I read this book because I was interested in the Olmecs in Central American, who were the forerunners of the Maya and Aztec.
There is evidence that this tribe, in fact, had the calendar of the Long Count before the Mayans, but there is no evidence that either of these peoples were sophisticated enough to have invented this calendar with the technical knowledge required.
This calendar that predicts the world to end in 2012 is, obviously, receiving a great deal of attention today.
I expect we will get closer to the truth of the message, which is probably not foretelling the end of the world.
One part of this knowledge, as I'm beginning to understand it, is the precession of the equinoxes.
This refers to the slow movement of the constellations in the sky in reference to observations from earth.
Our scientists did not have this information until later in the 1900s.
How did the Olmecs, living around 1500 BCE, have the ability to observe the skies over such a long period to understand this roughly 26,000 cycle? This answer is one of the author's reasons that a more advanced civilization existed on earth before our recorded ones.
In addition, there is no record of any communication or contact between such civilizations as the Egyptians and Olmecs or earlier ones in Peru.
Yet each had the same information, as exhibited in their similar pyramids.
No pyramids of comparable quality have been built since.
What is the chance of that occurring unless there was some group that had contact with both? And who would that group be? There is no such evidence available in our recorded history, except in the allusive references to ancient Quetzalcoatl and similar tall, strangers in other parts of Central and South America.
In Egypt, the unknown could be Osiris who comes to us in myth.
Similar stories occur in many other cultures, but none that seem to clarify.
Hancock believes this unknown civilization could be related to Atlantis, and he suggests that the mystery of this continent could be Antarctica.
There is a premise that the precession discussed above does correlate with the onset and demise of the ice age, which could explain how this civilization was lost under the ice of Antarctica.
There are three simultaneous occurrences that might have caused this to occur: the earth in its furthest point away from the sun, the earth's axis of north and south poles more vertical than normal, and the precession of the equinoxes.
Again, Hancock presents some convincing research.
While not all books purporting to solve some of our deepest mysteries are true, this one needs to be seriously considered.
More research and factual information, I expect, will happen in the next few years.
I can't wait to see what else is discovered.