confirms that men
were contemporary with extinct animals in Alaska’. Throughout the
12
Alaskan mucks, also there is:
evidence of atmospheric disturbances of unparalleled violence. Mammoth and
bison alike were torn and twisted as though by a cosmic hand in Godly rage. In
one place we can find the foreleg and shoulder of a mammoth with portions of the
flesh and toenails and hair still clinging to the blackened bones. Close by is the
neck and skull of a bison with the vertebrae clinging together with tendons and
ligaments and the chitinous covering of the horns intact. There is no mark of knife
or cutting instrument [as there would be if human hunters, for example, had been
involved]. The animals were simply torn apart and scattered over the landscape
like things of straw and string, even though some of them weighed several tons.
Mixed with piles of bones are trees, also twisted and torn and piled in tangled
groups; and the whole is covered with a fine sifting muck, then frozen solid.
13
Much the same picture emerges in Siberia where catastrophic climatic
changes and geological upheavals occurred at around the same time.
Here the frozen mammoth graveyards, ‘mined’ for their ivory since the
Roman era, were still yielding an estimated 20,000 pairs of tusks every
decade at the beginning of the twentieth century.
14
Once again, some mysterious factor appears to have been at work in
bringing about these mass extinctions. With their woolly coats and thick
skins, mammoths are generally considered adapted to cold weather, and
we are not surprised to come across their remains in Siberia. Harder to
explain is the fact that human beings perished alongside them, as well
15
as many other animals that in no sense can be described as cold-adapted
species:

The northern Siberian plains supported vast numbers of rhinoceroses, antelope,
horses, bison, and other herbivorous creatures, while a variety of carnivores,
including the sabertooth cat, preyed upon them ... Like the mammoths, these
other animals ranged to the extreme north of Siberia, to the shores of the Arctic
Ocean, and yet further north to the Lyakhov and New Siberian Islands, only a very
short distance from the North Pole.
16
Researchers have confirmed that of the thirty-four animal species living in
Siberia prior to the catastrophes of the eleventh millennium BC—including
Ossip’s mammoth, giant deer, cave hyena and cave lions—no less than

11 Professor Frank C. Hibben, The Lost Americans, cited in The Path of the Pole, p. 275ff.
12 F. Rainey, ‘Archaeological Investigations in Central Alaska’, American Antiquity,
volume V, 1940, page 307.
13 Path of the Pole, p. 275ff.
14 The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 107-8.
A. P. Okladnikov, ‘Excavations in the North’ in Vestiges of Ancient Cultures, Soviet
15
Union, 1951.
16 The Path of the Pole, p. 255.

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