Could it be that previous civilizations of man were destroyed by such capsizings? Could it be that this was what caused the extinction of the mysterious race which originally built the amazing cities, the ruins of which are extensive in Peru, long before the ancient Incas were living their own highly advanced civilization?

Perhaps now one of the most puzzling of these, the incredible find at Marcahuasi, only 80 km northeast of this city, can be solved. Are these the remains of a civilization made extinct by a previous capsizing? The remains have been a continuing enigma to archaeologists, particularly a spectacular discovery made in 1952 at an altitude of over 13,000 feet in the Andes.

The discovery, made in 1952 by Dr. Daniel Ruzo, is a great stone amphitheater in which are magnificent sculptures -- but sculptures which, according to all we know, are wholly anachronistic. Here, for example, among carvings of familiar South American animals and people, can also be seen unmistakable likenesses in white dioritic porphyry stone of camels and cows, lions and elephants, and other animals which have never lived there, along with finely carved heads, in the same material, of Semites, Caucasians and Negroes, all of whom supposedly came to this continent less than 500 years ago. There is even a perfect rendering of the turtle's long-extinct ancestor the amphichelydia; yet in all recorded history, the amphichelydia is known only from its fossilized remains. It lived during the Upper Triassic Period and became extinct about 180 million years ago.

Where, then, could the sculptor have gotten his model? There is also a rendering of a horse, but horses became extinct in the region 9,000 years ago and did not reappear until brought by Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century.

Dr. Ruzo's great discovery too long has been ignored. It is now time for science to take a fresh look at such mysteries of the past.

Or consider Tennessee's famous fossil footprints. Found during the last century near Brayton in Bledsoe County, these prints of bare human feet are embedded in solid granite which is probably hundreds of millions of years old=! Not only that, the human who made those prints must have been gigantic, for the heel alone measures 13 inches in width.