We might feel very sure that there is no more to reality that the material world in which we live, but we cannot prove that this is the case. Theoret… - Graham Hancock

Areas that are densely populated today, Chicago, New York, Manchester, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin, Moscow — in fact most of North America and northern Europe — were absolutely uninhabitable due to the fact that they were covered by ice-caps several kilometers thick. Conversely, many areas that are uninhabitable today — on account of being on the bottom of the sea, or in the middle of hostile deserts such as the Sahara (which bloomed for about 4000 years at the end of the last Ice Age) — were once (and relatively recently) desirable places to live that were capable of supporting dense populations.
Geologists calculate that nearly 5 per cent of the earth's surface — an area of around 25 million square kilometers or 10 million square miles — has been swallowed by rising sea-levels since the end of the Ice Age. That is roughly the equivalent to the combined areas of the United States and the whole of South America. It is an area almost three times as large as Canada and much larger than China and Europe combined.
What adds greatly to the significance of these lost lands of the last Ice Age is not only their enormous area but also — because they were coastal and in predominantly warm latitudes — that they would have been among the very best lands available to humanity anywhere in the world at that time. Moreover, although they represent 5 per cent of the earth's surface today, it is worth reminding ourselves that humanity during the Ice Age was denied useful access to much of northern Europe and North America because of the ice-sheets. So the 25 million square kilometers that were lost to the rising seas add up to a great deal more than 5 per cent of the earth's useful and habitable landspace at that time.

A 24,000-year sequence recorded in a marine core from the Santa Barbara Basin, off the coast of California, exhibits the highest peak in biomass burning precisely at the onset of the Younger Dryas. ... This anomalously high peak correlates with intense biomass burning documented from the nearby Channel Islands. ... The peak also coincides with the extinction of pygmy mammoths on the islands and with the beginning of an apparent 600-800-year gap in the archaeological record, suggesting a sudden collapse in island human populations.

I knew that the first Europeans to arrive in Ethiopia had addressed the monarchs of that country as 'Prester John.' This use of the sacred relic as a war palladium – and as an effective one at that – was not, according to Archpriest Solomon [Gabre Selassie, Head of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Britain], just something that had happened in Ethiopia's distant past. On the contrary: 'As recently as 1896 when the King of Kings Menelik the Second fought against the Italian aggressors at the battle of Adowa in Tigray region, the priests carried the Ark of the Covenant into the field to confront the invaders. As a result of this, Menelik was very victorious and returned to Addis Abada in great honour.'

I re-read this part of the reply with considerable interest because I knew that Menelik II had indeed been 'very victorious' in 1896. In that year, under the command of General Baratieri, 17,700 Italian troops equipped with heavy artillery and the latest weapons had marched up into the Abyssinian highlands from the Eritrean coastal strip intent on colonizing the whole country. Menelik's forces, though ill prepared and less well armed, had met them at Adowa on the morning of 1 March, winning in less than six hours what one historian had subsequently described as 'the most notable victory of an African over a European army since the time of Hannibal.' In a similar tone, the London Spectator of 7 March 1896 commented: 'The Italians have suffered a great disaster… greater than has ever occurred to white men in Africa.