Page 32 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

An early nineteenth-century Russian map showing that the existence
of Antarctica was at that time unknown. The continent was
‘discovered’ in AD 1818. But could it have been mapped thousands of
years earlier than that by the cartographers of an as yet unidentified
high civilization of prehistory?

Is it possible that a human civilization, sufficiently advanced to have
mapped Antarctica, could have developed by 13,000 BC and later
disappeared? And, if so, how much later?
The combined effect of the Piri Reis, Oronteus Finaeus, Mercator and
Buache Maps is the strong, though disturbing, impression that Antarctica
may have been continuously surveyed over a period of several thousands
of years as the ice-cap gradually spread outwards from the interior,
increasing its grip with every passing millennium but not engulfing all the
coasts of the southern continent until around 4000 BC. The original
sources for the Piri Reis and Mercator Maps must therefore have been
prepared towards the end of this period, when only the coasts of

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