The apocalyptic warning from our ancestors we must not ignore. Historian GRAHAM HANCOCK

Does the secret of mankind’s past – and its future – lie underneath thousands of feet of ice at the South Pole? That is the controversial view of author Graham Hancock who spent five years on a global odyssey, re-examining centuries-old mysteries. His conclusion is that the Sphinx of Egypt, Tiahuanaco in Bolivia and Teotihuacan in Mexico were inspired by a civilisation which suddenly vanished. Yesterday he explained how a massive movement of the Earth’s crust may have turned Antarctica from a temperate continent to one denied life at the South Pole. But could such a process happen again? Were the ancients trying to warn us of geophysical forces that could spell doom for us, too? Today, in the final extract from his provocative book, he gives notice of a possible apocalypse…

As every schoolboy knows, true north, the North Pole, is not quite the same thing as magnetic north – the direction in which a compass points.

In fact, the position of magnetic north is always changing – sometimes it has wandered as far as the South Pole! Indeed, the Earth’s magnetic polarity has reversed itself more than 170 times during the past 80 million years.

What causes these reversals?

There seems no doubt that the Earth’s magnetic field is tied up in some way to the rotation of the planet. So, either the Earth has flipped over in space – or, more simply, the Earth’s crust has slipped over the core that contains the magnetic poles (as we explained yesterday). Either way, the consequences for all life, were it to happen again, would be unimaginably dreadful.

According to reports in Nature and New Scientist, the last such reversal of the north and south magnetic poles was completed just 12,400 years ago – during the 11th millennium BC.

Having travelled the world on a five-year odyssey, best-selling author Graham Hancock has collected evidence which points to an advanced civilisation which flourished before the last Ice Age

In other words, it happened at the very time that the ancient civilisations of the Andes were destroyed, that the great alignments of the pyramids were set up in Egypt and that the Sphinx acquired its mysterious rain-beaten weathering.

At the same time, too, huge numbers of mammal species around the world vanished into extinction. Of course, the list could continue: abrupt rises in sea level, hurricane-force winds, electrical storms, volcanic disturbances, and so on.

Scientists expect the next reversal of the Earth’s magnetic poles to occur in the year 2030. Is this, perhaps, an intimation of planetary disaster?

We may never know until it happens. Meanwhile, however, it is surely worth noting that the current century is signalled in a remarkable convergence of ancient prophecies as an epoch of unprecedented turmoil.

It seems possible that the ancient geniuses, the accomplished map-makers who mapped Antarctica, the pyramid-builders, the mathematicians, navigators and astronomers whose fingerprints we have been following across continents and oceans of the Earth, were trying to tell us something.

They seem to have tried to say that cyclical, recurrent and near-total destructions of mankind are part and parcel of life on Earth, that such destructions have occurred many times – and that they will certainly occur again.

The last such reversal of the north and south magnetic poles was completed just 12,400 years ago – at the very time that the great alignments of the pyramids were set up in Egypt

Their myths speak not just of cataclysms of the past, but of cataclysms to come. And I am impressed by the sense of urgency and of a vitally important mission that seem to have been relayed to the future. Their underlying objective could have been to transmit a warning to do with a global cataclysm.

Ancient legends and traditions speak of a ‘Hall of Records’ at Egypt’s Giza plateau. Is it possible, therefore, that a recently located chamber beneath Egypt’s Sphinx, or a chamber discovered by a remote-controlled camera with the Great Pyramid, might contain records?

I find it increasingly difficult to shake off the disturbing intuition that something of immense importance to mankind may be crying out to be found at the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx.

WALKING IN THE LAST DAYS

Hopi Indian Reservation, May 1994: As we drove across the high plains of Arizona towards the tiny village of Shungopovi, I went over again in my mind everything that I had seen and done in the previous five years.

I made this journey because the science of the prophecy is still believed to be alive among the Hopi – Pueblo Indians, distantly related to the Aztecs of Mexico, whose numbers have been reduced to barely 10,000.

According to their myths: ‘The first world was destroyed, as a punishment for human misdemeanours, by an all-consuming fire from above and below. The second world ended when the terrestrial globe toppled from its axis and everything was covered in ice. The third world ended in a universal flood.

‘The present world is the fourth. Its fate will depend on whether or not its inhabitants behave in accordance with the Creator’s plans…’

I had come to Arizona to find out if the Hopi though that we were behaving in accordance with these plans.

IS THIS THE WAY THE WORLD WILL END?

I met Paul Sifki, a 96-year-old Hopi elder of the Spider clan, and a leading speaker of the traditions of his people. Beside him was his grand-daughter Melza Sifki, who had offered to translate.

‘I have heard,’ I said, ‘that the Hopi believe the end of the world is coming. Is this true?’

Paul Sifki was a small, wizened man, dressed in jeans and a cambric shirt. Throughout our conversation he gazed intently ahead.

Melza put my question to him in the Hopi language. Then this translation followed: ‘He said when he was a child, in the 1900s, there was a star that exploded – a star that had ben in the sky for a long while.

‘And he went to his grandfather and asked him to explain the meaning of this sign. His grandfather replied: “This is the way our own world will end – engulfed in flames. If people do not change their ways then the spirit that takes care of the world will become so frustrated with us that he will punish the world with flames.” That was what his grandfather said to him – that the Earth would explode just like that exploding star.’

‘Having viewed the world for the past 90 years, does he believe that the behaviour of mankind has improved or worsened?’

‘He says it has not improved. We’re getting worse.’

‘So in his opinion, then, the end is coming?’

‘He said that the signs are already there to be seen. He said that nowadays nothing but the wind blows and that all we do is have a weapon pointed at one another. There are no values any more and people live without morals or laws. These are the signs the time has come.’

I said quietly: ‘Please ask your grandfather if he thinks that anything can be done for the Hopi and for the rest of mankind.’

‘The only thing he knows,’ Melza replied, ‘is that so long as the Hopi do not abandon their traditions, they may be able to help themselves and to help others. But my grandfather wants to tell you also that nothing is here just by chance, that nothing happens by accident – whether good or bad – and that there is a reason for everything that takes place.’

THE HOUR WE DO NOT EXPECT

When human beings from around the globe and many cultures share a powerful and overwhelming intuition that a terrible cataclysm is approaching, we are within our rights to ignore them.

And when the voices of our distant ancestors, through myths and sacred architecture, speak to us of the physical obliteration of a great civilisation in antiquity – and tell us that our own civilisation, too, is in jeopardy – we are still entitled to stop our ears.

So it was, the Bible says, in the antediluvian world: ‘People were eating, drinking, taking wives, taking husbands, up to the moment that Noah went into the Ark, and they suspected nothing until the flood came and swept all away.’

In the same manner, it has been prophesised that the next global destruction will fall suddenly ‘at an hour we do not suspect, like lightning striking in the east and flashing far into the west.

‘The sun will be darkened, the moon will lose its brightness, the stars will fall from the sky and the powers of heaven will be shaken. Then of two men in the fields, one is taken, one left; and of two women at the millstone girinding, one is taken, one is left.’

What has happened before can happen again. What has been done before can be done again. And perhaps there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun.