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An examination of a specific portion of Graham Hancock's book Fingerprints of the Gods, relating to Earth Crustal Displacement, the climates and fauna of Siberia and Alaska, and the deaths of the mammoths, finds it to be critically flawed
By the late 1960s the modern theories of continental drift and plate tectonics had become firmly established in geological thought. They had survived close scrutiny and challenges from competing hypotheses and propositions, both within and outside the scientific community. One of the most prominent unorthodox interpretations put forward was Charles Hapgood's "Earth Crustal Displacement," which was never accepted as a truly valid competing scientific hypothesis (and Hapgood was not part of the geological community). Popularized in his 1958 book Earth's Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science, the Earth Crustal Displacement idea has re-emerged in alternative circles in the last decade. Its most vocal supporters are the librarians Rand and Rose Flem-Ath and the journalist Graham Hancock. Hancock based a large portion of his book Fingerprints of the Gods (1995, revised 2001) on Hapgood's evidence for catastrophe at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, 12,000 BY (before present).
Earth Crustal Displacement is based on the premise that Earth's lithosphere (the outer part of the rocky Earth, about the uppermost 80 kilometers or 50 miles) has shifted as a whole at different times in the past over Earth's interior. Hancock (1995, 11) went so far as to claim no geologist "has succeeded in proving it incorrect." Results from pollen analyses have revealed patterns of climate change that are at odds with the inherent predictions of the Earth Crustal Displacement model. Studies have shown that the Polar regions have either contracted or expanded toward the equator, but have never shifted their positions as required by Earth Crustal Displacement. The CLIMAP Project (1981) reconstructed climatic zones during the Last Glacial Maximum and the results obtained shows the North and South Poles (and the equator) in the same position as today. Paleontological data, summarized by Thiede et al. (1990), reveals that the Arctic Ocean has continuously experienced polar climates, almost permanent ice cover and glacio-marine sedimentation for all of the Late Cenozoic since the mid-Pleistocene. Phillips and Ganze (1997) reconfirm that, regardless of how...