Now we know that man is more than two million years old,' exlaimed Heyerdahl, 'it would be very strange if our ancestors lived like primitive food co… - Graham Hancock

Elsewhere Lankford reiterates that this belief system was by no means confined to the Plains, the Eastern Woodlands, and the Mississippi Valley. It is better understood, he argues, as part of 'a widespread religious pattern' found right across North America and 'more powerful than the tendency towards cultural diversity.' Indeed, what the evidence suggests is the former existence of 'an ancient North American international religion ... a common ethnoastronomy ... and a common mythology. Such a multicultural reality hints provocatively at more common knowledge which lay behind the façade of cultural diversity united by international trade networks. One likely possibility of a conceptual realm in which that common knowledge became focused is mortuary belief [and] ... the symbolism surrounding death.

It was Cesare Emiliani who first drew serious attention to the possibility of post-glacial superfloods. In a paper published in Science magazine in 1975, he and a group of colleagues presented startling evidence from deep-sea cores from the north-eastern part of the Gulf of Mexico. The evidence revealed 'a 2.4 per cent isotopic anomaly between 12,000 and 11,000 years ago', which the authors correctly interpreted as having been caused by 'the occurrence of major flooding of ice meltwater into the Gulf of Mexico ... centring at about 11,600 years before the present'.

At a deeper level what this whole exchange revealed to me was something disturbing about the way science works. I hadn't quite grasped the role of fear before. But I could see it in action everywhere here: fear of being 'noticed and monitored by colleagues,' fear of unwanted negative celebrity, fear of indignity, fear of loss of reputation, fear of loss of career — and not for committing some terrible crime but simply for exploring unorthodox possibilities and undertaking 'somewhat controversial research' into what everyone agrees were extraordinary events 12,800 years ago.
Worse still, this pervasive state of fear has somehow ingrained itself so deeply into the fabric of science that those who have embraced unorthodox possibilities themselves are often among the least willing to consider unorthodox possibilities embraced by others — lest by doing so they 'contaminate' their own preferred unorthodoxy.
How will it ever be possible to discover the truth about the past when so much fear gets in the way?