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

I enjoy his ability to include 1) solid scientific evidence to back up his theories, 2) diaries he kept while exploring underwater sites, 3) a photo journal of monuments and structures (whether natural or man-made is yet to be determined) by his wife, 4) descriptions of what he actually sees, 5) ancient maps of the "old world", and 6) "inundation" computerized maps (scientific but limited) of what the world would have been like *before* the flood which occured after the Ice Age. Graham Hancock does a phenomenal job of describing how he got started in this research and he does a superior investigative report supporting his main theory, that many civilizations/ancient cities were wiped out worldwide due to the floods that occurred approximately 11,000 years ago. He and his wife learned to dive just so they could view first hand, the objects of their theories and research.

I was impressed that this was a 700+ page book but found by part 4, I was tired and slowing down. The book picks up speed and moment after discussing monuments discovered near Japan that are either natural, man-made or a combination, as of yet, the "experts" are uncertain. The book is astonishing for its
use of "inundation maps" which aremaps developed by computers, from scientific data fed into them, such as, how high the water levels rose after the ice melted, etc. Graham Hancock compared
modern maps to existing ancient maps, such as "the 1424 Pizzagano chart", the results are quite similar. For this alone, Graham Hancock deserves recognition by the scientific community and serious consideration for his theories. This is a highly recommended book, although it becomes tedious about half
half-way through but its well worth finishing to the end. Erika Borsos (bakonyvilla)

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.

"Underworld" is a collation of ancient legends, old maps, submerged evidence and innovative thinking that gives humanity much deeper roots than previously thought. Hancock dives into the world's offshore depths, trolls through a wealth of mythologies, views unusual and unexplained artefacts and comes up with a challenge to consensus archaeology. Was there a global sprinking of advanced civilizations at the end of the last Ice Age? Did the melting ice caps drown more than the various land bridges that connected the British Isles with Europe, Sri Lanka with India and Alaska with Siberia? If Hancock is correct, and he is not to be dismissed lightly, humanity achieved far greater social complexity during the glacial advances than just living in caves wrapped in bear skins. What appears to be a near simultaneous emergence of agriculture, he argues, is in reality what we see left over from much older societies.

Hancock has made dives in many of the sites revealed by fishermen, archaeologists and others, recording finds on video and still camera and maps. The images are impressive, as are the numbers of potential sites. Utilising computer generated maps of the sea's rise after the Great Meltdown of the glaciers, he shows the logic of his thesis with compelling evidence. He's careful to note where the data seems firm as well as lacking. Where lacking, he urges more scientific attention to these places.

Although he justifiably spends most of the account on locations in India, where in some places the sea has invaded over 700 kilometres since the last Last Glacial Maximum, his relation of Japanese sites makes the most compelling reading. There, some of the longest-lived legends indicate Japan's oldest settlers, the Jomon, preceded the West in the establishment of agriculture and settled communities. Where scholars once held these people were "simple hunter-gatherers", Hancock sees evidence of rice growing nearly twelve thousand years old. Temple styles found today are duplicated in undersea sites, in some places nearby as if the sea simply pushed the people and their culture inland. These people may have followed the "Black Current" across the Pacific to establish settlements along the western coast of South America.

Hancock is careful to separate the known from the speculative, and not all of the speculations are his. Scholars in the places he visits are contributers to this innovative idea. So many sites and such commonality of legend add up to a highly plausible notion. Regrettably, even while crediting these researchers with empirical methods, Hancock is a bit too full of himself. Long passages of his problems, illness, fright from daring pilots cruising mountain passes permeate the book. By restricting himself to the scholars, their evidence coupled with his own and other researchers’ ideas, he could have made this account less tedious while recounting adventures and exploration. Even the computer-generated maps are often repeated unnecessarily. He raises serious questions which deserve serious study. Hancock makes a compelling introduction, but we await a less self-indulgent approach. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]