Archaeologica.org

Images from US space shuttle missions in the 1980s appeared to show ancient river drainage patterns beneath the Sahara desert.

Subsequent imaging turned up ring structures beneath the ice of Antarctica.

Hancock may be right about Antarctica after all!

Minimalist wrote:

Throughout the last 100,000 years, the Nile Valley and Sahara underwent many dry and wet phases, which over such a span of time would have constantly altered man's habitat. We do not know what the people who used these tools looked like, but they were surely hunters and would have migrated in bands, supplementing their diet with gathered fruits, nuts and vegetables. This uniform early Paleolithic tool "culture" is known as the Achulean, and it existed from about 500,000 to 50,000 years ago.

The idea that human history is a gradual but continual progression – starting from a state of savagery, with generations slowly making technological and social advances and passing these down, and leading to the pinnacle of western European civilisation – is a leftover from the Victorian era, part of the same colonial mentality which saw “primitive” indigenous peoples as subhumans who could be justifiably conquered and killed. Rather than a progression, the last 6000 years of war, oppression, misery and hardship are the result of a painful degeneration from an earlier, healthier state.