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Quote by Graham Hancock

“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.”

Quote by Graham Hancock

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

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Graham Hancock
Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock is a British writer known for his research into ancient civilizations and mysterious phenomena. His works delve into the mysteries of human history and culture, including ancient Egypt, the Maya, and Atlantis. more

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“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
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“Areas that are densely populated today, Chicago, New York, Manchester, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin, Moscow -- in fact most of North America and northern Europe -- were absolutely uninhabitable due to the fact that they were covered by ice-caps several kilometers thick. Conversely, many areas that are uninhabitable today -- on account of being on the bottom of the sea, or in the middle of hostile deserts such as the Sahara (which bloomed for about 4000 years at the end of the last Ice Age) -- were once (and relatively recently) desirable places to live that were capable of supporting dense populations. Geologists calculate that nearly 5 per cent of the earth's surface -- an area of around 25 million square kilometers or 10 million square miles -- has been swallowed by rising sea-levels since the end of the Ice Age. That is roughly the equivalent to the combined areas of the United States and the whole of South America. It is an area almost three times as large as Canada and much larger than China and Europe combined. What adds greatly to the significance of these lost lands of the last Ice Age is not only their enormous area but also -- because they were coastal and in predominantly warm latitudes -- that they would have been among the very best lands available to humanity anywhere in the world at that time. Moreover, although they represent 5 per cent of the earth's surface today, it is worth reminding ourselves that humanity during the Ice Age was denied useful access to much of northern Europe and North America because of the ice-sheets. So the 25 million square kilometers that were lost to the rising seas add up to a great deal more than 5 per cent of the earth's useful and habitable landspace at that time.”

GeologyIce AgeDeep Human HistoryIce SheetsUninhabitableMeltwater Pulses
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“It was Cesare Emiliani who first drew serious attention to the possibility of post-glacial superfloods. In a paper published in Science magazine in 1975, he and a group of colleagues presented startling evidence from deep-sea cores from the north-eastern part of the Gulf of Mexico. The evidence revealed 'a 2.4 per cent isotopic anomaly between 12,000 and 11,000 years ago', which the authors correctly interpreted as having been caused by 'the occurrence of major flooding of ice meltwater into the Gulf of Mexico ... centring at about 11,600 years before the present'.”

Ice AgeDelugesPost Glacial Superfloods
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.”

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Author:Madeleine L'Engle
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“There is indeed compelling evidence of a series of massive glacial surges at the end of the last Ice Age. These correlate with meltwater pulses and peaks of sea-level rise, recorded, for example, in 'drowned' reefs of Acropora palmata from the Caribbean-Atlantic region near the island of Barbados. Acropora is an efficient tracker of rising sea-level because it is a light-loving coral that dies at depths greater than about 10 meters. The Barbados reefs were drowned three times at the end of the last Ice Age -- at approximately 14,000, 11,000 and 8000 years ago -- and so suddenly and deeply on each occasion that they now form three distinct steps, one for each flooding peak (rather than having crept towards shallower water as would have been the case with more gradual sea-level rises).”

Ice AgeDelugesMeltwater Pulses
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“In 1988 the German oceanographer Hartmut Heinrich was the first to come up with the firm geological evidence for such a cataclysmic 'iceberg-calving' process during the last Ice Age. By examining deep-sea drill cores sampled at various points across the North Atlantic he demonstrated the existence of widely dispersed layers of 'ice-rafted detritus' -- millions of tonnes of rocks and rocky debris that had once stood on land, that had been clawed up by the ice-sheets and that had ultimately been carried out to sea frozen into huge icebergs: 'As they melted they released rock debris that was dropped into the fine-grained sediments of the ocean floor. Much of this ice-rafted debris consists of limestones similar to those exposed over large areas of eastern Canada today. The Heinrich layers as they have become known, extend 3000 kilometers across the North Atlantic, almost reaching Ireland.' The Heinrich layers record at least six separate discharges of 'stupendous flotillas of ice-bergs' into the North Atlantic -- discharges that are now known, obviously enough, as 'Heinrich Events' and that are thought to have unfolded in concentrated bursts of activity that may, in each case, have lasted less than a century. Because of the progressive thickening of the Heinrich layers towards the western side of the Atlantic and the continuation of this trend into the Labrador Sea in the direction of Hudson Bay, it is obvious to geologists that 'much of the floating ice was sourced from the Laurentide ice-sheet'. However, other debris has been found intermingled in some Heinrich layers that 'could only have come from separate ice-sheets covering not only Canada, but Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles and Scandinavia'. Likewise, research into southern hemisphere ice-caps in the Andes and New Zealand shows that these too 'grew and then collapsed synchronously with the ice-rafting pulses recorded in the North Atlantic'. The implication [...] is that some 'global rather than regional forcing of climate change' must have been at work.”

GeologyIce AgeCataclysmDelugesIce SheetsIcebergs
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“Around 12,800 years ago, it was as though an enchantment of ice had gripped the earth. In many areas that had been approaching terminal meltdown full glacial conditions were restored with breathtaking rapidity and all the gains that had been made since the LGM were simply stripped away: 'Temperatures ... fell back on the order of 8-15 degrees centigrade ... with half this brutal decline possibly occurring within decades. The Polar Front in the North Atlantic redescended to the level of Cabo Finisterre in northwest Spain and glaciers readvanced in the high mountain chains. With respect to temperature the setback to full glacial conditions was nearly complete ...' For human populations at the time, in many except the most accidentally favoured parts of the world, the sudden and inexplicable plunge into severe cold and aridity must have been devastating. And in the Karakoram-Himalayan region, as in other glaciated areas, it is very likely that it was accompanied by a significant readvance of the ice-cap that previously had been in recession for some 7000 years.”

Ice AgeDeep Human HistoryCataclysmYounger DryasIce Sheets
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“We know from Glenn Milne's inundation data that Gozo and Malta were indeed one big island during the Ice Age, down to approximately 13,500 years ago, and that they did not take on their present form as an archipelago of three islands (with little Comino in between) until around 11,000 years ago. Accordingly, if the medieval tradition of Malta and Gozo as one big island is not a complete invention -- and why should it be? -- then, 'fantastic' though it may seem, it somehow preserves a memory of Malta as it appeared more than 11,000 years ago. It is well known that most medieval mapmakers were only copyists reproducing older maps and [...] I believe we cannot exclude the possibility that the single large island called Gaulometin of Galonia leta that has somehow survived on certain medieval maps may indeed be a representation of Malta in a much earlier time. A mental leap is required in order even to consider such a possibility. It is necessary to set aside all preconceptions about the past, and all unexamined notions of how societies evolve. Above all, we have to rid ourselves of the ingrained conviction that (despite some setbacks) the basic story of human civilization has been steadily and reassuringly onwards and upwards from the very beginning. It may not have been so. There may be tremendous gaps, of which we are blissfully unaware, in the evidence presently available to us concerning the origins and progress of civilization. In particular, there has been no sustained or serious search for very ancient underwater ruins along the millions of square kilometres of continental shelves flooded at the end of the Ice Age. So it is possible, and within the bounds of reason, that a civilization of some sort might have flourished during the closing millennia of the Ice Age and might not yet have been detected by archaeologists. A civilization not necessarily at all like our own but still advanced enough to have mastered complex skills such as seafaring and navigation (that do not call for a large material or industrial base) and to have left behind memories of the world as it looked before the flood and at various stages during the rising of the seas. The sort of civilization, perhaps, that would have built with megaliths and aligned them with navigational precision to the path of the sun. Maybe even a civilization that measured the earth, mapped it and netted it with a latitude and longitude grid. Until such a lost civilization has been entirely ruled out -- and we are far from that -- it is rational to keep our minds open to the possibility, however extraordinary it may seem, that certain ancient maps have indeed carried down to us broken images of the antediluvian world.”

ProgressHeritageIce AgeCataclysmLost CivilizationsIce Age CivilizationsDelugesUnderwater Ruins
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“Europe lost many trees or their close relatives that today are only found native in the warm-temperate-subtropical ‘evergreen forests’ of south-eastern China or eastern North America (Combourieu-Nebout et al. 2015). These were largely replaced in Europe by trees of the temperate ‘mixed mesophytic forest’. Many taxa had already disappeared at the beginning of the Quaternary (e.g. Liquidambar, Meliosma, Pseudolarix false larch, Stewartia), while others survived longer (e.g. Liriodendron, Magnolia, Taxodium, Sequoia, Phellodendron cork tree, Tsuga, Carya) to vanish finally from Europe during the course of the early- or mid-Quaternary (Willis and McElwain 2014, Combourieu-Nebout et al. 2015, Birks and Tinner 2016).”

TreesIce Age
Author:Frank Krumm
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