Independent researcher Matthew LaCroix claims to have found evidence of a technologically and spiritually advanced prehistoric civilization that encoded its knowledge in monument design, geometry, and symbols worldwide tens of thousands of years ago. In an interview with the Daily Mail, he said recurring features such as giant T-shapes, step pyramids, lions, and three-level motifs appear across distant ancient sites, which he interprets as part of a global symbolic code. He traces the system's origin to the Lake Van region of eastern Turkey, proposing dates of 38,000 to 40,000 years ago, and argues this civilization understood cosmic cycles and embedded teachings about human origins, the structure of the universe, and divine reality into sacred architecture to preserve knowledge before catastrophic events.
LaCroix connects these symbols to sites in Egypt and South America, including the Giza Plateau, the Sphinx Temple, Tiwanaku, and Puma Punku, arguing they share a common architectural template and cosmological model he calls a cosmogram. He interprets the shapes as representing layered realms of reality linked by a central axis, often described as the axis mundi, and ties this to esoteric traditions such as Hermetic thought, suggesting that ancient people viewed humans as divine and interconnected with the cosmos. Mainstream archaeologists reject these conclusions, dating the relevant sites to much later periods and noting there is no peer-reviewed evidence for a pre-Ice Age global civilization or for LaCroix's proposed timelines.