Quotessence
Home / Books / America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

Book by Graham Hancock · 5 quotes · Deep Human History, Cataclysm, Younger Dryas

Filter quotes by topic

AllDeep Human HistoryCataclysmYounger DryasArchaeologyComet ImpactWildfiresIce AgeApocalypseCosmic ImpactMigrationsCivilizationDestructionExtinctionLegacyPaleontologyScienceAssumptionsClimate ChangeEpochEvidence

America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization Quotes

“My broad conclusion is that an advanced global seafaring civilization existed during the Ice Age, that it mapped the earth as it looked then with stunning accuracy, and that it had solved the problem of longitude, which our own civilization failed to do until the invention of Harrison's marine chronometer in the late eighteenth century. As masters of celestial navigation, as explorers, as geographers, and as cartographers, therefore, this lost civilization of 12,800 years ago was not outstripped by Western science until less than 300 years ago at the peak of the Age of Discovery.”

MastersCivilizationExplorersNavigationIce AgeSeafaringLost Civilization
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
Create image

“The Piri Reis map of 1513 features the western shores of Africa and the eastern shores of North and South America and is also controversially claimed to depict Ice Age Antarctica--as an extension of the southern tip of South America. The same map depicts a large island lying east of the southeast coast of what is now the United States. Also clearly depicted running along the spine of this island is a 'road' of huge megaliths. In this exact spot during the lowered sea levels of the Ice Age a large island was indeed located until approximately 12,400 years ago. A remnant survives today in the form of the islands of Andros and Bimini. Underwater off Bimini I have scuba-dived on a road of great megaliths exactly like those depicted above water on the Piri Reis map. Again, the implication, regardless of the separate controversy of whether the so-called Bimini Road is a man-made or natural feature, is that the region must have been explored and mapped before the great floods at the end of the Ice Age caused the sea level to rise and submerged the megaliths.”

ExplorationUnderwaterNavigationIce AgeDeep Human HistoryLost CivilizationRising Sea LevelsPiri Reis Map
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
Create image

“It was not until 2014, more than two decades after the mastodon's discovery [a mastodon scavenged by humans in the Americas], that the tide decisively turned. Built on improved understanding of processes that incorporate natural uranium and its decay products in fossil bone, a newly enhanced technique, known as 230 Th/U radiometric dating, was now available that could settle the age of the Cerutti deposit once and for all. Deméré therefore sent several of the mastodon bones to the US Geological Survey in Colorado, where geologist Jim Paces, using the updated and refined technique, established beyond reasonable doubt that the bones were buried 130,000 years ago.”

HumanityCivilizationIce AgeDeep Human HistoryPrehistory
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
Create image

“No investigation of the human story in the Americas [...] can ignore the role of Siberia as a crossroads in the migrations of our ancestors. Moreover, despite the fact that only a tiny fraction of its vast area has yet been sampled by archaeologists, we already know that anatomically modern humans were present in both western and Arctic Siberia at least as far back as 45,000 years ago. We know, too, that DNA studies have revealed close genetic relationships between Native Americans and Siberians that speak to a deep and ancient connection.”

InvestigationDnaArchaeologyIce AgeDeep Human HistoryMigrations
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
Create image

“Despite the passage of close to a million years since Homo erectus first sailed to Flores, however, what archaeology does not concede is that the human species could have developed and refined those early nautical skills to the extent of being able to cross a vast ocean like the Pacific or the Atlantic from one side to the other. In the case of the former, extensive transoceanic journeys are not believed to have been undertaken until about 3,500 years ago, during the so-called Polynesian expansion. And the mainstream historical view is that the Atlantic was not successfully navigated until 1492--the year in which, as the schoolyard mnemonic has it, "Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Indeed, the notion that long transoceanic voyages were a technological impossibility during the Stone Age remains one of the central structural elements of the dominant reference frame of archaeology--a reference frame that geneticists see no reason not to respect and deploy when interpreting their own data. Since that reference frame rules out, a priori, the option of a direct ocean crossing between Australasia and South America during the Paleolithic and instead is adamant that all settlement came via northeast Asia, geneticists tend to approach the data from that perspective.”

AssumptionsPrejudicesArchaeologyIce AgeOceansDeep Human HistoryMigrationsGeneticists
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
Create image