Page 460 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

highlights the period from about 32,000 to about 18,000 years ago as
being one during which particularly warm conditions prevailed.
17
• As we saw in Part IV, huge numbers of warm-blooded, temperate
adapted mammal species were instantly frozen, and their bodies
preserved in the permafrost, all across a vast zone of death stretching
from the Yukon, through Alaska and deep into northern Siberia. The
bulk of this destruction appears to have taken place during the
eleventh millennium BC, although there was an earlier episode of large-
scale extinctions around 13,500 BC.
18
• We also saw (Chapter Twenty-seven) that the last Ice Age came to an
end between 15,000 and 8000 BC, but principally between 14500 and
12,500 BC, with a further outburst of extraordinarily intense activity in
the eleventh millennium BC. During this geologically brief period of
time, glaciation up to two miles deep covering millions of square miles
which had taken more than 40,000 years to build-up suddenly and
inexplicably melted: ‘It must be obvious that this could not have been
the result of the gradually acting climatic factors usually called upon to
explain ice ages ... The rapidity of the deglaciation suggests that some
extraordinary factor was affecting climate ...’
19

The icy executioner

Some extraordinary factor was affecting climate ...
Was it a 30° one-piece shift of the lithosphere that abruptly terminated
the Ice Age in the northern hemisphere (by pushing the most heavily
glaciated areas southwards from the northern pole of the spin axis)? If so,
why shouldn’t the same 30° one-piece shift of the lithosphere have
swivelled a largely deglaciated six-million-square-mile southern
hemisphere continent from temperate latitudes to a position directly over
the southern pole of the spin axis?
On the issue of the movability of Antarctica, we now know that it is
movable and, more to the point, that it has moved, because trees have
grown there and trees simply cannot grow at latitudes which suffer six
months of continual darkness.
What we do not know (and may never know for certain) is whether this
movement was a consequence of earth-crust displacement, or of
continental drift, or of some other unguessed-at factor.
Let us consider Antarctica for a moment.
We have already seen that it is big. It has a land area of 5.5 million

Ibid., p. 99.
17
18 See Part IV.
19 Ibid.

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