Page 72 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Although our ultimate destination was Tiahuanaco, we were aiming that
night for the town of Copacabana on a promontory near the southern end
of Lake Titicaca. To reach it we had to cross a neck of water by
improvised car ferry at the fishing town of Tiquine. Then, with dusk
descending, we followed the main highway, now little more than a narrow
and uneven track, up a series of steep hairpin bends and on to the
shoulder of a mountain spur. From this point a contrasting panorama
unfolded: the dark, dark waters of the lake below appeared to lie at the
edge of a limitless ocean drowned in sombre shadows, and yet the
jagged peaks of the snowcapped mountains in the distance were still
drenched in dazzling sunlight.
From the very beginning Lake Titicaca seemed to me a special place. I
knew that it lay some 12,500 feet above sea level, that the frontier
between Peru and Bolivia passed through it, that it covered an area of
3200 square miles and was 138 miles long by about 70 miles wide. I also
knew it was deep, reaching almost 1000 feet in places, and had a
puzzling geological history.
Here are the mysteries, and some of the solutions that have been
proposed:
1 Though now more than two miles above sea level, the area around
Lake Titicaca is littered with millions upon millions of fossilized sea
shells. This suggests that at some stage the whole of the Altiplano was
forced upwards from the sea-bed, perhaps as part of the general
terrestrial rising that formed South America as a whole. In the process
great quantities of ocean water, together with countless myriads of
living marine creatures, were scooped up and suspended among the
Andean ranges. This is thought to have happened not more recently
1
than about 100 million years ago.
2
2 Paradoxically, despite the mighty antiquity of this event, Lake Titicaca
has retained, until the present day, ‘a marine icthyofauna’ , in other
3
words, though now located hundreds of miles from any ocean, its fish
and crustacea feature many oceanic (rather than freshwater) types.
Surprising creatures brought to the surface in fishermen’s nets have

Professor Arthur Posnansky, Tiahuanacu: The Cradle of American Man, Ministry of
1
Education, La Paz, Bolivia, 1957, volume III p. 192. See also Immanuel Velikovsky, Earth
in Upheaval, Pocket Books, New York, 1977, pp. 77-8: ‘Investigation into the topography
of the Andes and the fauna of Lake Titicaca, together with a chemical analysis of this
lake and others on the same plateau, has established that the plateau was at one time at
sea level, 12,500 feet lower than it is today ... and that its lakes were originally part of a
sea-gulf ... Sometime in the past the entire Altiplano, with its lakes, rose from the
bottom of the ocean ...’
2 Personal communication with Richard Ellison of the British Geological Survey, 17
September 1993. Ellison is the author of the BGS Overseas Geology and Mineral
Resources Paper (No. 65) entitled The Geology of the Western Corriera and Altiplano.
3 Tiahuanacu, III, p. 192.

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