Eleven thousand years ago, Antarctica was not the icy desert it is today, but a continent with high-water rivers, blossoming pastures and rich, diverse fauna. Moreover, people lived there. The first great world civilization was founded there - the ancient race, which had perfect astronomical, technical and navigational skills. Representatives of this race traveled all over the globe and founded colonies in South America, Egypt and even in southern Iraq.
Then came the catastrophe. Approximately 10,000 years B.C., the earth's crust shifted tremendously, moving the continents to a new geographical position thousands of miles away. The northeast of America, once covered by a giant glacier, shifted to a warmer climate; this was the end of a period of glaciation that for many thousands of years had compressed the continent in its cold grip. The polar region moved northward and took its current position in the Arctic, spreading its influence to Siberia and Alaska. In the southern hemisphere, the once blooming continent of Antarctica has shifted to the South Pole. Its great civilization, destroyed by catastrophic earthquakes and floods, eventually found peace under a powerful cover of ice.
The people who inhabited Antarctica were extinct, but they managed to leave identification marks for future civilizations. Their scientific knowledge was so profound that they could predict the catastrophe that had ended their culture. They built the Sphinx, the great Egyptian pyramids, and the Sun Temple in Tiahuanaco, Bolivia, with accurate mathematical calculations, in the hope that when human civilization returned to its previous level, their meaning would be revealed by distant descendants. This was one of the ways in which the wise men of Antarctica were spreading their knowledge. In colonies where there were enough survivors, priests passed on ancient cosmic wisdom from generation to generation, encrypting it in myths, legends and calendars.
Along with myths describing the great catastrophe, they have prepared special instructions on the periodic cataclysms destroying all alive. For example, the ancient Mayan calendar of Central America contains a formidable warning: it predicts that the current world era will end in 2012 (see annex: "Mayan Calendar" in this section). If this is true, then soon a new catastrophic pole shift will occur, and our own civilization, like the Antarctic one, will disappear almost without a trace.
Although all of the above may look like a science fiction novel, this extraordinary scenario was quite seriously suggested by the British journalist Graham Hancock in his bestseller Traces of the Gods (1995) and further developed in the books of Hancock himself and others. Their ideas have become so widely known that it is now difficult to find someone who has not heard of them.
Geologists have rejected this theory from the threshold, simply ignoring it. Official geology, of course, does not accept the idea of a global shift of the Earth's crust in 10,000 B.C. and denies that the poles could have taken a different geographical position from the current (The consequences of a continental drift lasting tens and hundreds of millions of years is another matter.)
Archaeologists also met Hancock's main thesis with a deadly silence; perhaps they believed that such nonsense would dissipate without outside involvement. However, this did not happen. On the contrary, Hancock's views formed the core of an "alternative prehistory of mankind" that most of its readers considered more meaningful than the version proposed by academic science. With one stroke of pen Hancock as if explained the cause of the glacial eras, the meaning of the legends of the Flood, the mystery of the Sphinx and Tiawanaku, the origin of Egyptian civilization and much more. In addition to everything else, his theory agrees well with the statements of many psychics and occultists, including the great Edgar Casey (see "Edgar Casey about Atlantis" in the section "Archaeology and the supernatural").
Hancock's arguments look impressive. The first and main proof of his theory is some ancient maps depicting the contours of the Antarctic coast free of ice. Hancock insists they can only have one explanation. Silent witnesses to the past, these maps are relics of a dead civilization that existed before the glaciation of Antarctica.