Page 444 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Chapter 50

Not a Needle in a Haystack

When I was only a few months into this investigation, my research
assistant sent me a fifteen-page letter explaining why he had decided to
resign. At that stage I hadn’t yet begun to put the pieces of the puzzle
together and I was working more on hunches than on hard evidence. I
was captivated by all the mysteries, anomalies, anachronisms and
puzzles, and wanted to learn as much about them as I could. My
researcher, meanwhile, had been looking into the long, slow processes by
which some known civilizations had come into global history.
It transpired that, in his opinion, certain significant economic, climatic,
topographical and geographical preconditions had to be met before a
civilization could evolve:
So if you are looking for a hitherto undiscovered civilization of great originators
who made it on their own, separate from any of the ones we already know, you are
not looking for a needle in a haystack. You are looking for something more like a
city in its hinterland. What you are looking for is a vast region which occupied a
land area at least a couple of thousand miles across. This is a landmass as big as
the Gulf of Mexico, or twice the size of Madagascar. It would have had major
mountain ranges, huge river systems and a Mediterranean to sub-tropical climate
which was buffered by its latitude from the adverse effects of short-term climatic
cooling. It would have needed this relatively undisturbed climate to last for around
ten thousand years ... Then the population of several hundred thousand
sophisticated people, we are to believe, suddenly vanished, together with their
homeland, leaving very little physical trace, with only a few surviving individuals
who were shrewd enough to see the end coming, wealthy enough and in the right
place, with the resources they needed to be able to do something about escaping
the cataclysm.
So there I was without a researcher. My proposition was a priori
impossible. There could be no lost advanced civilization because a
landmass big enough to support such a civilization was too big to lose.

Geophysical impossibilities

The problem was a serious one and it continued to nag at the back of my
mind all the way through my own research and travels. It was, indeed,
this exact problem, more than any other, which had scuppered Plato’s
Atlantis as a serious proposition for scholars. As one critic of the lost
continent theory put it:
There never was an Atlantic landbridge since the arrival of man in the world; there
is no sunken landmass in the Atlantic: the Atlantic Ocean must have existed in its
present form for at least a million years. In fact it is a geophysical impossibility for

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