British journalist and author, born on 2 August 1950, educated at Durham University and formerly East Africa correspondent of The Economist, with earlier bylines in The Times, The Sunday Times and The Guardian. His first books were reportage, among them Lords of Poverty (1989) on the aid industry. From The Sign and the Seal (1992) onwards he turned to the argument he is now known for, that an advanced civilisation was destroyed at the end of the last Ice Age and left its traces in maps, myths and monuments. Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) is its fullest statement. In Magicians of the Gods (2015) and America Before (2019) he moved the mechanism from Earth-Crust Displacement to the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis and the setting from Antarctica to the drowned continental shelves. He presents the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse. He describes himself as a journalist rather than a scientist, and has repeatedly and at length denied the racism charge levelled at the lost-civilisation genre.
Connections
Charles Hapgood · Robert Bauval · Earth-Crust Displacement · Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis · Ancient Apocalypse · Proto-Ancient Human Hypothesis