Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock. Three Rivers Press, NY, 1995 reviewed by David Timmins I've just finished the book "Fingerprints of the Gods" my son Mark sent me. It's not quite what I understood from the BBC program I'd seen and written my children about. -- but close enough. Here's "the rest of the story" based on a full reading. Hancock starts out by elaborating a series of similar legends handed down by the Egyptians, Mayas, Aztecs, Incas, and Mazda and Avesta Aryans of India and Persia -- as well as the Hebrews of the Bible, wondering why such parallelism. He then brings in the importance of ships in each culture, showing that details of construction are surprisingly similar -- and that the Egyptian funerary ships found buried near the Great Pyramid miles and miles inland from the sea, are of sea-going ships larger and more suited to the high seas than later Viking ships. Then he discusses how the high civilizations of each region seems to have erupted full-blown, with insufficient time to have evolved naturally. Then he brings in construction details of Inca, Aztec, Mayan, Indian, and Egyptian pyramids and temples showing how mathematical similarities are too frequent and too astonishing to be coincidental. He argues that the Great Pyramid is a three dimensional flat surfaced map of the northern hemisphere projected (with astonishing mathematical precociousness) on the four flat surfaces of the monument. He sees this as an attempt by a highly civilized remnant of a destroyed earlier civilization long-preceding what we call "history" to give survivors (us) a leg up in reconstructing civilized life after a great destruction. He then returns to the various legends of floods, earthquakes, falling heavens, stars fleeing across the nigh skies, the sun rising from different locations (as seen from various continents), Adam figures, Noah figures, visits by various Great Civilizers, e.g. Varicocha, Quetzalcocatl, the Seven Sages of China, Krishna, etc. etc. Mark penned in B of M similarities as recorded in III Nephi. Hancock ends up discussing a theory of Einstein's (which frankly I'd never heard of) to the effect that as ice caps build up over centuries and centuries, they become so heavy that the precession of the earth (its slight wobble on its axis) reaches a ciritcal point and the earth shifts around to a new equilibrium with a new north and south pole. This is clever. It certainly accounts for why it's been found that there have been several different north poles over the course of the earth's history. Hancock adds, that it's been established that the same thing has has happened on Mars. Finally, he brings in an argument to supplement the slow shift of continents based on tectonic plate drift -- a farily new notion that as the whole earth tilts in the course of establishing a new equilibrium, it breaks loose whole contients from their interior roots in the interior flux, allowing some, or all, to shift long distances over relatively short periods of time -- a few thousand years -- much like a loose orange skin might, loosened, slide around the interior flesh of the orange. These two mechanisms, pole shift, and catastrophic continental drift, neatly account for why we find trees and animals, with flesh still on their bones, caught in the arctic and anarctic (so far no meat on the bones of antarctic animals -- though our friend Jim Jones, formerly of the Harvard Museum, now at BYU, has discoverfed bones of the sames species in South America and Antarctica!! To pull together Hancock's thesis: he argues that these great catatrophic episodes seem to occur about every twenty-two thousand years, and have been doing so for as long as the earth has existed. A faint folk-memory of the last catastrophy has been preserved in the legends of all peoples. And like Noah (Hancoock seems to think there must have been several "Noahs") the few survivors who happened to be at sea, or near ships (accounting for the importance of the ship as an Egyptian mortuary symbol) survived and began establishing a new civilization wherever they landed. Sea-going peoples depend on the stars for navigation and having just gone throurh a terrifying survival experience, they were aware of the importance of mathematics to their survival.(star-reading to recognize the approaching cataclysm, ship building and navigation to sruvice the flood) And having observed the relationship of the precession of the equinox (the wobble that over a period of 2000 plus years brings us full circle around the signs of the zodiac) they built all the higher math they knew, relating this to the zodiacal cycle in which the latest catatrophic events took place, as a warning to their descendants of coming future catastrophes sso we could prepare!!! So there you have it. Interesting, yes. Provocative, yes, Well argued, quite. But the whole story, in my oipinion, not quite. I see no need for several Noahs. And we LDS can account for all the Krishnas, Viracochas, and Quetzalcoatls around the world from the single post-resurrection visits of Christ to the "other sheep not of this fold" which he told his disciples he was going to visit. I like Eistein's polar instability theory which accounts for shifting poles and the wipe-out of so many specias at the end of the last Ice Age. It also helps explain the Great Flood and the days of total darkness and destructive earthquakes recorded in both Bible and B of M. -- which I assume might havebeen caused by slightly less catastrophic shifts of equilibrium than those of the "great destructions". And catastrophic contiental shift helps explain more satisfactoriuly to me how the Indian Sub-Continent could have pushed up the Himalayas than slow tectonic displacement. I'd fully expected Hancock to end up arguing that the site of this ancient civilization was the Mediterranean Basin, flooded by the descending weaters pent up behind the great ice dams at the end of the last Icee Age, which also created the Black Sea and Sea of Marmara, not to mention Lake Baikal in Russia and the Great Lakes in North America. But, no. He postulates that the center of this great missing chapter in world civilization was located on the land mass of what is now Antarctica, then located in a mid-Atlantic temperate clime until 13,000or 14,000 years ago, and which then slid into its present position at the South Pole as a result of the world's last great cataclysm, with survivors scattering in all directions. . In possible support of this, we know that semi-tropical trees and plants, and some animal remains do exist in Antarctica. But why would the sole previous civilization have necessarily been located on this single continent? If they were such great sailors and so scientifically advanced before the cataclysm, why were there not have been great civilizations on other continents already? I suggest there were. And, again, Mormon teachings suggest this. The Adamic civilization existed, at least in part on the American continent. And the Jaredites were here very early 's flood, at least a couple of three thousand years before the Aztecs or Mayas. And I think it doesn't take a "World Catstrophe" to set people traveling and exploring -- or contributing to cultural diffusion -- as per Hugh Nibley -- thus accounting for many cultural commonalitis among peoples. But, still, I enjoyed Hancock's book, learned a good deal from it, and think you will, too. Main thing I learned is why hippies call this (a bit prematurely) the Age of Aquarius. This goes back to the precession of the equinox, At the beginning of the age of Abraham, the sun was rising in Aries -- the sign of the ram. And Hancock finds it intriguing that a ram was substituted for Isaac as a sacrifice and that the horn of a ram became the principal;accompaniment to the ritual of early jHebrew religion. By the time of Christ, the sun was rising in Pisces (fish) and that it was the fish which became the symbol for the earliest Christians (long before the cross). We are now approaching the sign of Aquarius. Hence hippy interest in "The New Age". Not being superstitious (although just writing about this stuff may make me appear so), or having much knowledge about astrology, I didn't know this stuff. So at least my trivia quotient was raised. Final thought. According to Hanccock, all ancient sages.. -- Incan, Mayan, Aztec, Chinese, Hindu, and Christian are agreed that we are approaching a new world age. The Mayan calendar has the next world cataclysm arriving in the year 2020. Others establish dates very close to this. Nostradamus, a noted French seer of two hundred years ago, puts the date as 2027! We know that Christ wasn't born in the year zero, because Herod died in what is now reckoned as 6 B.S. So Christ must have been born then, or a year or two sooner. In Jewish tradition a rabbi could't preach until he'd reached the age of thirty. So if God is calculating things on a neat cosmic calendar, and wants to usher in the Millenium according to his clock, not our erroneous one, it would be about 2024, or close to this, that the true third millenium since Christ;s birth would begin. But this kind of speculation is bootless, if fun. The Lord said "No man knoweth the day or hour of my coming, no not the angelsd of heaven." I think this is because the Mormon understanding of deity suggests that having accorded Man free agency, and while He knows in great detail how we think, and behave, He must act as The Great Tactician (setting the D-day dates for various events), as well as the Great Strategist (the Plan of Salvation) -- and that in tactics, much depeneds on how the Church progresses, how we behave individiually and as nations (we're behaving pretty badly on all accounts (except my kids and a small bunch of others. My wife Lola left her laptop in thw waiting room at JFK airport in NYC ad didn't recognize this until we were aboard and the plane about ready to taxi. She hurried off the plane and the girld at the ticket counter had it!! Someone had turned it in. Hope he/she makes the Celestial! In summary, keep your oil vessels full (and your powder dry) and while reading books like Hancock's is fun, don't let the Aztec or Maya sages replace the New Testament or B of M prophets.