were heavily glaciated in what we think of as the last Ice Age, it was not
because of some mysterious slow-acting climatic factor, but rather
because those areas of land were then situated much closer to the North
Pole than they are today. Similarly, when the Wisconsin and Wurm
glaciations described in Part IV began to go into their meltdown at
around 15,000 BC the trigger was not global climate change but a shift of
the ice-caps into warmer latitudes ...
In other words: there is an Ice Age going on right now—inside the
Arctic Circle and in Antarctica.
The lost continent
The second connection the Flem-Aths made followed logically from the
first: if there was such a recurrent, cyclical geological phenomenon as
earth-crust displacement, and if the last displacement had shifted the
enormous landmass we call Antarctica out of temperate latitudes and into
the Antarctic Circle, it was possible that the substantial remains of a lost
civilization of remote antiquity might today be lying under two miles of
ice at the South Pole.
448
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
It was suddenly clear to me how a continent-sized landmass, which had
been the home of a large and prosperous society for thousands of years,
could indeed get lost almost without trace. As the Flem-Aths concluded:
‘It is to icy Antarctica that we look to find answers to the very roots of
civilization—answers which may yet be preserved in the frozen depths of
the forgotten island continent.’
I hauled out my researcher’s resignation letter from the files and
started to check off his preconditions for the emergence of an advanced
civilization. He wanted ‘major mountain ranges’. He wanted ‘huge river
systems’. He wanted ‘a vast region which occupied a land area at least a
couple of thousand miles across’. He also wanted a stable, congenial
climate for ten thousand years, to allow time for a developed culture to
evolve.
Antarctica is by no means a needle in a haystack. It’s a huge landmass,
much, much bigger than the Gulf of Mexico, about seven times larger
than Madagascar—indeed roughly the size of the continental USA.
Moreover, as seismic surveys have demonstrated, there are major
mountain ranges in Antarctica. And as several of the ancient maps seem
to prove, unknown prehistoric cartographers, who possessed a scientific
understanding of latitude and longitude, depicted these mountain ranges
before they disappeared beneath the ice-cap that covers them today.
These same ancient maps also show ‘huge river systems’ flowing down
from the mountains, watering the extensive valleys and plains below and
running into the surrounding ocean. And these rivers, as I already knew
from the Ross Sea cores,6 had left physical evidence of their presence in
the composition of ocean bottom sediments.
Last but not least, I noted that the earth-crust displacement theory did
not conflict with the requirement for 10,000 years of stable climate. Prior
to the supposed sudden shift of the crust, at around the end of the last
Ice Age in the northern hemisphere, the climate of Antarctica would have
been stable, perhaps for a great deal longer than 10,000 years. And if the
theory was right in suggesting that Antarctica’s latitude in that epoch had
been about 2000 miles (30 degrees of arc) further north than it is today,
the northernmost parts of it would have been situated in the vicinity of
latitude 30° South and would, indeed, have enjoyed a Mediterranean to
sub-tropical climate.
Had the earth’s crust really shifted? And could the ruins of a lost
civilization really lie beneath the ice of the southern continent?
As we see in the following chapters, it might have ... and they could.
6 Ibid. See Part I and Chapter Fifty-one for details.
449
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
Chapter 51
The Hammer and the Pendulum
Although beyond the scope of this book, a detailed exposition of the
earth-crust displacement theory is to be found in Rand and Rose FlemAth’s When the Sky Fell (published by Stoddart, Canada, 1995).
As noted, this geological theory was formulated by Professor Charles
Hapgood and supported by Albert Einstein. In brief, what it suggests is a
complete slippage of our planet’s thirty-mile-thick lithosphere over its
nearly 8000-mile-thick central core, forcing large parts of the western
hemisphere southward towards the equator and thence towards the
Antarctic Circle. This movement is not seen as taking place along a due
north-south meridian but on a swivelling course—pivoting, as it were,
around the central plains of what is now the United States. The result is
that the north-eastern segment of North America (in which the North Pole
was formerly located in Hudson’s Bay) is dragged southwards out of the
Arctic Circle and into more temperate latitudes while at the same time the
north-western segment (Alaska and the Yukon) swivels northwards into
the Arctic Circle along with large parts of northern Siberia.
In the southern hemisphere, Hapgood’s model shows the landmass that
we now call Antarctica, much of which was previously at temperate or
even warm latitudes, being shifted in its entirety inside the Antarctic
Circle. The overall movement is seen as having been in the region of 30
degrees (approximately 2000 miles) and as having been concentrated, in
the main, between the years 14,500 BC and 12,500 BC—but with massive
aftershocks on a planetary scale continuing at widely-separated intervals
down to about 9500 BC.
450
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
According to the earth-crust displacement theory, large parts of
Antarctica were positioned outside the Antarctic circle prior to 15,000
BC and thus could have been inhabited, with a climate and resources
suitable for the development of civilization. A cataclysmic slippage of
the crust then shifted the continent to the position it occupies
today—dead centre within the Antarctic circle.
Suppose that, before the displacement of the earth’s crust, a great
civilization had grown up in Antarctica, when much of it was located at
green and pleasant latitudes? If so, that civilization might easily have
been destroyed by the effects of the displacement: the tidal waves, the
hurricane-force winds and electric storms, the volcanic eruptions as
seismic faults split open all around the planet, the darkened skies, and
the remorselessly expanding ice-cap. Moreover, as the millennia passed,
the ruins left behind—the cities, the monuments, the great libraries, and
the engineering works of the destroyed civilization—would have been
ever more deeply buried beneath the mantle of ice.
Little wonder, if the earth-crust displacement theory is correct, that all
that can be found today, scattered around the world, are the tantalizing
fingerprints of the gods. These would be the traces, the echoes of the
works and deeds, the much misunderstood teachings and the
geometri
cal edifices left behind by the few survivors of Antarctica’s
451
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
former civilization who had made it across the turbulent oceans in great
ships and settled themselves in faraway lands: in the Nile Valley, for
example (or perhaps, first, around Lake Tana at the headwaters of the
Blue Nile), and in the Valley of Mexico, and near Lake Titicaca in the
Andes—and no doubt in several other places as well ...
Here and there around the globe, in other words, the fingerprints of a
lost civilization remain faintly visible. The body is out of sight, buried
under two miles of Antarctic ice and almost as inaccessible to
archaeologists as if it were located on the dark side of the moon.
Fact?
Or fiction?
Possibility?
Or impossibility?
Is it a geophysical possibility or a geophysical impossibility that
Antarctica, the world’s fifth-largest continent (with a surface area of
almost six million square miles) could (a) previously have been located in
a more temperate zone and (b) have been shifted out of that zone and
into the Antarctic Circle within the last 20,000 years?
Is Antarctica movable?
A lifeless polar desert
‘Continental drift’ and/or ‘plate-tectonics’ are key terms used to describe
an important geological theory that has become increasingly well
understood by the general public since the 1950s. It is unnecessary to go
into the basic mechanisms here. But most of us are aware that the
continents in some way ‘float around’, relocate and change position on
the earth’s surface. Common sense confirms this: if you take a look at a
map of the west coast of Africa and the east coast of South America it’s
pretty obvious that these two landmasses were once joined. The timescale according to which continental drift operates is, however, immense:
continents can typically be expected to float apart (or together) at a rate
of no more than 2000 miles every 200 million years or so: in other words,
very, very slowly.1
Plate-tectonics and Charles Hapgood’s earth-crust displacement theory
are by no means mutually contradictory. Hapgood envisaged that both
could occur: that the earth’s crust did indeed exhibit continental drift as
the geologists claimed—almost imperceptibly, over hundreds of millions
of years—but that it also occasionally experienced very rapid one-piece
displacements which had no effect on the relationships between
individual landmasses but which thrust entire continents (or parts of
them) into and out of the planet’s two fixed polar zones (the perennially
cold and icy regions surrounding the North and South Poles of the axis of
1 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 3:584.
452
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
spin).
Continental drift?
Earth-crust displacement?
Both?
Some other cause?
I honestly don’t know. Nevertheless, the simple facts about Antarctica
are really strange and difficult to explain without invoking some notion of
sudden, catastrophic and geologically recent change.
Before reviewing a few of these facts, let us remind ourselves that we
are referring to a landmass today oriented by the curvature of the earth
so that the sun never rises on it during the six winter months and never
sets during the six summer months (but rather, as viewed from the Pole,
remains low above the horizon, appearing to transcribe a circular path
around the sky during each twenty-four hours of daylight).
Antarctica is also by far the world’s coldest continent, where
temperatures on the polar plain can fall as low as minus 89.2 degrees
centigrade. Although the coastal areas are slightly warmer (minus 60
degrees centigrade) and shelter huge numbers of seabird rookeries, there
are no native land mammals and there is only a small community of coldtolerant plants capable of surviving lengthy winter periods of total or
near-total darkness. The Encyclopaedia Britannica lists these plants
laconically: ‘Lichens, mosses and liverworts, moulds, yeasts, other fungi,
algae and bacteria ...’2
In other words, although magnificent to behold in the long-drawn-out
antipodean dawn, Antarctica is a freezing, unforgiving, almost lifeless
polar desert, as it has been throughout mankind’s entire 5000-year
‘historical’ period.
Was it always so?
Exhibit 1
Discover The World Of Science Magazine, February 1993, page 17:
‘Some 260 million years ago, during the Permian period, deciduous trees
adapted to a warm climate grew in Antarctica. This is the conclusion
palaeobotanists are drawing from a stand of fossilized tree stumps
discovered at an altitude of 7000 feet on Mount Achernar in the
Transantarctic mountains. The site is at 84° 22’ south, some 500 miles
north of the South Pole.
‘ “The interesting thing about this find is that it’s really the only forest,
living or fossil, that’s been found at 80 or 85 degrees latitude,” says Ohio
State University palaeobotanist Edith Taylor, who has studied the fossil
trees. “The first thing we palaeobotanists do is look for something in the
modern records that is comparable, and there are no forests growing at
2 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 1:440.
453
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
that latitude today. We can go to the tropics and find trees growing in a
warm environment, but we can’t find trees growing in a warm
environment with the light regime these trees had: 24 hours of light in
the summer and 24 hours of dark in the winter.” ’3
Exhibit 2
Geologists have found no evidence of any glaciation having been present
anywhere on the Antarctic continent prior to the Eocene (about 60 million
years ago.)4 And if we go as far back as the Cambrian ( c. 550 million
years ago) we find irrefutable evidence of a warm sea stretching nearly or
right across Antarctica, in the form of thick limestones rich in reefbuilding Archaeocyathidae: ‘Millions of years later, when these marine
formations had appeared above the sea, warm climates brought forth a
luxuriant vegetation in Antarctica. Thus Sir Ernest Shackleton found coal
beds within 200 miles of the South Pole, and later, during the Byrd
expedition of 1935, geologists made a rich discovery of fossils on the
lofty sides of Mount Weaver, in latitude 86° 58’ S., about the same
distance from the Pole and about two miles above sea level. These
included leaf and stem impressions and fossilized wood. In 1952 Dr
Lyman H. Dougherty, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington,
completing a study of these fossils, identified two species of a tree fern
called Glossopteris, once common to the other southern continents
(Africa, South America, Australia) and a giant fern tree of another species
...’5
3 Discover The World Of Science, February 1993, p. 17. The fifteen mineralized tree
stumps, presumably the remnant of a much larger forest, range from three and a half to
seven i
nches in diameter. They were saplings of a well-known genus of seed fern,
Glossopteris [found in much of the southern hemisphere’s coal]. Unlike true ferns, seed
ferns had seeds instead of spores, were often treelike, and are now extinct ... All around
the Mount Achernar tree stumps, Taylor’s colleagues found the tongue-shaped imprints
of fallen Glossopteris leaves.
Deciduous trees are an indicator of a warm climate, and so is the absence of ‘frost
rings’. When Taylor analysed the growth rings in samples from the stumps she found
none of the ice-swollen cells and gaps between cells that arise when the growth of a tree
is disrupted by frost. That means there wasn’t any frost in the Antarctic at that time.
‘In our memory Antarctica has always been cold,’ says Taylor. ‘It’s only by looking at
fossil floras that we can see what potential there is for plant communities. This fossil
forest, growing at 85 degrees latitude, gives us some idea of what is possible with
catastrophic climate change.’ N.B. The trees were killed by a flood or mudflow—another
impossibility in Antarctica today.
4 The Path of the Pole, p. 61.
5 Ibid., pp. 62-3.
454
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
Exhibit 3
Admiral Byrd’s own comment on the significance of the Mount Weaver
finds: ‘Here at the southernmost known mountain in the world, scarcely
two hundred miles from the South Pole, was found conclusive evidence
that the climate of Antarctica was once temperate or even sub-tropical.’6
Exhibit 4
‘Soviet scientists have reported finding evidence of tropical flora in
Graham Land, another part of Antarctica, dating from the early Tertiary
Period (perhaps the Paleocene or Eocene) ... Further evidence is provided
by the discovery by British geologists of great fossil forests in Antarctica,
of the same type that grew on the Pacific coast of the United States 20
million years ago. This of course shows that after the earliest known
Antarctic glaciation in the Eocene [60 million years ago] the continent did
not remain glacial but had later episodes of warm climate.’7
Exhibit 5
‘On 25 December 1990 geologists Barrie McKelvey and David Harwood
were working 1830 metres above sea level and 400 kilometres [250
miles] from the South Pole in Antarctica. The geologists discovered fossils