Page 29 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

maps other than those used by Oronteus Finaeus.’
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And not only Mercator.
Philippe Buache, the eighteenth-century French geographer, was also
able to publish a map of Antarctica long before the southern continent
was officially ‘discovered’. And the extraordinary feature of Buache’s map
is that it seems to have been based on source maps made earlier,
perhaps thousands of years earlier, than those used by Oronteus Finaeus
and Mercator. What Buache gives us is an eerily precise representation of
Antarctica as it must have looked when there was no ice on it at all. His
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map reveals the subglacial topography of the entire continent, which even
we did not have full knowledge of until 1958, International Geophysical
Year, when a comprehensive seismic survey was carried out.
That survey only confirmed what Buache had already proclaimed when
he published his map of Antarctica in 1737. Basing his cartography on
ancient sources now lost, the French academician depicted a clear
waterway across the southern continent dividing it into two principal
landmasses lying east and west of the line now marked by the Trans-
Antarctic Mountains.
Such a waterway, connecting the Ross, Weddell and Bellinghausen Seas,
would indeed exist if Antarctica were free of ice. As the 1958 IGY Survey
shows, the continent (which appears on modern maps as one continuous
landmass) consists of an archipelago of large islands with mile-thick ice
packed between them and rising above sea level.

The epoch of the map-makers

As we have seen, many orthodox geologists believe that the last time any
waterway existed in these ice-filled basins was millions of years ago.
From the scholarly point of view, however, it is equally orthodox to affirm
that no human beings had evolved in those remote times, let alone
human beings capable of accurately mapping the landmasses of the
Antarctic. The big problem raised by the Buache/IGY evidence is that
those landmasses do seem to have been mapped when they were free of
ice. This confronts scholars with two mutually contradictory propositions.

12 Ibid., pp. 103-4.
13 Ibid., p. 93.

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