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Since my first research visit to Malta in November 1999 I've learned that objects — and even places — of archaeological importance can and do disappe… - Graham Hancock
" "Since my first research visit to Malta in November 1999 I've learned that objects — and even places — of archaeological importance can and do disappear here in mysterious ways. For example, ancient remains of an estimated 7000 people were found in the Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni, buried in a matrix of red earth, when it was excavated by Sir Themistocles Zammit at the beginning of the twentieth century. Today only six skulls are left, stashed out of public view in two plastic crates in the cavernous vaults of Malta's National Museum of Archaeology. Nobody has the faintest idea what has happened to all the rest of the bones. They've just 'vanished', according to officials at the Museum.
And the six skulls? After much pressure and protest I have been allowed to see them only this morning and they are — I must confess — extremely and unsettlingly odd. They are weirdly elongated — dolichocephalic is the technical term but this is dolichocephalism of the most extreme form. And one of the skulls, though that of an adult, is entirely lacking in the fossa median — the clearly-visible 'join' that runs along the top of the head where two plates of bone are separated in infancy (thus facilitating the process of birth) but later join together in adulthood. I should be paying attention to the fantastic views and seascapes unfolding beneath the helicopter but I keep on wondering: what would people with skulls like that have looked like during life? How could they have survived birth and grown to adulthood? And did the other skulls from the Hypogeum — the lost skulls, the lost bones — also show the same distinctive peculiarity?
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About Graham Hancock
Graham Hancock (born 2 August 1950) is a British writer who promotes pseudoarchaeological and other pseudoscientific theories involving ancient civilizations and hypothetical lost lands. He has been the subject of the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse (2022).
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Graham Bruce Hancock
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Additional quotes by Graham Hancock
While spinning daily on its own axis, the earth also orbits the sun (again in an anti-clockwise direction) on a path which is slightly elliptical rather than completely circular. It pursues this orbit at truly breakneck speed, travelling as far along it in an hour – 66,600 miles – as the average motorist will drive in six years. To bring the calculations down in scale, this means that we are hurtling through space much faster than any bullet, at the rate of 18.5 miles every second. In the time that it has taken you to read this paragraph, we have voyaged about 550 miles farther along earth's path around the sun.3
After the first Neanderthal skeletal remains were identified in Europe in the nineteenth century it was, for a very long while, one of the fundamental unquestioned assumptions of archaeology, a matter taken to be self-evidently true, that other "older," "less-evolved" human species never attained, or even in their wildest dreams could hope to aspire, to the same levels of cultural development as Homo sapiens. During more than a century of subsequent analysis, and despite multiple additional discoveries, the Neanderthals continued to be depicted as nothing more than brutal, shambling, stupid subhumans — literally morons by comparison with ourselves.20 Since the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, and with increasing certainty as the evidence has become overwhelming, a new "image" of the Neanderthals as sensitive, intelligent, symbolic, and creative beings capable of advanced thought processes and technological innovations has taken root among archaeologists and is set to become the ruling paradigm.21
If we accept the generally agreed date of between AD 350 and 550 for the end of the — at least semi-historical — 'Third Sangam', then this gives us a fixed reference point on which to anchor the chronology of the myth [...]. The date of 9600 BC for the formation of the First Sangam (or 9800 BC or 9400 BC for that matter) coincides closely enough with Plato's date for the inundation of Atlantis — also 9600 BC — to raise the hairs on the back of my neck.
And the question continues to be this: how could Plato less than 2500 years ago, or Nakirar less than 1500 years ago, have managed by chance to select the epoch of 9600 BC in which to set, on the one hand, the sinking under the waves of the Atlantic Ocean of the great antediluvian civilization of Atlantis and, on the other, the foundation of the First Sangam in Kumari Kandam — a doomed Indian Ocean landmass that was itself destined to be swallowed by the sea?
If Plato and Nakirar were pure 'fabulists' working independently of any real tradition or real events, then isn't it much more likely that they would have chosen different imaginary epochs in which to set their flood stories?
Why didn't they choose 20,000 or 30,000 years ago — or even 300,000 years ago, or three million years ago — instead of the tenth millennium BC?
And was it just luck that this slot turns out to have been in the midst of the meltdown of the last Ice Age — the only episode of truly global flooding to have hit the earth in the last 125,000 years?
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