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Know_files/FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS.pdf - D Ank Unlimited

Know_files/FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS.pdf - D Ank Unlimited

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Graham Hancock – <strong>FINGERPRINTS</strong> <strong>OF</strong> <strong>THE</strong> <strong>GODS</strong><br />

It was suddenly clear to me how a continent-sized landmass, which had<br />

been the home of a large and prosperous society for thousands of years,<br />

could indeed get lost almost without trace. As the Flem-Aths concluded:<br />

‘It is to icy Antarctica that we look to find answers to the very roots of<br />

civilization—answers which may yet be preserved in the frozen depths of<br />

the forgotten island continent.’<br />

I hauled out my researcher’s resignation letter from the <strong>files</strong> and<br />

started to check off his preconditions for the emergence of an advanced<br />

civilization. He wanted ‘major mountain ranges’. He wanted ‘huge river<br />

systems’. He wanted ‘a vast region which occupied a land area at least a<br />

couple of thousand miles across’. He also wanted a stable, congenial<br />

climate for ten thousand years, to allow time for a developed culture to<br />

evolve.<br />

Antarctica is by no means a needle in a haystack. It’s a huge landmass,<br />

much, much bigger than the Gulf of Mexico, about seven times larger<br />

than Madagascar—indeed roughly the size of the continental USA.<br />

Moreover, as seismic surveys have demonstrated, there are major<br />

mountain ranges in Antarctica. And as several of the ancient maps seem<br />

to prove, unknown prehistoric cartographers, who possessed a scientific<br />

understanding of latitude and longitude, depicted these mountain ranges<br />

before they disappeared beneath the ice-cap that covers them today.<br />

These same ancient maps also show ‘huge river systems’ flowing down<br />

from the mountains, watering the extensive valleys and plains below and<br />

running into the surrounding ocean. And these rivers, as I already knew<br />

from the Ross Sea cores, 6 had left physical evidence of their presence in<br />

the composition of ocean bottom sediments.<br />

Last but not least, I noted that the earth-crust displacement theory did<br />

not conflict with the requirement for 10,000 years of stable climate. Prior<br />

to the supposed sudden shift of the crust, at around the end of the last<br />

Ice Age in the northern hemisphere, the climate of Antarctica would have<br />

been stable, perhaps for a great deal longer than 10,000 years. And if the<br />

theory was right in suggesting that Antarctica’s latitude in that epoch had<br />

been about 2000 miles (30 degrees of arc) further north than it is today,<br />

the northernmost parts of it would have been situated in the vicinity of<br />

latitude 30° South and would, indeed, have enjoyed a Mediterranean to<br />

sub-tropical climate.<br />

Had the earth’s crust really shifted? And could the ruins of a lost<br />

civilization really lie beneath the ice of the southern continent?<br />

As we see in the following chapters, it might have ... and they could.<br />

6 Ibid. See Part I and Chapter Fifty-one for details.<br />

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