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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 />

former civilization who had made it across the turbulent oceans in great<br />

ships and settled themselves in faraway lands: in the Nile Valley, for<br />

example (or perhaps, first, around Lake Tana at the headwaters of the<br />

Blue Nile), and in the Valley of Mexico, and near Lake Titicaca in the<br />

Andes—and no doubt in several other places as well ...<br />

Here and there around the globe, in other words, the fingerprints of a<br />

lost civilization remain faintly visible. The body is out of sight, buried<br />

under two miles of Antarctic ice and almost as inaccessible to<br />

archaeologists as if it were located on the dark side of the moon.<br />

Fact?<br />

Or fiction?<br />

Possibility?<br />

Or impossibility?<br />

Is it a geophysical possibility or a geophysical impossibility that<br />

Antarctica, the world’s fifth-largest continent (with a surface area of<br />

almost six million square miles) could (a) previously have been located in<br />

a more temperate zone and (b) have been shifted out of that zone and<br />

into the Antarctic Circle within the last 20,000 years?<br />

Is Antarctica movable?<br />

A lifeless polar desert<br />

‘Continental drift’ and/or ‘plate-tectonics’ are key terms used to describe<br />

an important geological theory that has become increasingly well<br />

understood by the general public since the 1950s. It is unnecessary to go<br />

into the basic mechanisms here. But most of us are aware that the<br />

continents in some way ‘float around’, relocate and change position on<br />

the earth’s surface. Common sense confirms this: if you take a look at a<br />

map of the west coast of Africa and the east coast of South America it’s<br />

pretty obvious that these two landmasses were once joined. The timescale<br />

according to which continental drift operates is, however, immense:<br />

continents can typically be expected to float apart (or together) at a rate<br />

of no more than 2000 miles every 200 million years or so: in other words,<br />

very, very slowly. 1<br />

Plate-tectonics and Charles Hapgood’s earth-crust displacement theory<br />

are by no means mutually contradictory. Hapgood envisaged that both<br />

could occur: that the earth’s crust did indeed exhibit continental drift as<br />

the geologists claimed—almost imperceptibly, over hundreds of millions<br />

of years—but that it also occasionally experienced very rapid one-piece<br />

displacements which had no effect on the relationships between<br />

individual landmasses but which thrust entire continents (or parts of<br />

them) into and out of the planet’s two fixed polar zones (the perennially<br />

cold and icy regions surrounding the North and South Poles of the axis of<br />

1 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 3:584.<br />

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