Theos-Talk Archives (November 2002 Message tt00073)

Here's an excerpt from Graham Hancock's web site: 
http://www.grahamhancock.com/underworld/underworld1.php


Online Introduction to Underworld
>From Fingerprints of the Gods to Underworld

An Essay on Methods
By Graham Hancock

The central claim of my 1995 book Fingerprints of 
the Gods is not that there was but that there could have 
been a lost civilisation, which flourished and was 
destroyed in remote antiquity. And I wrote the book, 
quite deliberately, not as a work of science but as a work 
of advocacy. I felt that the possibility of a lost civilisation 
had not been adequately explored or tested by
mainstream scholarship. I set myself the task of 
rehabilitating it by gathering together, and passionately 
championing, all the best evidence and arguments in its 
favour.

In the early 1990's when I was researching 
Fingerprints there were a number of new ideas in the air 
that seemed to me to
have an important bearing on the lost civilisation 
debate. These included Robert Bauval's Orion 
correlation, Rand and Rose
Flem-Ath's work on Antarctica and earth-crust 
displacement, and the geological case presented by John 
Anthony West and
Robert Schoch that the Great Sphinx of Giza might 
be much older than had hitherto been thought.

At the same time I was aware of a huge reservoir of 
popular literature, going back more than a century to the 
time of Ignatius
Donnelly, in which the case for a lost civilisation 
had been put again and again, in many different ways and 
from many different
angles. I knew that not a single word of this vast 
literature had ever been accepted by mainstream scholars 
who remained
steadfast in their view that the history of civilisation 
is known and includes no significant forgotten episodes.

But, I thought, what if the scholars have got it 
wrong?

What if we've forgotten something important in our 
story?

What if we are a species with amnesia?

After all, scientists are now pretty sure that 
anatomically modern humans, just like us, have been 
around for at least the last
120,000 years.

Yet our "history" begins 5000 years ago with the 
first cities and the first written records. And the 
prehistory of this process
has presently only been traced back (often quite 
tentatively) to the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 
years ago when it's
thought that mankind began to make the transition 
from hunter-gathering to food production.

So what were we doing during the previous 110,000 
years?
===========snip