Page 218 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

wolf and lion, have been found in England, in the neighbourhood of
Plymouth on the Channel. The hills around Palermo in Sicily disclosed an
51
‘extraordinary quantity of bones of hippopotami—in complete
hecatombs’. On the basis of this and other evidence, Joseph Prestwich,
52
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. A number of
54
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. Remarkably, it endured for less than a millennium, indicating a
57
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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