Traditions, with all their folksy redolences, are relatively safe matters for scholars to speculate about. Maps and nautical charts on the other hand… - Graham Hancock

Another point of interest about the Tiahuanaco [in Bolivia] monoliths is that their garments from the waist down are patterned in the form of fish scales. Here, too, is a parallel to the Apkallus — the bearded, "fish-garbed figures" who brought high civilization to Mesopotamia [...]. Nor is it as though bearded figures are missing from the repertoire of Tiahuanaco. Two have survived, and one on the pillar in the semi-subterranean temple has been identified since time immemorial with the great civilizing deity Kon-Tiki Viracocha, [...] who is described in multiple myths and traditions as being white skinned and bearded.

Although I have no doubt that the ancients had developed special means for manipulating the physical world - means that our own technological society is sometimes unable to match - I think it is obvious that their main project was a profound spiritual quest & the dilation of the mind through the pursuit of esoteric knowledge. It is in this area, I believe, that we have the most to learn from our ancestors, where their great minds were put to work for thousands of years to penetrate the riddles of existence.

At six thousand or more years older than the stone circles of Stonehenge, the megaliths of Göbekli Tepe, like the deeply buried megaliths of Gunung Padang, mean that the timeline of history taught in our schools and universities for the best part of the last hundred years can no longer stand. It is beginning to look as though civilization, as I argued in my controversial 1995 bestseller Fingerprints of the Gods, is indeed much older and much more mysterious than we thought.