Page 212 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

twenty-eight were adapted only to temperate conditions. In this context,
17
one of the most puzzling aspects of the extinctions, which runs quite
contrary to what today’s geographical and climatic conditions lead us to
expect, is that the farther north one goes, the more the mammoth and
other remains increase in number. Indeed some of the New Siberian
18
Islands, well within the Arctic Circle, were described by the explorers who
first discovered them as being made up almost entirely of mammoth
bones and tusks. The only logical conclusion, as the nineteenth-century
19
French zoologist Georges Cuvier put it, is that ‘this eternal frost did not
previously exist in those parts in which the animals were frozen, for they
could not have survived in such a temperature. The same instant that
these creatures were bereft of life, the country which they inhabited
became frozen.’
20
There is a great deal of other evidence which suggests that a sudden
freeze took place in Siberia during the eleventh millennium BC. In his
survey of the New Siberian Islands, the Arctic explorer Baron Eduard von
Toll found the remains ‘of a sabre-tooth tiger, and a fruit tree that had
been 90 feet tall when it was standing. The tree was well preserved in the
permafrost, with its roots and seeds. Green leaves and ripe fruit still
clung to its branches ... At the present time the only representative of
tree vegetation on the islands is a willow that grows one inch high’.
21
Equally indicative of the cataclysmic change that took place at the onset
of the great cold in Siberia is the food the extinct animals were eating
when they perished: ‘The mammoths died suddenly, in intense cold, and
in great numbers. Death came so quickly that the swallowed vegetation is
yet undigested ... Grasses, bluebells, buttercups, tender sedges, and wild
beans have been found, yet identifiable and undeteriorated, in their
mouths and stomachs.’
22
Needless to say, such flora does not grow anywhere in Siberia today. Its
presence there in the eleventh millennium BC compels us to accept that
the region had a pleasant and productive climate—one that was
temperate or even warm. Why the end of the last Ice Age in other parts
23
of the world should have been the beginning of fatal winter in this former
paradise is a question we shall postpone until Part VIII. What is certain,

17 A. P. Okladnikov, Yakutia before its Incorporation into the Russian State, McGill-
Queens University Press, Montreal, 1970.
18 The Path of the Pole, p. 250.
19 The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 107. Wragnell, the explorer, observed on Bear
Island (Medvizhi Ostrova) that the soil consisted of only sand, ice and such a quantity of
mammoth bones that they seemed to be the chief substance of the island. On the
Siberian mainland he observed that the tundra was dotted with mammoth tusks rather
than Arctic shrubbery.
20 Georges Cuvier, Revolutions and Catastrophes in the History of the Earth, 1829.
21 Cited in Path of the Pole, p. 256.
Ivan T. Sanderson, ‘Riddle of the Quick-Frozen Giants’, Saturday Evening Post, 16
22
January 1960, p. 82.
23 Path of the Pole, p. 256.

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