Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization

by Graham Hancock

Here are the mysteries, and some of the solutions that have been proposed: 1 Though now more than two miles above sea level, the area around Lake Titicaca is littered with millions upon millions of fossilized sea shells. This suggests that at some stage the whole of the Altiplano was forced upwards from the sea-bed, perhaps as part of the general terrestrial rising that formed South America as a whole. In the process great quantities of ocean water, together with countless myriads of living marine creatures, were scooped up and suspended among the Andean ranges.1 This is thought to have happened not more recently than about 100 million years ago.2 2 Paradoxically, despite the mighty antiquity of this event, Lake Titicaca has retained, until the present day, ‘a marine icthyofauna’3, in other words, though now located hundreds of miles from any ocean, its fish and crustacea feature many oceanic (rather than fresh-water) types. Surprising creatures brought to the surface in fishermen’s nets have included examples of Hippocampus (the seahorse).4 In addition, as one authority has pointed out, ‘The various species of Allorquestes (hyalella inermis, etc.) and other examples of marine fauna leave no doubt that this lake in other periods was much saltier than today, or, more accurately, that the water which formed it was from the sea and that it was damned up and locked in the Andes when the continent rose.’5 3 So much, then, for the events which may have created Lake Titicaca in t...