Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

Graham Hancock is often tarred with what you might call the "Jesus is an Alien" brush. In bookshops you'll find his books grouped alongside authors who claim that aliens built the pyamids, that the descendants of Jesus are alive today in a secret society, that the "templars" had esoteric knowledge that they can trace back to ancient Egypt etc.

In fact you will usually see him in the same section as authors writing about alien abductions, or someone like former BBC sports presenter David Icke who claims that the people who run the world are all giant lizards!

Hancock doesn't believe that aliens created civilization and whatever his views on Jesus, it's not a period of history that he writes about.

What he tries to prove in all his books is something that's both more conventional and potentially more exciting: Civilization is much older than we think it is and didn't just evolve out of thin air around 3000 BCE.

Hardly a theory that's in the same bracket as alien abductions or giant lizards when you consider that the Noah story of a great flood that destroyed civilization thousands of years ago isn't exclusive to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. It's shared by societies as far apart as native americans and aboriginal australians.

And as Hancock goes to show in Underworld, ice age earth had a fifth more land than it does today. The Persian Gulf and large areas of the Indian coast were not only land, but were temperate, warm and completely fit for human habitation. (And so was the Sahara incidentally)

Using geological evidence he shows that a number of apparently man-made structures below the oceans could only have been built thousands of years before when civilization is first thought to have started.

And though he doesn't believe that the ancients drove cars or flew planes he does believe that they knew a great deal about astrology, mathematics and linked to that, sophisticated building techniques.

This is a serious, 700 page tome where Hancock takes you through the evidence and all of his thought processes in so much detail that you wonder whether some of his critics have actually bothered to wade their way through it.

Those of us in the UK who saw the Channel4 series that accompanied the book could see for ourselves that Hancock isn't some lunatic but a perfectly sane individual who has studied the alternative points of view as well as the evidence.

Just like it took a while for the flat-earthers of middle ages Europe to come around to the fact that the World was actually round, I'm convinced that Graham Hancock has kick-started a process that will cause us to reevaluate some of our assumptions about history.

And to paraphrase a famous saying, the key to understanding our present and our future is to understand our past.

In this book he has visited the open-minded experts. Geophysics has had some amazing discoveries in recent years. It has always been assumed that ice sheets melted slowly and evenly away at the end of an ice age. Recent work published in peer reviewed scientific journals show conclusively that the last ice age came in three giant floods between 18,000 and 8,000 years ago.

The outflow from the Laurentian shield over Canada, Alaska and Greenland, discharged with the freeing of ice jams. The resulting flood was a wall of water 2,000ft high, 1000miles long and moving at 300mbp. The resulting debris of glacial outwash are evident in the Caribbean and off the Labrador coast.

Sea levels rose in giant leaps of 100s of feet. It is therefore not surprising that today's sea-levels are roughly similar to those up to 8,000 years ago. It has always been assumed that civilisation started then because that is the age of the very oldest archaelolgical remains found on land.

Cave paintings are known to be at least 20,000 years old. Moreover some have been shown to contain detailed star positions between the horns of a bull. The positions of the stars are accurate for 12,000 years ago and in the constellation of the Bull.

We know from the work of Brian Sykes on mitochrondial DNA that half the european women derive from an individual present in Europe 20,000 years ago. That was during the last ice age.

The evidence therefore is all pointing to civilised man being in Europe, well advanced and capable before the end of the ice age.

Today the majority of the world's population lives within about 50 miles of the sea. If the sea level was 300ft lower and 1 million square miles now underwater was above sea level, then it is clear there must be remains of the majority population below present day sea level.

This book details Graham Hancock's journey of discovery through all the data to back his previous hunches. This time he has consulted the experts. Note however that in any discipline including science and archaeology it is always difficult to get any radically new idea accepted.

Only 40 years ago geologists insisted rock was rock solid. It took someone from another discipline, ocean science, to prove that the sediments either side of the mid Atlantic ridge increased in age with distance from the ridge. It took years for plate tectonics and continental drift to be accepted. Alfred Wegener first suggest it in 1924.

I think we all need to read and consider Graham Hancock's ideas in this beautifully illustrated and well-written book. The idea that knowledge is best transmitted by rote learning without writing as the origin of the Vedas is fascinating. It was held that if a disaster occurred and the next generation could not read all knowledge would be lost. But an oral tradition would continue if there were only a few surviving knowledge carriers. His suggestion that the Vedas carry information from an age of people largely lost under the floods 10,000 years ago fits well. The recent discoveries underwater off India, Malta and Japan also attest to great skills in masonry within civilisations last above water 10,000 years or more ago.

Egyptian Heirogphys were lost knowledge until the Rosetta stone. Even today though Linear B is known to be ancient Greek we know nothing of Linear A. There are many inscriptions from all over the ancient world which could tell us much if we could only translate them. This may come with computer assistance. But this strengthens the arguments made in Hancock's book of the importance of passing knowledge by oral tradition. This is where all the world's flood myths originate.

I think this is the book that will change our views of civilisation. There is lots of research to be done. I am encouraging my children to pursue it. I encourage everyone to read this book.