Page 451 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

It was suddenly clear to me how a continent-sized landmass, which had
been the home of a large and prosperous society for thousands of years,
could indeed get lost almost without trace. As the Flem-Aths concluded:
‘It is to icy Antarctica that we look to find answers to the very roots of
civilization—answers which may yet be preserved in the frozen depths of
the forgotten island continent.’
I hauled out my researcher’s resignation letter from the files and
started to check off his preconditions for the emergence of an advanced
civilization. He wanted ‘major mountain ranges’. He wanted ‘huge river
systems’. He wanted ‘a vast region which occupied a land area at least a
couple of thousand miles across’. He also wanted a stable, congenial
climate for ten thousand years, to allow time for a developed culture to
evolve.
Antarctica is by no means a needle in a haystack. It’s a huge landmass,
much, much bigger than the Gulf of Mexico, about seven times larger
than Madagascar—indeed roughly the size of the continental USA.
Moreover, as seismic surveys have demonstrated, there are major
mountain ranges in Antarctica. And as several of the ancient maps seem
to prove, unknown prehistoric cartographers, who possessed a scientific
understanding of latitude and longitude, depicted these mountain ranges
before they disappeared beneath the ice-cap that covers them today.
These same ancient maps also show ‘huge river systems’ flowing down
from the mountains, watering the extensive valleys and plains below and
running into the surrounding ocean. And these rivers, as I already knew
from the Ross Sea cores, had left physical evidence of their presence in
6
the composition of ocean bottom sediments.
Last but not least, I noted that the earth-crust displacement theory did
not conflict with the requirement for 10,000 years of stable climate. Prior
to the supposed sudden shift of the crust, at around the end of the last
Ice Age in the northern hemisphere, the climate of Antarctica would have
been stable, perhaps for a great deal longer than 10,000 years. And if the
theory was right in suggesting that Antarctica’s latitude in that epoch had
been about 2000 miles (30 degrees of arc) further north than it is today,
the northernmost parts of it would have been situated in the vicinity of
latitude 30° South and would, indeed, have enjoyed a Mediterranean to
sub-tropical climate.
Had the earth’s crust really shifted? And could the ruins of a lost
civilization really lie beneath the ice of the southern continent?
As we see in the following chapters, it might have ... and they could.

6 Ibid. See Part I and Chapter Fifty-one for details.

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