Bam111
Abandon your fear. Look forward.
Such a waterway, connecting the Ross, Weddell and Bellinghausen Seas, would indeed exist if Antarctica were free of ice. As the 1958 IGY Survey shows, the continent (which appears on modern maps as one continuous landmass) consists of an archipelago of large islands with mile-thick ice packed between them and rising above sea level.
The epoch
Of the mapmakers as we have seen, many orthodox geologists believe that the last time any waterway existed in these ice-filled basins was millions of years ago. From the scholarly point of view, however, it is equally orthodox to affirm that no human beings had evolved in those remote times, let alone human beings capable of accurately mapping the landmasses of the Antarctic. The big problem raised by the Buache/IGY evidence is that those landmasses do seem to have been mapped when they were free of ice. This confronts scholars with two mutually contradictory propositions. Which one is correct? If we are to go along with orthodox geologists and accept that millions of years have indeed elapsed since Antarctica was last completely free of ice, then all the evidence of human evolution, painstakingly accumulated by distinguished scientists from Darwin on, must be wrong. It seems inconceivable that this could be the case: the fossil record makes it abundantly clear that only the unevolved ancestors of humanity existed millions of years ago – low-browed knuckle-dragging hominids incapable of advanced intellectual tasks like map-making. Are we therefore to assume the intervention of alien cartographers in orbiting spaceships to explain the existence of sophisticated maps of an ice-free Antarctica? Or shall we think again about the implications of Hapgood’s theory of earth-crust displacement which allows the southern continent to have been in the ice-free condition depicted by Buache as little as 15,000 years ago?
Is it possible that a human civilization, sufficiently advanced to have mapped Antarctica, could have developed by 13,000 BC and later disappeared? And, if so, how much later? The combined effect of the Piri Reis, Oronteus Finaeus, Mercator and Buache Maps is the strong, though disturbing, impression that Antarctica may have been continuously surveyed over a period of several thousands of years as the icecap gradually spread outwards from the interior, increasing its grip with every passing millennium but not engulfing all the coasts of the southern continent until around 4000 BC. The original sources for the Piri Reis and Mercator Maps must therefore have been prepared towards the end of this period, when only the coasts of Antarctica were free of ice; the source for the Oronteus Finaeus Map, on the other hand, seems to have been considerably earlier, when the ice-cap was present only in the deep interior of the continent; and the source for the Buache Map appears to originate in even earlier period (around 13,000 BC), when there may have been no ice in Antarctica at all.
South America
Were other parts of the world surveyed and accurately charted at widely separated intervals during this same epoch; roughly from 13,000 BC to 4000 BC? The answer may lie once again in the Piri Reis Map, which contains more mysteries than just Antarctica:
• Drawn in 1513, the map demonstrates an uncanny knowledge of South America – and not only of its eastern coast but of the Andes mountains on the western side of the continent, which were of course unknown at that time. The map correctly shows the Amazon River rising in these unexplored mountains and thence flowing eastwards.
• Itself compiled from more than twenty different source documents of varying antiquity; the Piri Reis Map depicts the Amazon not once but twice (most probably as a result of the unintentional overlapping of two of the source documents used by the Turkish admiral). In the first of this the Amazon’s course is shown down to its Para River mouth, but the important island of Marajo does not appear. According to Hapgood, this suggests that the relevant source map must have dated from a time, perhaps as much as 15,000 years ago, when the Para River was the main or only mouth of the Amazon and when Marajo Island was part of the mainland on the northern side of the river. The second depiction of the Amazon, on the other hand, does show Marajo (and in fantastically accurate detail) despite the fact that this island was not discovered until 1543.19 Again, the possibility is raised of an unknown civilization which undertook continuous surveying and mapping operations of the changing face of the earth over a period of many thousands of years, with Piri Reis making use of earlier and later source maps left behind by this civilization.
• Neither the Orinoco River nor its present delta is represented on the Piri Reis Map. Instead,
as Hapgood proved, ‘two estuaries extending far inland (for a distance of about 100 miles) are shown close to the site of the present river. The longitude on the grid would be correct for the Orinoco, and the latitude is also quite accurate. Is it possible that these estuaries have been filled in, and the delta extended this much, since the source maps were made?
• Although they remained undiscovered until 1592, the Falkland Islands appear on the 1513 map at their correct latitude.
• The library of ancient sources incorporated in the Piri Reis Map may also account for the fact that it convincingly portrays a large island in the Atlantic Ocean to the east of the South American coast where no such island now exists. Is it pure coincidence that this ‘imaginary’ island turns out to be located right over the sub-oceanic Mid-Atlantic Ridge just north of the equator and 700 miles east of the coast of Brazil, where the tiny Rocks of Sts Peter and Paul now jut above the waves? Or was the relevant source map drawn deep in the last Ice Age, when sea levels were far lower than they are today, and a large island could indeed have been exposed at this spot?
Sea levels and ice ages
Other sixteenth-century maps also look as though they could have been based on accurate world surveys conducted during the last Ice Age. One was compiled by the Turk Hadji Ahmed in 1559, a cartographer, as Hapgood puts it, who must have had access to some ‘most extraordinary’ source maps. The strangest and most immediately striking feature of Hadji Ahmed’s compilation is that it shows quite plainly a strip of territory, almost 1000 miles wide, connecting Alaska and Siberia. Such a ‘land-bridge’, as geologists refer to it, did once exist (where the Bering Strait is now) but was submerged beneath the waves by rising sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age. The rising sea levels were caused by the tumultuous melting of the icecap which was rapidly retreating everywhere in the northern hemisphere by around 10,000 BC. It is therefore interesting that at least one ancient map appears to show southern Sweden covered with remnant glaciers of the kind that must indeed have been prevalent then in these latitudes. The remnant glaciers are on Claudius Ptolemy’s famous Map of the North. Originally compiled in the second century AD, this remarkable work from the last great geographer of classical antiquity was lost for hundreds of years and rediscovered in the fifteenth century. Ptolemy was custodian of the library at Alexandria, which contained the greatest manuscript collection of ancient times, and it was there that he consulted the archaic source documents that enabled him to compile his own map. Acceptance of the possibility that the original version of at least one of the charts he referred to could have been made around 10,000 BC helps us to explain why he shows glaciers, characteristic of that exact epoch, together with ‘lakes … suggesting the shapes of present-day lakes, and streams very much suggesting glacial streams … flowing It is probably unnecessary to add that no one on earth in Roman times, when Ptolemy drew his map, had the slightest suspicion that ice ages could once have existed in northern Europe. Nor did anyone in the fifteenth century (when the map was rediscovered) possess such knowledge. Indeed, it is impossible to see how the remnant glaciers and other features shown on Ptolemy’s map could have been surveyed, imagined or invented by any known civilization prior to our own.
The implications of this are obvious. So, too, are the implications of another map, the ‘Portolano’ of Iehudi Ibn Ben Zara, drawn in the year 1487.30 This chart of Europe and North Africa may have been based on a source even earlier than Ptolemy’s, for it seems to show glaciers much farther south than Sweden (roughly on the same latitude as England in fact) and to depict the Mediterranean, Adriatic and Aegean Seas as they might have looked before the melting of the European ice-cap. Sea level would, of course, have been significantly lower than it is today. It is therefore interesting, in the case for instance of the Aegean section of the map, to note that a great many more islands are shown than currently exist. At first sight this seems odd. However, if ten or twelve thousand years have indeed elapsed since the era when Ibn Ben Zara’s source map was made, the discrepancy can be simply explained: the missing islands must have been submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age. Once again, we seem to be looking at the fingerprints of a vanished civilization – one capable of drawing impressively accurate maps of widely separated parts of the earth. What kind of technology, and what state of science and culture, would have been required to do a job like that?
End of chapter 2
The epoch
Of the mapmakers as we have seen, many orthodox geologists believe that the last time any waterway existed in these ice-filled basins was millions of years ago. From the scholarly point of view, however, it is equally orthodox to affirm that no human beings had evolved in those remote times, let alone human beings capable of accurately mapping the landmasses of the Antarctic. The big problem raised by the Buache/IGY evidence is that those landmasses do seem to have been mapped when they were free of ice. This confronts scholars with two mutually contradictory propositions. Which one is correct? If we are to go along with orthodox geologists and accept that millions of years have indeed elapsed since Antarctica was last completely free of ice, then all the evidence of human evolution, painstakingly accumulated by distinguished scientists from Darwin on, must be wrong. It seems inconceivable that this could be the case: the fossil record makes it abundantly clear that only the unevolved ancestors of humanity existed millions of years ago – low-browed knuckle-dragging hominids incapable of advanced intellectual tasks like map-making. Are we therefore to assume the intervention of alien cartographers in orbiting spaceships to explain the existence of sophisticated maps of an ice-free Antarctica? Or shall we think again about the implications of Hapgood’s theory of earth-crust displacement which allows the southern continent to have been in the ice-free condition depicted by Buache as little as 15,000 years ago?
Is it possible that a human civilization, sufficiently advanced to have mapped Antarctica, could have developed by 13,000 BC and later disappeared? And, if so, how much later? The combined effect of the Piri Reis, Oronteus Finaeus, Mercator and Buache Maps is the strong, though disturbing, impression that Antarctica may have been continuously surveyed over a period of several thousands of years as the icecap gradually spread outwards from the interior, increasing its grip with every passing millennium but not engulfing all the coasts of the southern continent until around 4000 BC. The original sources for the Piri Reis and Mercator Maps must therefore have been prepared towards the end of this period, when only the coasts of Antarctica were free of ice; the source for the Oronteus Finaeus Map, on the other hand, seems to have been considerably earlier, when the ice-cap was present only in the deep interior of the continent; and the source for the Buache Map appears to originate in even earlier period (around 13,000 BC), when there may have been no ice in Antarctica at all.
South America
Were other parts of the world surveyed and accurately charted at widely separated intervals during this same epoch; roughly from 13,000 BC to 4000 BC? The answer may lie once again in the Piri Reis Map, which contains more mysteries than just Antarctica:
• Drawn in 1513, the map demonstrates an uncanny knowledge of South America – and not only of its eastern coast but of the Andes mountains on the western side of the continent, which were of course unknown at that time. The map correctly shows the Amazon River rising in these unexplored mountains and thence flowing eastwards.
• Itself compiled from more than twenty different source documents of varying antiquity; the Piri Reis Map depicts the Amazon not once but twice (most probably as a result of the unintentional overlapping of two of the source documents used by the Turkish admiral). In the first of this the Amazon’s course is shown down to its Para River mouth, but the important island of Marajo does not appear. According to Hapgood, this suggests that the relevant source map must have dated from a time, perhaps as much as 15,000 years ago, when the Para River was the main or only mouth of the Amazon and when Marajo Island was part of the mainland on the northern side of the river. The second depiction of the Amazon, on the other hand, does show Marajo (and in fantastically accurate detail) despite the fact that this island was not discovered until 1543.19 Again, the possibility is raised of an unknown civilization which undertook continuous surveying and mapping operations of the changing face of the earth over a period of many thousands of years, with Piri Reis making use of earlier and later source maps left behind by this civilization.
• Neither the Orinoco River nor its present delta is represented on the Piri Reis Map. Instead,
as Hapgood proved, ‘two estuaries extending far inland (for a distance of about 100 miles) are shown close to the site of the present river. The longitude on the grid would be correct for the Orinoco, and the latitude is also quite accurate. Is it possible that these estuaries have been filled in, and the delta extended this much, since the source maps were made?
• Although they remained undiscovered until 1592, the Falkland Islands appear on the 1513 map at their correct latitude.
• The library of ancient sources incorporated in the Piri Reis Map may also account for the fact that it convincingly portrays a large island in the Atlantic Ocean to the east of the South American coast where no such island now exists. Is it pure coincidence that this ‘imaginary’ island turns out to be located right over the sub-oceanic Mid-Atlantic Ridge just north of the equator and 700 miles east of the coast of Brazil, where the tiny Rocks of Sts Peter and Paul now jut above the waves? Or was the relevant source map drawn deep in the last Ice Age, when sea levels were far lower than they are today, and a large island could indeed have been exposed at this spot?
Sea levels and ice ages
Other sixteenth-century maps also look as though they could have been based on accurate world surveys conducted during the last Ice Age. One was compiled by the Turk Hadji Ahmed in 1559, a cartographer, as Hapgood puts it, who must have had access to some ‘most extraordinary’ source maps. The strangest and most immediately striking feature of Hadji Ahmed’s compilation is that it shows quite plainly a strip of territory, almost 1000 miles wide, connecting Alaska and Siberia. Such a ‘land-bridge’, as geologists refer to it, did once exist (where the Bering Strait is now) but was submerged beneath the waves by rising sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age. The rising sea levels were caused by the tumultuous melting of the icecap which was rapidly retreating everywhere in the northern hemisphere by around 10,000 BC. It is therefore interesting that at least one ancient map appears to show southern Sweden covered with remnant glaciers of the kind that must indeed have been prevalent then in these latitudes. The remnant glaciers are on Claudius Ptolemy’s famous Map of the North. Originally compiled in the second century AD, this remarkable work from the last great geographer of classical antiquity was lost for hundreds of years and rediscovered in the fifteenth century. Ptolemy was custodian of the library at Alexandria, which contained the greatest manuscript collection of ancient times, and it was there that he consulted the archaic source documents that enabled him to compile his own map. Acceptance of the possibility that the original version of at least one of the charts he referred to could have been made around 10,000 BC helps us to explain why he shows glaciers, characteristic of that exact epoch, together with ‘lakes … suggesting the shapes of present-day lakes, and streams very much suggesting glacial streams … flowing It is probably unnecessary to add that no one on earth in Roman times, when Ptolemy drew his map, had the slightest suspicion that ice ages could once have existed in northern Europe. Nor did anyone in the fifteenth century (when the map was rediscovered) possess such knowledge. Indeed, it is impossible to see how the remnant glaciers and other features shown on Ptolemy’s map could have been surveyed, imagined or invented by any known civilization prior to our own.
The implications of this are obvious. So, too, are the implications of another map, the ‘Portolano’ of Iehudi Ibn Ben Zara, drawn in the year 1487.30 This chart of Europe and North Africa may have been based on a source even earlier than Ptolemy’s, for it seems to show glaciers much farther south than Sweden (roughly on the same latitude as England in fact) and to depict the Mediterranean, Adriatic and Aegean Seas as they might have looked before the melting of the European ice-cap. Sea level would, of course, have been significantly lower than it is today. It is therefore interesting, in the case for instance of the Aegean section of the map, to note that a great many more islands are shown than currently exist. At first sight this seems odd. However, if ten or twelve thousand years have indeed elapsed since the era when Ibn Ben Zara’s source map was made, the discrepancy can be simply explained: the missing islands must have been submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age. Once again, we seem to be looking at the fingerprints of a vanished civilization – one capable of drawing impressively accurate maps of widely separated parts of the earth. What kind of technology, and what state of science and culture, would have been required to do a job like that?
End of chapter 2
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