Earths Ancient Civilizations

Graham Hancock's multi-million best seller Fingerprints of the Gods remains an astonishing, deeply controversial, wide-ranging investigation of the mysteries of our past and the evidence for Earth's lost civilisation. Twenty years on, Hancock returns with a book filled with completely new, scientific and archaeological evidence, which has only recently come to light....

In 1945, the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became the first and last victims of the atom bomb, the most destructive man-made force our planet has ever known. Or were they just the latest in a long line of Armageddon-level events? Is it possible that our civilization is, in reality, just one of many? Did previous cultures blossom, develop, and thrive only to destroy themselves, tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, with the same atomic technology?

In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes listeners on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii in Italy, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today.

As soon as man discovered writing, he began engaging in historiography (historical writing and philosophy), but paleoanthropology only really began in the late 1800s. As archaeologists began finding bones in European caves of a human race that was very different than any race in the modern world, the study of paleoanthropology was born. The race of those early humans who were found in the European caves were later termed Neanderthals, and for quite some time, they were believed to have been the race from which many modern humans were directly descended.

Thirty thousand years ago our prehistoric ancestors painted perfect images of animals on walls of tortuous caves, most often without any light. How was this possible? Scholars and archaeologists have for centuries pored over these works of art, speculating and hoping to come away with the key to the mystery. David and Lefrre give us a new understanding of an art lost in time, revealing what had until recently remained unexplainable - the oldest enigma in humanity has been solved.