Page 403 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

evidence proved that the Sphinx was more than 12,000 years old, the
history of human civilization was going to have to be rewritten. As part of
that exciting process, all the other strange, anachronistic ‘fingerprints of
the gods’ that kept appearing around the world, and the sense of an
undercurrent of ancient connections linking apparently unrelated
civilizations, would begin to make sense ...
When West’s evidence was presented in 1992 at the annual meeting of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science it had been
taken seriously enough to be publicly debated by the Chicago University
Egyptologist Mark Lehner, director of the Giza Mapping Project, who—to
the astonishment of almost everybody present—had been unable to come
up with a convincing refutation. ‘When you say something as complex as
the Sphinx dates to 9000 or 10,000 BC,’ Lehner had concluded:

it implies, of course, that there was a very high civilization that was capable of
producing the Sphinx at that period. The question an archaeologist has to ask,
therefore, is this: if the Sphinx was made at that time then where is the rest of this
civilization, where is the rest of this culture?
15
Lehner, however, was missing the point.
If the Sphinx did date to 9000 or 10,000 BC, the onus was not on West
to produce other evidence for the existence of the civilization which
produced it, but on Egyptologists and archaeologists to explain how they
had got things so wrong, so consistently, for so long. So could West
prove the antiquity of the Sphinx?

15 AAAS Annual Meeting, 1992, Debate: How Old is the Sphinx?

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