Page 34 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Orinoco, and the latitude is also quite accurate. Is it possible that these
estuaries have been filled in, and the delta extended this much, since
the source maps were made?’
20
• Although they remained undiscovered until 1592, the Falkland Islands
appear on the 1513 map at their correct latitude.
21
• The library of ancient sources incorporated in the Piri Reis Map may
also account for the fact that it convincingly portrays a large island in
the Atlantic Ocean to the east of the South American coast where no
such island now exists. Is it pure coincidence that this ‘imaginary’
island turns out to be located right over the sub-oceanic Mid-Atlantic
Ridge just north of the equator and 700 miles east of the coast of
Brazil, where the tiny Rocks of Sts. Peter and Paul now jut above the
waves? Or was the relevant source map drawn deep in the last Ice
22
Age, when sea levels were far lower than they are today and a large
island could indeed have been exposed at this spot?

Sea levels and ice ages

Other sixteenth-century maps also look as though they could have been
based on accurate world surveys conducted during the last Ice Age. One
was compiled by the Turk Hadji Ahmed in 1559, a cartographer, as
Hapgood puts it, who must have had access to some ‘most extraordinary’
source maps.
23
The strangest and most immediately striking feature of Hadji Ahmed’s
compilation is that it shows quite plainly a strip of territory, almost 1000
miles wide, connecting Alaska and Siberia. Such a ‘land-bridge’, as
geologists refer to it, did once exist (where the Bering Strait is now) but
was submerged beneath the waves by rising sea levels at the end of the
last Ice Age.
24
The rising sea levels were caused by the tumultuous melting of the ice-
cap which was rapidly retreating everywhere in the northern hemisphere
by around 10,000 BC. It is therefore interesting that at least one ancient
25
map appears to show southern Sweden covered with remnant glaciers of
the kind that must indeed have been prevalent then in these latitudes.
The remnant glaciers are on Claudius Ptolemy’s famous Map of the North.
Originally compiled in the second century AD, this remarkable work from
the last great geographer of classical antiquity was lost for hundreds of

20 Ibid., p. 69.
21 Ibid., p. 72.
22 Ibid., p. 65.
Ibid., p. 99.
23
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., p. 164.

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