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Title: Underworld : The Mysterious Origins of Civilization by GRAHAM HANCOCK ISBN: 1-4000-4951-2 Publisher: Three Rivers Press Pub. Date: 28 October, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.91 (23 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Deserves Attention
Comment: Graham Hancock has been producing various books speculating that an ancient and previously unknown civilization existed in the Paleolithic era for about ten years now. Periodically he changes the proposed location of the civilization, originally thought to be Antarctica in Fingerprints of the Gods and now under the sea in Underworld. Regardless of where Hancock thinks this civilization was to be found, he tells an entertaining story with much that bears thinking about.
All of Hancock's books are part history, part travel guide. One of the more enjoyable aspects of Underworld are all the stories about his various travels and travails as he examines different areas of the world for evidence of ancient cities and buildings. He is always eager and excited to find out more, and lets nothing, not even the ubiquitousness of bureaucracy ( his stories of the red tape involved in getting permission to dive in places like the Persian Gulf are worthy of the old Yes Minister show ) get him down.
Besides the travel stories, Hancock is worth reading because he has come up with an amazing amount of material which at least brings into question the accepted theories about the human past. I hope that his journalistic, rather than academic, credentials will not lead many to dismiss his theories, because they do deserve more study.
Rating: 5
Summary: Really Intriguing
Comment: So we think there were human beings (homo sapiens) around during the most recent ice age. In documentaries, we tend to show these ancestors of ours as bearded, fur-wrapped stalkers of woolly mammoth, staggering around the tundra and pine forests of Europe trying to eke out an existence hand-to-mouth.
Of course, during the most recent ice age, the seas were lower by some hundred meters. And all the land that was exposed 20,000 years ago and is now underwater was low, coastal plain, perfect for agricultural settlement. If you were to look for an ice age civilization -- with ships, and farming, and real constructions -- the place to look would be underwater.
Think of it this way: if the oceans rose a hundred meters today, how much of our modern civilization would it swallow?
And of course, underwater archaeology is only in its infancy.
So this is a Graham Hancock book, a book about looking for tracks of ancient civilizations. It's also a book about diving. _Underworld_ is written in the comfortable travelogue / mystery style of _The Sign and the Seal_ and is very readable, very easy to follow. Hancock traipses around to exotic places like Malta, Japan and India, diving to purported submerged sites of megalithic architecture. Interspersed with this interesting narrative are his musings on literary and other traces that may reflect an ancient, ice age human civilization, now hidden by flood from human eyes.
Hancock, of course, may be wrong. But he may just be onto something, and even if not, he's never dull.
Rating: 4
Summary: Challenging the consensus
Comment: Archaeologists have been pushing back the date of humanity's first attempts at agriculture and the civilization that follows it. An inexplicable commonality is seen in agriculture emerging in distant places at nearly the same time. Self-confessed - sorry, self-adulatory - Graham Hancock thinks there's an answer for that chronological similarity. He contends agriculture, and civilization reach even further back in time than evidence found in places like Iran or Turkey suggests. He thinks the legends and mythologies of India, Malta and South America point to a multitude of "Atlantis-like" urbanised cultures that have disappeared from view - under water.
"Underworld" is a collation of ancient legends, old maps, submerged evidence and innovative thinking that gives humanity much deeper roots than previously thought. Hancock dives into the world's offshore depths, trolls through a wealth of mythologies, views unusual and unexplained artefacts and comes up with a challenge to consensus archaeology. Was there a global sprinking of advanced civilizations at the end of the last Ice Age? Did the melting ice caps drown more than the various land bridges that connected the British Isles with Europe, Sri Lanka with India and Alaska with Siberia? If Hancock is correct, and he is not to be dismissed lightly, humanity achieved far greater social complexity during the glacial advances than just living in caves wrapped in bear skins. What appears to be a near simultaneous emergence of agriculture, he argues, is in reality what we see left over from much older societies.
Hancock has made dives in many of the sites revealed by fishermen, archaeologists and others, recording finds on video and still camera and maps. The images are impressive, as are the numbers of potential sites. Utilising computer generated maps of the sea's rise after the Great Meltdown of the glaciers, he shows the logic of his thesis with compelling evidence. He's careful to note where the data seems firm as well as lacking. Where lacking, he urges more scientific attention to these places.
Although he justifiably spends most of the account on locations in India, where in some places the sea has invaded over 700 kilometres since the last Last Glacial Maximum, his relation of Japanese sites makes the most compelling reading. There, some of the longest-lived legends indicate Japan's oldest settlers, the Jomon, preceded the West in the establishment of agriculture and settled communities. Where scholars once held these people were "simple hunter-gatherers", Hancock sees evidence of rice growing nearly twelve thousand years old. Temple styles found today are duplicated in undersea sites, in some places nearby as if the sea simply pushed the people and their culture inland. These people may have followed the "Black Current" across the Pacific to establish settlements along the western coast of South America.
Hancock is careful to separate the known from the speculative, and not all of the speculations are his. Scholars in the places he visits are contributers to this innovative idea. So many sites and such commonality of legend add up to a highly plausible notion. Regrettably, even while crediting these researchers with empirical methods, Hancock is a bit too full of himself. Long passages of his problems, illness, fright from daring pilots cruising mountain passes permeate the book. By restricting himself to the scholars, their evidence coupled with his own and other researchers' ideas, he could have made this account less tedious while recounting adventures and exploration. Even the computer-generated maps are often repeated unnecessarily. He raises serious questions which deserve serious study. Hancock makes a compelling introduction, but we await a less self-indulgent approach. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
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Title: Heaven's Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization by Graham Hancock, Santha Faiia ISBN: 0609804774 Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA) Pub. Date: 01 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock ISBN: 0517887290 Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA) Pub. Date: 01 March, 1996 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: The Mars Mystery : The Secret Connection Between Earth and the Red Planet by GRAHAM HANCOCK ISBN: 0609802232 Publisher: Three Rivers Press Pub. Date: 07 June, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The Message of the Sphinx: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind by Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval ISBN: 0517888521 Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA) Pub. Date: 01 June, 1997 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age by Charles H. Hapgood ISBN: 0932813429 Publisher: Adventures Unlimited Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1997 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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