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

by Graham Hancock

Isn’t it odd that the same symbolic language keeps cropping up in ancient traditions from so many widely scattered regions of the world? How can this be explained? Are we talking about some vast, subconscious wave of intercultural telepathy, or could elements of these remarkable universal myths have been engineered, long ages ago, by clever and purposeful people? Which of these improbable propositions is the more likely to be true? Or are there other possible explanations for the enigma of the myths?

The answer, of course, was the Ice Age. That was what exterminated the former horses of the Americas, and a number of other previously successful mammals. Nor were extinctions limited to the New World. On the contrary, in different parts of the earth (for different reasons and at different times) the long epoch of glaciation witnessed several quite distinct episodes of extinction. In all areas, the vast majority of the many destroyed species were lost in the final seven thousand years from about 15,000 BC down to 8000 BC.

These staggering losses, involving the violent obliteration of more than forty million animals, were not spread out evenly over the whole period; on the contrary, the vast majority of the extinctions occurred in just two thousand years, between 11,000 BC and 9000 BC.5 To put this in perspective, during the previous 300,000 years only about twenty genera had disappeared.6 The same pattern of late and massive extinctions was repeated across Europe and Asia. Even far-off Australia was not exempt, losing perhaps nineteen genera of large vertebrates, not all of them mammals, in a relatively short period of time.7

Researchers have confirmed that of the thirty-four animal species living in Siberia prior to the catastrophes of the eleventh millennium BC – including Ossip’s mammoth, giant deer, cave hyena and cave lions – no less than twenty-eight were adapted only to temperate conditions.

Equally indicative of the cataclysmic change that took place at the onset of the great cold in Siberia is the food the extinct animals were eating when they perished: ‘The mammoths died suddenly, in intense cold, and in great numbers. Death came so quickly that the swallowed vegetation is yet undigested … Grasses, bluebells, buttercups, tender sedges, and wild beans have been found, yet identifiable and undeteriorated, in their mouths and stomachs.’22 Needless to say, such flora does not grow anywhere in Siberia today. Its presence there in the eleventh millennium BC compels us to accept that the region had a pleasant and productive climate – one that was temperate or even warm.

A more representative impression would be the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa, which erupted in 1883 with such violence that more than 36,000 people were killed and the explosion was heard 3000 miles away. From the epicentre in the Sunda Strait, tsunamis 100 feet high roared across the Java Sea and the Indian Ocean, carrying steamships miles inland and causing flooding as far away as East Africa and the western coasts of the Americas. Eighteen cubic kilometres of rock and vast quantities of ash and dust were pumped into the upper atmosphere; skies all over the world were noticeably darker for more than two years and sunsets notably redder.

The bulk of the animal extinctions took place between 11,000 BC and 9000 BC when there were violent and unexplained fluctuations of climate.35 (In the words of geologist John Imbrie, ‘a climatic revolution took place around 11,000 years ago.’36) There were also greatly increased rates of sedimentation37 and an abrupt temperature increase of 6–10 degrees Centigrade in the surface waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

It was long believed that human beings did not reach the New World until around 11,000 years ago, but recent finds have steadily pushed that horizon back. Stone implements dating to 25,000 BC have been identified by Canadian researchers in the Old Crow Basin in the Yukon Territory of Alaska.59 In South America (as far south as Peru and Tierra del Fuego) human remains and artefacts have been found which have been reliably dated to 12,000 BC – with another group between 19,000 BC and 23,000 BC.60 With this and other evidence taken into account, ‘a very reasonable conclusion on the peopling of the Americas is that it began at least 35,000 years ago, but may well have included waves of immigrants at later dates too.’

Isn’t it also odd that so many of the myths turn out to contain descriptions of figures like Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha, said to have come in the time of darkness, after the flood, to teach architecture, astronomy, science and the rule of law to the scattered and devastated tribes of survivors. Who were these civilizing heroes? Were they figments of the primitive imagination? Or gods? Or men? If they were men, could they have tampered with the myths in some way, turning them into vehicles for transporting knowledge through time?

Beneath the clear and unpolluted heavens of the ancient world, it is easy to understand how human beings might have felt reassured by regular celestial motions such as these. It is equally easy to understand why the four cardinal points of the year – the spring and autumn equinoxes, the winter and summer solstices – should everywhere have been accorded immense significance. Even greater significance was accorded to the conjunction of these cardinal points with the zodiacal constellations. But most significant of all was the constellation in which the sun was observed to rise on the morning of the spring (or vernal) equinox.

First, a point of terminology. Seconds of arc are the smallest subdivisions of a degree of arc. There are 60 of these arc seconds in one arc minute, 60 minutes in one degree, and 360 degrees in the full circle of earth’s path around the sun. An annual change of 50.274 seconds of arc represents a distance somewhat under one-sixtieth of one degree so that it takes roughly 72 years (an entire human lifetime) for the equinoctial sun to migrate just one degree along the ecliptic. It is because of the observational difficulties entailed in detecting this snails’ pace rate of change that the value worked out by Hipparchus in the second century BC is hailed in the Britannica as a ‘notable discovery’.

Of course, there are many potential sources. At this point, however, in the interests of succinctness, we shall limit our inquiry to universal myths. We have already examined one group of myths in detail (the traditions of flood and cataclysm set out in Part IV) and we have seen that they possess a range of intriguing characteristics: 1 There is no doubt that they are immensely old. Take the Mesopotamian flood story, versions of which have been found inscribed on tablets from the earliest strata of Sumerian history, around 3000 BC. These tablets, handed down from the dawn of the recorded past, leave no room for doubt that the tradition of a world-destroying flood was ancient even then, and therefore originated long before the dawn. We cannot say how long. The fact remains that no scholar has ever been able to establish a date for the creation of any myth, let alone for these venerable and widespread traditions. In a very real sense they seem always to have been around – part of the permanent baggage of human culture. 2 The possibility cannot be ruled out that this aura of vast antiquity is not an illusion. On the contrary, we have seen that many of the great myths of cataclysm seem to contain accurate eye-witness accounts of real conditions experienced by humanity during the last Ice Age. In theory, therefore, these stories could have been constructed at almost the same time as the emergence of our subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, perhaps as long 50,000 years ago. The geol...

Santillana and von Dechend argue that it is no accident that the allegory of the ‘orb of heaven that turns around like a millstone and ever does something bad’20 also makes an appearance in the biblical tradition of Samson, ‘eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves’.21 His merciless captors unbind him so that he can ‘make sport’ for them in their temple; instead, with his last strength, he takes hold of the middle pillars of that great structure and brings the whole edifice crashing down, killing everybody.22 Like Fenja and Menja, he gets his revenge. The theme resurfaces in Japan,23 in Central America,24 among the Maoris of New Zealand,25 and in the myths of Finland. There the Hamlet/Samson figure is known as Kullervo and the mill has a peculiar name: the Sampo. Like Fenja and Menja’s mill it is ultimately stolen and loaded on board a ship. And like their mill, it ends up being broken in pieces.26 It turns out that the word ‘Sampo’ has its origins in the Sanskrit skambha, meaning ‘pillar or pole’.

In Chapter Twenty-three we saw that the so-called Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan in Mexico also expressed a knowledge and deliberate use of the transcendental number pi; in its case the height (233.5 feet) stood in a relationship of 4pi to the perimeter of its base (2932.76 feet).11 The crux, therefore, was that the most remarkable monument of Ancient Egypt and the most remarkable monument of Ancient Mexico both incorporated pi relationships long before and far away from the official ‘discovery’ of this transcendental number by the Greeks.12 Moreover, the evidence invited the conclusion that something was being signalled by the use of pi – almost certainly the same thing in both cases.

In addition, we have the testimony of a Heliopolitan priest named Manetho. In the third century BC he compiled a comprehensive and widely respected history of Egypt which provided extensive king lists for the entire dynastic period. Like the Turin Papyrus and the Palermo Stone, Manetho’s history also reached much further back into the past to speak of a distant epoch when gods had ruled in the Nile Valley. Manetho’s complete text has not come down to us, although copies of it seem to have been in circulation as late as the ninth century ad.7 Fortuitously, however, fragments of it were preserved in the writings of the Jewish chronicler Josephus (AD 60) and of Christian writers such as Africanus (AD 300), Eusebius (AD 340) and George Syncellus (AD 800).8 These fragments, in the words of the late Professor Michael Hoffman of the University of South Carolina, provide the ‘framework for modern approaches to the study of Egypt’s past’.

Of course they did no such thing.18 By means of this sleight of hand, however, Eusebius and others succeeded in boiling down Manetho’s grand pre-dynastic span of almost 25,000 years into a sanitized dollop a bit over 2000 years which fits comfortably into the 2242 years orthodox biblical chronology allows between Adam and the Flood.19 A different technique for downplaying the disturbing chronological implications of Manetho’s evidence is employed by the monk George Syncellus (c. AD 800). This commentator, who relies entirely on invective, writes, ‘Manetho, chief priest of the accursed temples of Egypt [tells us] of gods who never existed. These, he says, reigned for 11,895 years …’20