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In Underworld--the book of his Channel 4 TV series--he argues that far from springing out of nowhere some 6,000 or 7,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, civilisation has been with mankind for many millennia longer. With the aid of a geologist at Durham University, Hancock examines which coastal areas vanished beneath the sea as the ice melted at the end of the last Ice Age, a catastrophic inundation he finds in the Flood myths of most of the world's traditional religions. And then he goes diving and finds, in some cases, incontrovertible ruins; in other cases the piles of stone might well be natural rock formations, but Hancock argues for their human origins.
Hancock accepts that he is neither a historian, an archaeologist nor a geologist. Some of his arguments tend to be rather speculative, and some of his conclusions may well be wrong--it's not always a good thing to ignore the experts! But in this massive book--well over 700 pages--he does provide sufficient evidence for flooded ruins that ought to be studied by real scholars. And if a few cherished paradigms are overturned in the process, surely this is what science is all about. --David V Barrett
