Page 91 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

elephant-like proboscid complete with tusks and a trunk, uncannily
similar in appearance to the ‘elephants’ of the Gateway of the Sun.
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I stepped forward a few paces to take a closer look at these elephants.
Each turned out to be composed of the heads of two crested condors,
placed throat to throat (the crests constituting the ‘ears’ and the upper
part of the necks the ‘tusks’). The creatures thus formed still looked like
elephants to me, perhaps because a characteristic visual trick the
sculptors of Tiahuanaco had employed again and again in their subtle
and otherworldly art had been to use one thing to depict another. Thus
an apparently human ear on an apparently human face might turn out to
be a bird’s wing. Likewise an ornate crown might be composed of
alternate fishes’ and condors’ heads, an eyebrow a bird’s neck and head,
the toe of a slipper an animal’s head, and so on. Members of the elephant
family formed out of condors’ heads, therefore, need not necessarily be
optical illusions; on the contrary, such inventive composites would be
perfectly in keeping with the overall artistic character of the frieze.
Among the riot of stylized animal figures carved into the Gateway of the
Sun were a number of other extinct species as well. I knew from my
research that one of these had been convincingly identified by several
observers as Toxodon —a three-toed amphibious mammal about nine
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feet long and five feet high at the shoulder, resembling a short, stubby
cross between a rhino and a hippo. Like Cuvieronius, Toxodon had
23
flourished in South America in the late Pliocene (1.6 million years ago)
and had died out at the end of the Pleistocene, about 12,000 years ago.
24

21 Ibid.
22 See The Calendar of Tiahuanaco, p. 47. Posnansky's work is also replete with
references to Toxodon.
23 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 11:878.
24 Ibid., 9:516. See also Quaternary Extinctions, pp. 64-5.

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