It contends that an advanced civilization existed on Antarctica during the last ice age, until the continent supposedly suddenly shifted south to its current position.

Bellamy and Denis Saurat to the work of Heinrich Himmler's notorious racial research institute, the Ahnenerbe, and the "crackpot theories"[This quote needs a citation] of Nazi archaeologist Edmund Kiss.

[6] Kenneth Feder said that the book reads like the "Victorian travelogue" of a writer untrained in archeology, who credits a mysterious white people for the achievements of the ancient civilizations he visits, Hancock notably referring to the Maya as "jungle-dwelling Indians" who could not possibly come up with a sophisticated calendar.

Feder finds Hancock's synthesis of a variety of fringe writers such as Ignatius Donnelly, Charles Hapgood, Arthur Posnansky, Robert Bauval and Anthony West "very hard to swallow, indeed.

[12] In a November 2009 interview with the London magazine Time Out, the film's director Roland Emmerich stated, "I always wanted to do a biblical flood movie, but I never felt I had the hook.