Hancock challenges the archaeological orthodoxy's view that North and South America were the last places to be settled by humans.
Hancock posits a theory that an ancient globally distributed system of ASTRO-ARCHITECTURE that created monuments on the ground which mimic patterns of certain constellations in the sky. Since before he wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, Hancock has been searching for a lost ancient high civilization.
The design of the sacred architecture of the world is ruled by geometry. Hancock uses Richard Dawkins' term "meme" to describe this system of behavior being passed from one individual to the other.
Stonehenge, the Pyramids, Angkor Wat, Serpent Mound, Ohio - all are concerned with deliberate orientation to the sky - some honor the solstices. Architectural, astronomical, geometrical memes across different parts of the world AND across many different time periods.
A quote from the book:
"Contrary to the mainstream, my broad conclusion is that an advanced global seafaring civilization existed during the Ice Age, that it mapped the earth as it looked then with stunning accuracy, and that it had solved the problem of longitude, which our own civilization failed to do until the invention of Harrison’s marine chronometer in the late eighteenth century. As masters of celestial navigation, as explorers, as geographers, and as cartographers, therefore, this lost civilization of 12,800 years ago was not outstripped by Western science until less than 300 years ago at the peak of the Age of Discovery."
