America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

by Graham Hancock

sacred structures aligned to the solstices and equinoxes, found in monumental art and architecture all around the world, has been present in the Amazon for at least 13,000-years

From what remains we can begin to gauge the extent of the loss and by 2012, despite the destruction of ancient sites, archaeologists had identified as many as 97 surviving mounds and earthworks in the Lower Mississippi Valley, with several others found as far afield as Florida, thought to be in the range of 5,000 years old.1 Very few of these sites have yet been subject to radiometric dating, but of the 16 that have, with a combined total of 53 mounds and 13 causeways, all are more than 4,700 years old2—and many are much older than that.

From roughly 18,000 years ago, and for several thousand years thereafter, global temperatures had been slowly but steadily rising and the ice sheets melting. Our ancestors would have had reason to hope that earth’s long winter was at last coming to an end and that a new era of congenial climate beckoned. This process of warming became particularly pronounced after about 14,500 years ago. Then suddenly, around 12,800 years ago, the direction of climate change reversed and the world turned dramatically, instantly cold—as cold as it had been at the peak of the Ice Age many thousands of years earlier. This deep freeze—the mysterious epoch now known as the Younger Dryas—lasted for approximately 1,200 years until 11,600 years ago, at which point the climate flipped again, global temperatures shot up rapidly, the remnant ice sheets melted and collapsed into the oceans, and the world became as warm as it is today.