Many researchers of ancient history agree that the history of human civilization is much older than we think. There is indisputable evidence that many architectural monuments and scientific achievements were created tens of thousands of years ago. Myths and legends contain references to events that occurred hundreds of thousands of years before the present. However, how is this possible if the history of civilization goes back only four thousand years, and Homo sapiens - Cro-Magnon - appeared only about forty thousand years ago? After analyzing many sources, the famous writer and researcher of supernatural phenomena Colin Wilson, author of the world bestseller "The Occult", offers his own a version of what the ancient global proto-civilization of Atlantis could have been, which gave birth to all the world's human cultures. In his opinion, the predecessors of the Cro-Magnons, the Neanderthals, who are generally considered primitive ape-men, could well have been the creators of an extremely highly developed civilization that did not possess advanced technologies, but compensated for this due to a much higher level of intuitive interaction with nature than now. This assumption allows us to fill in the gaps in the history of mankind over the past 100 thousand years, explaining the mysterious scientific and architectural achievements of ancient civilizations. And it is quite possible that the unusual abilities of the human mind of our ancestors were passed down from generation to generation by various carriers of the Hermetic tradition, including the Order of the Templars, the Masonic Brotherhood and other secret societies.