please put your hands together and
warmly welcome mr. graham hancock thank
you Dad I've got volume here right yes
thank you very much indeed for for all
being here today I was just listening to
what Graham birds'll was saying about my
my past career and I was thinking how
how I got into all of this from being a
journalist working on the Economist it
actually happened because of repeated
visits that I made to Ethiopia and the
claim that Ethiopia makes to possess the
Lost Ark of the Covenant this claim was
ridiculed by scholars but as I began to
look into it I found that it rests on
very solid foundations and I ended up
writing the sign of the seal and that
book the research on that book took me
to Egypt because of course the origins
of the Ark of the Covenant lie in Egypt
and in the exodus of the Israelites from
Egypt and when I went to Egypt and began
looking into that civilization I
realized that I was confronted by an
extraordinary mystery a mystery that
Egyptologists had never satisfactorily
explained or if any rate if they tried
to their explanations certainly didn't
make sense to me I remember we were
reading a book called archaic Egypt by
Professor Walter Emery now deceased but
a great authority on his subject and he
drew attention to curious similarities
between ancient sumerian civilization in
Mesopotamia and the archaic
Egyptian civilization and while he could
find no strong evidence of a direct
influence of of ancient Egypt on Sumer
or of Sumer on ancient Egypt he found
that these similarities couldn't be
explained away as coincidence and he put
forward an interesting hypothesis
he asked what if an earlier an
identified civilization a remote third
party civilization had influenced both
Egypt and Sumer passed down a legacy to
both of them and what if the
similarities between these two cultures
were explained by that remote common
influence and I thought I thought this
was a very interesting idea and one
worth pursuing further and in fact more
than anything else it was that seed
planted by Professor Walter Emery
that led me to research and write
fingerprints of the gods I could not
have written that book at all or indeed
developed in the direction that that I
have developed as a writer and
researcher if it hadn't been for my
partner and wife santa hire whose
photographs were going to be looking at
here she certainly been the most
profound influence on my life and I did
some bad stuff back in the s which
when I look back on it I regret it but
we have to live with our mistakes and
I'm very grateful to Santa for putting
me right
many other people also who I need to
thank and without whom fingerprints
could not have been written researchers
people working in the field of the
mystery of the origins of civilization
over the last hundred years or so going
back as far as Ignatius Donnelly who
wrote Atlantis the antediluvian world in
the s more recently professor
giorgio de santo jana of the
massachusetts institute of technology
he's now also deceased did wonderful
work on the astronomical content of
ancient myths the amazing discovery that
in some of the oldest myths relating to
global cataclysms that have come down to
us from remote prehistory that in those
myths is found detailed astronomical
information relating to the phenomenon
that I'll be discussing a little bit
during this
Nonna's precession of the equinoxes
professor Charles Hapgood whose earth
crust displacement theory and whose work
on ancient maps again provides a clue to
this lost civilization that exists way
back in our past and I'm quite sure that
it does exist and more recently rather
than Rose flemeth who've refined Charles
Hapgood theories of earth crust
displacement and John Anthony West a
great man who spent years trying to
draw the attention of Egyptologists to
the erosional features of the Great
Sphinx and the implications of that
erosion and of course my friend and
colleague Robert Bauval with whom I have
co-authored the new book keeper of
Genesis Roberts astronomical work on the
Orion correlation between the pyramids
and the three stars of Orion's belt is
in my view the single most important
breakthrough in this field which has
enabled the pyramids mute for
four-and-a-half thousand years to speak
again and to speak in a comprehensible
manner I don't propose in this talk that
I'm going to give on fingerprints today
to go at all into the astronomical work
that Robert and I presented keeper
Genesis because Robert will be doing
that when he talks about keeper of
Genesis but take it from me the the
astronomy is really the key to this to
this whole mystery it's it's a way that
some ancient people long ago far more
sophisticated and civilized than our
historians would ever give credit for
found a way to communicate with the
future a way to wake up
dormant memories in all of us memories
of that great Golden Age of mankind that
is recorded in all our ancient myths
I'll start this talk just by looking at
a few similarities a few connections
bearing in mind what I said about Walter
Emery and the theory of a remote
third party civilization let's extend
that out from just the Middle East from
Egypt consumer and let's look at
connections between Egypt and the
America and the Americas similarities
that are ignored by scholars but are not
explained by them one issue concerns the
face of the Great Sphinx which were
which we're looking at here Robert and I
are of the view along with many of our
colleagues that the head of the Sphinx
was recarved by the dynastic Egyptians
that the monument is many thousands of
years older than the beginning of
historic Egyptian civilization and that
it was probably originally lion headed
as well as lion bodied and that that
heavily eroded millennial ancient
leonine head was recarved into the face
of a God by the early Pharaohs of Egypt
perhaps at around BC when
Egyptologists think that the monument
was actually created what I want to draw
attention to here is just a small point
it's pretty clear and well established
that we're looking at the face of an
African individual here an African head
and I'd like to compare that with this
African head which is roughly the same
size as the head of the Sphinx
it's an enormous piece of sculpture when
you stand beside it towers above you and
it weighs about tons the only problem
with this African head is that it
doesn't come from Africa at all it comes
from the Gulf of Mexico and indeed was
disinterred from the oldest
archaeological strata in the Gulf of
Mexico in which it had been deliberately
buried at around or BC we can
say that it was buried then because
organic material found alongside it has
been carbon dated to that period but I
suspect the scholars may be making a
mistake when they
attribute this so-called Olmec head the
construction the carving of the head to
that same period of say BC it's a
mistake in logic to assume that the head
dates from the same period as the
organic material that was buried with it
it's equally possible that it could have
been a vastly ancient heirloom a
venerated treasure that was passed down
over thousands of years until the time
when this mysterious Olmec civilization
the supposed mother culture of Central
America also venerated it and very did
I'm intrigued by the similarities of
features between the face of the Sphinx
in the face of this head and by the way
we know nothing at all about the Olmecs
not a single Olmec skeleton has ever
been found we it's just a name that is
applied to them they're one of those
mysterious high civilizations of
antiquity the origins of which are quite
unknown this also is an Olmec artifact
whoever the Olmecs were and again just
on this theme of light similarities I'd
like to draw attention to the headdress
that the figure is wearing and to
compare it with this headdress from
Egypt this is a fifth dynasty statue
found at saqqara and I'm intrigued by
the similarity of the headdress because
we're looking at cultures that are not
supposed to have been in contact at all
fifth dynasty Egypt in BC and and
the Olmecs in BC or perhaps much
earlier than that so how do such
similarities come about is it just a
coincidence was there a contact between
these two areas at that time or could we
be looking at the influence of a remote
third party civilization
this is this piece of sculpture is from
Bush mall in the Yucatan and it's
associated with the Maya and as you can
see it's a double feline figure two
Pumas or layer nine animals back to back
again we find a very similar device in
ancient Egyptian iconography to Lions
back to back often joined at the hip -
Lions fix's back to back as as here on
this Stella that stands between the paws
of the Sphinx see if I can get that shot
they were called the akka rule the gods
of yesterday and today and this device
of placing two felines back to back
again in my view is too similar to the
device found amongst the Maya to be
written off entirely as a coincidence
here we're looking at a piece of
Architecture from the from the Inka area
let me just try and get this shot so
difficult for me to see with all these
lights on me what I want to draw
attention to here is the way that the
block wraps around the corner this is a
supposedly inca wall just north of Cusco
in Peru and the blocks form a kind of L
shape as they wrap around the corner of
an unusual architectural device we find
exactly the same method of cornering
here in the valley temples that stands
next door to the Great Sphinx of Giza
excuse me I'll get the hang of this in a
minute a method of joining two blocks of
stone together this photograph was taken
at Tiahuanaco in Bolivia in the high
Andes and Tiahuanaco is a very
mysterious City and I'll be touching on
it in a few moments what I want to draw
attention to here is this imprint of a
metal bar which once joined these two
huge blocks of stone together of course
the metal bar has long since been
removed vandalized melted down but this
particular form of architecture is not
found anywhere else in the Americas but
it is found in Egypt we find it at Phil
I at elephantine and also here at
Dendera in Upper Egypt the same method
of joining stone blocks together and
here we're on the island of Sri Key in
Bolivia on lake titicaca looking at a
traditional method of boat design it's
one of the few places on lake titicaca
where these boats are still built these
reed boats with high curving brows and
according to local tradition the design
of these boats was brought to the andes
by the gods by the veera coaches as they
were called gods who were remembered as
being tall and pale skinned and bearded
who'd come from across the sea to South
America in a time of turmoil and
darkness after a great catastrophe and
who had brought with them this kind of
boat design and many many other skills
advanced his skills of civilization I'd
like to compare this this high proud
boat with this design from ancient Egypt
the so called solar boat of Khufu which
was found buried beside the Great
Pyramid of Egypt off the southern face
it's much bigger than the boats on the
Andes but the design is eerily similar
and this design has been studied by
marine experts and
they've concluded is rather interesting
they conclude that although the
materials used both in the Egyptian
boats and in the Andean boats are not
suitable for sailing on the open seas
the design that is incorporated in these
boats could only have been evolved by a
people with a long and solid tradition
of oceanic navigation people who needed
boats that could cut through high waves
and breakers and the suggestion is could
this design be a very ancient legacy
that was passed down and received both
by the Egyptians and by the peoples of
the Andes and expressed in the kind of
boats that they made in both areas such
boats are associated with the gods
the ancient Egyptians called their gods
the neat arewe and they said that they
had come from a land far away to the
south a land called tarney to rule
across vast expanses of ocean so whoever
they may have been these gods above all
else were navigators and seafarers and
navigators and seafarers need maps if
they're going to sail around the earth
now this map is a modern map and I
picked it up at the Library of Congress
in the United States it's an azimuthal
equidistant projection centered near
Cairo and in common with all modern maps
it incorporates a number of advanced
features it incorporates highly accurate
longitudes and particularly relative
longitudes and it incorporates an
advanced map projection it isn't easy to
represent a spherical object the earth
on a flat piece of paper and to do so
with a considerable degree of accuracy
and this is a problem that cartography
has had to overcome so we find good map
projections which require advanced
mathematics and good relative longitudes
interestingly enough there's a category
of ancient map which also shows these
modern features
and which doesn't fit with the received
view of the development of human history
one of the most famous of these maps is
the piri Reis map and I'm showing it
here because I want to compare the
projection of this map with the
projection here centered on Cairo notice
the west coast of Africa and the east
coast of South America and coming down
here to the Antarctic Peninsula hanging
up towards the South of South America
it's that precise projection that we
find on this map again there's the
west coast of Africa the east coast of
South America and coming down here we
find a representation of the northern
Antarctic Peninsula in when piri
Reis drew the map Antarctica had not
been discovered in fact it wasn't
discovered until by our
civilization so there immediately is one
anomaly on this map and another anomaly
is the mathematics used in the map
projection and a third anomaly is that
it incorporates highly accurate relative
longitudes to do longitudes accurately
on maps requires a chronometer a marine
chronometer that will keep accurate time
at sea and again this was something that
our civilization couldn't do until the
late th century so this map fragment
or though it is appears to incorporate
many features that are not supposed to
have been known about in piri Reis
explains why in these texts that he
wrote on the map he was a Turkish
Admiral and he wrote these texts on the
map and what they say is that the map is
not his own work it's a it's a work of
synthesis it's based on more than
earlier source maps that he put all
these maps together and derived his own
map from these and unfortunately the
source maps that piri Reis used have not
survived is it possible that the
advanced features of this map originate
in those lost
source maps which piri Reis told us went
back in some cases to before the time of
Christ and had come from the long-lost
Library of Alexandria in Egypt another
strange thing about the appearance of
Antarctica on this map it's been studied
by US Air Force cartographers and their
view is that what we're actually seeing
there is the sub Glacial topography of
Antarctica Antarctica as it looks
underneath the ice that now covers it
and this raises the question how long
has Antarctica been covered with the
two-mile thick ice cap that we now
presently see on it such questions would
be irrelevant if there were no other
maps in this category
if the piri reis map stood alone the
most sensible thing to do would be to
dismiss it as a coincidence but it
doesn't stand alone there's hundreds of
other maps that incorporate this same
information at a time when our
civilization had not yet acquired that
information this is the Mercator map
mecca tour is rather famous for his
Mercator projection that still dominates
most atlases today it's a th century
map and it shows Antarctica years
before Antarctica was discovered and
again it's based on earlier source maps
and again it incorporates accurate
relative longitudes so also the Arantes
phineus map that we're looking at here
another th century map mecca tour
includes it in one of his atlases and
here we see Antarctica looking a little
bit different with mountains clearly
visible along the coast and rivers
running down from those mountains in
places where great glaciers are known to
run today it looks on this map as though
Antarctica is partially d glaciated the
center of the continent appears to be
featureless and ice covered but the
coast is showing these unglaciated
features what might that mean this is a
map by philip brush an th century
geographer still good hundred years
before the discovery of antarctica and
it shows the continent as a kind of
archipelago two major land masses
divided by a clear waterway run
between them I wonder where he got that
idea from as a redrawing of the Mercator
map and the Arantes Finnick phineas map
and the bush map and here to the right
based on seismic surveys conducted in
international geophysical year in
is a view of what Antarctica actually
looks like underneath all that ice that
now covers it we're looking at the sub
racial landscape of Antarctica here and
while I wouldn't claim for a moment that
the Blash map is a perfectly accurate
representation of the subglacial
topography of Antarctica I think it's
much too close to the reality to be
dismissed entirely I think that much
more research needs to be done into
these anomalous early maps and into the
source maps that they rely upon for
their information because we just may be
looking at the faint fingerprints of a
lost civilization of a navigating
seafaring civilization that explored and
mapped the entire globe long before what
we call history began the issue of the
glaciation of Antarctica is a
controversial one and most scholars
would say that it has been covered with
ice in the form that we see it today for
several millions of years but there is
some contradictory evidence deep-sea
cores which bring up soils from the
ocean band which suggests that rivers
carrying fine-grained sediments were
indeed running down off the coastline of
Antarctica until about , years ago
maybe that's the period we should be
looking at maybe something happened in
the world around them that we don't
fully understand and in my view this
whole mystery is intimately connected to
the mystery of the last ice age and what
an ice age is and why the last ice age
came suddenly and traumatically to an
end at around twelve or fourteen
thousand years ago you have ice sheets
six million square miles of ice covering
northern Europe two miles thick as far
south as London you have a similar mass
of ice covering much of North America as
far south as the Mississippi Delta
almost into the tropics this ice is
stable for a hundred thousand years and
then suddenly almost in the blink of an
eye it all melts within just a thousand
or two thousand years it's all gone
sea levels have gone up by feet
around the world and hundreds of animal
species have been rendered extinct no
complete explanation for why the last
ice age came so suddenly and
dramatically to an end has ever been
offered by Orthodox scholarship there
are clear correlations with astronomical
events including interestingly the
precession of the equinoxes which I'll
be talking about later interestingly
because many of the ancient myths of
global Cataclysm that I've analyzed in
fingerprints of the gods incorporate
precise information on precession it's
almost as though they're trying to tell
us that there's a connection between
precession and the ending of ice ages
and lo and behold we've known for the
last years that there is a connection
between precession and the end of ice
ages
it's a correlation we don't know what
causes this ending of the ice age I
think that this is the period that
should be looked at by scholars this is
the period that deserves much more
detailed research than it's had a period
in which something awful happened to the
earth something that brought about a
dramatic tumultuous change a period in
which the face of the earth was almost
literally wiped clean and a period in
which it's perfectly possible perfectly
reasonable to suppose that a high human
civilization could have been almost
entirely obliterated leaving only a few
survivors and only a few traces of
itself for us to wonder at in later
times
hmm well there is the earth and that's
the extended North Pole of the earth
pointing at the star Polaris in the
constellation of Ursa Minori let me
focus this a bit that is our pole star
in the present time because of the
phenomenon of precession which causes
the earth to wobble very very slowly in
a cycle of , years
the pole star gradually changes it will
not always be Polaris and it has not
always been Polaris but it's a very slow
change about one degree every years
not noticeable in a human lifetime
it also affects the positions of all the
other stars in the star field and if you
can establish that a monument is aligned
astronomically or incorporates
astronomical symbolism it's possible to
use precession to date that Monument and
we think that the ancients who left
their fingerprints around the world used
the phenomenon of precession as a
deliberate way of communicating
information about themselves to the
future and I'll be touching on that a
little bit in this talk and Robert will
be doing so much more in the torque on
keeper of Genesis that he'll be giving
after me this site Machu Picchu in Peru
is an extraordinary piece of landscape
gardening on a gigantic scale it's dated
by Orthodox archeology to around
years ago it's possible that it's much
older than that I won't go into the
details here but astronomers have
studied the alignments of some of the
features of Machu Picchu and they've
concluded that these were laid out
thousands and thousands of years earlier
than the Orthodox dating of the site
another aspect that many of these sites
have
in addition to intriguing astronomical
alignments is the use of enormous blocks
of stone we're looking here at a wall in
a place called sacsayhuamán near cusco
and the stone that I'm standing beside
has been calculated to weigh tons in
layman's terms that's ford sierra
motor cars it really beggars belief that
this kind of work could have been done
by a primitive people to put together
massive blocks of stone weighing
hundreds of tons each to align them to
the stars and to join them together in
these curious jigsaw puzzle formations
requires amazing engineering and
architectural skills and I think that
our historians and scholars tend to
gloss over the implications of this much
too easily all around the world there
are monuments like these undateable by
any objective technique because you
can't as I said earlier carbon-date
stone which bear the fingerprints of a
high technology in remote antiquity or
if not a high technology at any rate of
technology that we do not properly
understand today this is the Altiplano
in Bolivia in the high Andes and I'm
showing this photograph really to
indicate how sparsely populated the
Altiplano is how few people live there
at an altitude of more than , feet
above sea level it's not the kind of
terrain that can support a large
population crops are grown but they come
out of the ground stunted and the yield
is extremely low as a result very few
people live on the Altiplano today and
there's a mystery in that and a problem
in that and it's to do with the city of
Tiahuanaco which stands on the Altiplano
at an altitude of and a half thousand
feet above sea level here's a bit of
tihuanaco this is the piece of
Tiahuanaco that's called the Puma Puma
punku and it consists of absolutely
enormous blocks of stone I mean they're
just an image