Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization is a 1995 pseudoarcheology book by Graham Hancock, in which the author echoes 19th-century writer Ignatius Donnelly, author of , in contending that an enigmatic, ancient, advanced civilization existed in prehistory, one which served as the common progenitor civilisation to all subsequent known ancient historical ones. The author proposes that sometime around the end of the last Ice Age this civilisation ended in cataclysm, but passed on to its inheritors profound knowledge of such things as astronomy, architecture, and mathematics. Hancock's views are based on the idea that mainstream interpretations of archaeological evidence are flawed or incomplete. The book was followed by Magicians of the Gods.
Thesis
Hancock argues for a civilisation centred on Antarctica that supposedly left evidence in Ancient Egypt and American civilisations such as the Olmec, Aztec and Maya. Hancock discusses:
a range of archaeological sites such as Tiwanaku in Bolivia. Tiwanaku was a planned city which, according to UNESCO, reached its peak between 400 AD. and 900 AD, but is assigned an earlier date by Hancock. Tiwanaku is also featured in other works of "alternative archaeology", including Von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods?Von Däniken suggested that it provides evidence of an extraterrestrial civilisation, whereas Hancock does not argue for "ancient astronauts"; he proposes Atlantis as the origin of a lost civilisation.
Hancock suggests that in 10,450 BC, a major pole shift took place. Before then, Antarctica lay farther from the South Pole than today, and after then, it shifted to its present location. The pole-shift hypothesis hinges on Charles Hapgood's theory ofEarth Crustal Displacement. Hapgood had a fascination with the story of Atlantis and suggested that crustal displacement may have caused its destruction. His theories have few supporters in the geological community compared to the more widely accepted model of plate tectonics, but they were adopted by Rose and Rand Flem-Ath's When the Sky Fell: in Search of Atlantis in which they expand the evidence for Charles Hapgood's theory of earth-crust displacement and propose Antarctica as the site of Atlantis.
Reception
Members of the scholarly and scientific community have described the proposals put forward in the book as pseudoscience and pseudoarchaeology. Canadian authorHeather Pringle has placed Fingerprints specifically within a pseudo-scientific tradition going back through the writings of H.S. Bellamy and Denis Saurat to the work of Heinrich Himmler's notorious racial research institute, the Ahnenerbe, and the "crackpot theories" of Nazi archaeologist Edmund Kiss. Pringle draws attention to Fingerprints' "wild speculations" on the origins of Tiwanaku and describes Hancock as a "fabulist." Fingerprints of the Gods has been translated into 27 languages and is estimated to have sold five million copies around the world. A second edition of the book was published in 2001, entitled Fingerprint of the Gods: The Quest Continues. It includes a new introduction and new appendices in which Hancock responds to some of his critics.
Influence
In 2009, Roland Emmerich, the Hollywood director, released his blockbuster disaster film2012 citing Fingerprints of the Gods in the credits as inspiration for the film. In a November 2009 interview with the London magazineTime Out, Emmerich states: "I always wanted to do a biblical flood movie, but I never felt I had the hook. I first read about the Earth's Crust Displacement Theory in Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods." In the extras of the Blu-ray10,000 BC, the director Emmerich and his co-writer Harald Kloser said that they had found inspiration in the same book.
