Fingerprints of the Gods

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Fingerprints of the Gods is a book first published in 1995 by Graham Hancock, in which he contends that some previously unidentified ancient but highly-advanced civilization had existed in prehistory, one which served as the common progenitor civilization to all subsequent known ancient historical ones. Supposedly, sometime after the end of the last Ice Age this civilization passed on to its inheritors knowledge of such things as astronomy, architecture and mathematics.

The book pivots on three "fingerprints" of these civilizations, evidence of which Hancock finds in the descriptions of civilizing God-Men i.e. Osiris, Thoth, Quetzalcoatl, and Virachocha. These creation myths predate history, and Hancock suggests that in 10,450 B.C., a major poleshift took place, before which Antarctica was further from the South Pole than it is today, and after which it was moved to its present location. This civilization was supposedly centered around Antarctica, and later survivors initiated the Olmec, Aztec, Maya, and Egyptian cultures.

The pole shift theory hinges on Charles Hapgood's theory of Earth Crustal Displacement which has very few supporters (most notably Albert Einstein) in the geological community compared to the more accepted model of plate tectonics.

Some readers in the scholarly and scientific community have described the proposals put forward in the book as pseudoscience and pseudoarchaeology.