Connecting a Global Flood with the Mystery of Mankind's Ancient Past (cont.)
By David Warner Mathisen

We can hope that they themselves will become engaged with this question and offer their own analysis in the future, but in the meantime, you are to be commended for looking beyond the first explanation or theory that is offered to explain any given piece of evidence, and considering whether there might perhaps be other explanations which would provide a more satisfactory answer for the clues that we see all around us. In my own writing, I use as an analogy the example of Sherlock Holmes or even the gang from the old Scooby Doo cartoons, who invariably arrive at a crime scene to find that the authorities have a theory and that those authorities are quite certain that their theory is the last word on the matter. They usually find that the authorities are quite unwilling to have their thesis challenged, especially by outsiders. However, it is very often the outsiders who are able to see that there could be another explanation, because the outsider or outsiders are coming from a completely different perspective, and also because they do not have an institutional bias the way “the authorities” (no matter how competent or how well-meaning) often develop institutional bias simply by virtue of their role and position within the structure of society. There is certainly a lesson to be extracted from the fact that in almost every one of the most beloved stories within the crime and mystery genre, the hero (or heroine, or even dog, in the case of Scooby Doo) who ends up solving the case is a marginalized figure who operates on the fringes of society and who isn’t taken seriously by those in authority.

In that spirit of open-minded examination of alternative explanations for the clues of the case, then, I would like to suggest that there is a theory which has not really been heard from yet, and a theory which may not prove to be too popular even among those who are used to examining alternative theories, but a theory which (in my analysis at least) does a really outstanding job of explaining a whole lot of evidence – even some of the most puzzling evidence of which Graham Hancock readers are keenly aware, such as underwater ruins at great depths, fossil evidence of heavy forests in locations currently near the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, or even the worldwide evidence of extremely ancient understanding of sophisticated concepts such as the precession of the equinoxes or the mathematical concepts of phi and pi. That alternative explanation which I believe so elegantly suits this data is a theory that involves a cataclysmic global flood within human memory – an explanation many will oppose simply because it was the dominant explanation for so many centuries, and therefore carries a lot of historic and emotional baggage. But, like the authorities in the Sherlock Holmes or Scooby Doo crime story (who miss clues because of their own baggage), we would do well to let go of whatever predispositions we might bring along with us as we examine this evidence, and see whether setting down our own baggage and considering a different storyline might help us to solve the mystery.