Graham Hancock - Fingerprints of the Gods (1995)

In Fingerprints of the Gods Graham Hancock embarks on a worldwide quest to put together the pieces of a vast and mysterious jigsaw-puzzle of mankind's prehistory. In ancient ruins as far apart as Egypt's Great Sphinx, the strange Andean temples at Tiahuanaco and Mexico's awe-inspiring Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, he reveals not only the clear fingerprints of an unknown people who flourished during the last ice age, but also disquieting signs of high intelligence, technological sophistication and details scientific knowledge of the cosmos aeons before any previous known civilisation.

Through the memory-banks of universal myth and legend - which store much of our species' prehistoric records - Hancock uncovers traces of a precise scientific language, encoding the results of thousands of years of accurate astronomical observations. He studies ancient maps, incorporating spherical trigonometry, showing how the earth would have looked 12,000 years ago - and with levels of accuracy not achieved by our own cartographers until the nineteenth century. Finally, he uses the most up-to-date techniques of geology and astronomy to show that the conventionally accepted dating of a number of intriguing archaeological sites around the world cannot possible be correct and that they must be considered far, far older than was previously thought.

Hancock's extraordinary findings form the core of what could be an intellectual revolution, a dramatic and irreversible change in the way that we understand our past - and thus ourselves.

But there is something more, a warning maybe. Some of the most disturbing issues raised by Fingerprints of the Gods concern the type and extent of planetary catastrophe that would have had to occur in order to obliterate almost all traces of a large civilisation. The evidence for such a catastrophe, and indeed for more than one of them, is surprisingly strong.

488 pg. eBook