Page 219 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

A token of good faith

It was long believed that human beings did not reach the New World until
around 11,000 years ago, but recent finds have steadily pushed that
horizon back. Stone implements dating to 25,000 BC have been identified
by Canadian researchers in the Old Crow Basin in the Yukon Territory of
Alaska. In South America (as far south as Peru and Tierra del Fuego)
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human remains and artefacts have been found which have been reliably
dated to 12,000 BC—with another group between 19,000 BC and 23,000
BC. With this and other evidence taken into account, ‘a very reasonable
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conclusion on the peopling of the Americas is that it began at least
35,000 years ago, but may well have included waves of immigrants at
later dates too.’
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Those newly arriving Ice Age Americans, trekking in from Siberia across
the Bering land bridge, would have faced the most appalling conditions
between 17,000 and 10,000 years ago. It was then that the Wisconsin
glaciers, all at once, went into their ferocious meltdown, forcing a 350-
foot rise in global sea levels amid scenes of unprecedented climatic and
geological turmoil. For seven thousand years of human experience,
earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and immense floods, interspersed with
eerie periods of peace, must have dominated the day-to-day lives of the
New World peoples. Perhaps this is why so many of their myths speak
with such conviction of fire and floods and times of darkness and of the
creation and destruction of Suns.
Moreover, as we have seen, the myths of the New World are not in this
respect isolated from those of the Old. All around the globe, a
remarkable uniformity reveals itself over issues such as ‘the great flood’
and ‘the great cold’ and ‘the time of the great upheaval’. It is not just that
the same experiences are being recounted again and again; that, on its
own, would be quite understandable since the Ice Age and its after-
effects were global phenomena. More curious by far is the way in which
the same symbolic motifs keep recurring: the one good man and his
family, the warning given by a god, the seeds of all living things saved,
the survival ship, the enclosure against the cold, the trunk of a tree in
which the pregenitors of future humanity hide themselves, the birds and
other creatures released after the flood to find land ... and so on.
Isn’t it also odd that so many of the myths turn out to contain
descriptions of figures like Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha, said to have come
in the time of darkness, after the flood, to teach architecture, astronomy,
science and the rule of law to the scattered and devastated tribes of
survivors.
Who were these civilizing heroes? Were they figments of the primitive

Human Evolution, p. 92.
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60 Ibid.; see also Quaternary Extinctions, p. 375.
61 Human Evolution, p. 92.

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