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find coastlines of Antarctica shown which could not have been known to their makers. Childress' many works chronicle the inexplicable sites around the world. Something was definitely up.
     For centuries, people had whispered about "Atlantis" and "Mu." Colin Wilson rehearses many of these themes and their modern counterparts in From Atlantis to the Sphinx. Speculation had often arisen over the seeming similarities of many ancient world cultures and artifacts. A unified theory began to emerge which would explain and unify all of these findings and phenomena. The theory speaks of a lost, antediluvian Civilization whose heirs we all are.
     Not that this is new. Many mystical and metaphysical groups, notably the Rosicrucian Order AMORC, have taught that we have inherited the knowledge of "Atlantis," no matter how confused or diluted in the popular consciousness . But the wisdom that these groups had preserved for the many centuries is now finally being validated by modern science, it would seem!
      Graham Hancock, a British Journalist, together with a number of colleagues from disparate fields, began to pull the threads of the story together. Today, Hancock, West, Bauval (see bibliography that follows) and others are challenging the Archaeological and Historical establishment with a consistent theory which fits the observed phenomena well. The basic lineaments of the theory (as I understand it), are as follows:
      Humanity arose and developed a highly advanced civilization much earlier than currently thought. No date is clear, but certainly prior to 13,000 years ago. Recent discoveries in North America have shown that humans were even on this continent as early as 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. This civilization may have been based on principles different from our own, which would account for the lack of technological artifacts which we would recognize as such.
     The Ancient Civilization may have inhabited Antarctica, a prime candidate today for "Atlantis," thanks to the work of Rand & Rose Flem-Ath, When the Sky Fell.Certainly geological evidence of tropical forests has been found under the Ice of Antarctica, and the polar shift patters suggest that the southernmost continent may well have been as much as 2000 miles further north at one time. More info on this.
      That change of location due to the regular (and established) polar shifts may well have taken place approximately 12,500 years ago (10,500 BC). Such a cataclysm would have devastated the entire earth, destroying most of any human civilization. Naturally, the Great Flood stories which are part of most world myth-cycles are seen as the ancient genetic or "race-memory" of this species-trauma.
      Nonetheless, some survivors emerged from the Ancient Civilization. It may be that, if West & Schoch's dating of the Sphinx is correct (and also the dating of the newly discovered submerged ruins off the coast of Japan), that some few great monuments of the antediluvian culture made it through the polar shift. But they are among the very few.
     Among humans, many of our ancient cultures have legends of semi-divine figures who emerged from a time of great darkness to assist in the (re-) civilizing of humanity ("We alone are escaped to tell Thee…"), e.g. Egypt and the Meso- and South- American cultures share this mythic pattern. The theory supposes that remnants of the Ancient Civilization managed to make it to several places around the globe (e.g. Egypt, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Central America, the Andes, Tibet, China, etc.). Here they began to teach and train the survivors of the cataclysm in the wisdom and techniques of "Atlantis." This would account for the remarkable building, geometric and astronomical feats of these early (post-flood) cultures.

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