Evidence of the Gods (21 page)

The position of a single monolith in the passage would have changed everything. If the artificial slit over the entrance had been a few centimeters smaller, or if its position had been a few millimeters off, the fingers of light could not have reached the back wall through the passage and chamber. Furthermore, had the passage of monoliths been shorter or longer, the sunlight would either not have reached the back wall or not illuminated the cultic symbols. With a shorter passage, the light beam would have fizzled out on the ground due to the slope of the terrain.

There is more: The giant complex of Newgrange is not set on even ground, and the east-west passage does not lie horizontally but slopes upward. The highest point on the floor of the passage is also the location of the last monolith after 24 meters. This angle of ascent was planned. The starting point of the sunbeams on December 21 was not the entrance of the grave, nor did the beams creep from the floor at the entrance to the back, but they entered through a small rectangular opening above the entrance monoliths. This position alone, in combination with the hill lying opposite behind which the sun rose, allowed for a straight beam of light into the center of the vault.

There the light hit the edge of the “basin stone,” a block with an artificially scraped out basin, like a bundled laser beam. What came next was a magic symphony, triggered through the mirror effect of the basin stone. The beams fanned out in various directions, always directed at cultic symbols and, of course, at a right angle straight upward like an arrow through the shaft of the vaulted roof. (
Image 180
)

This vault over the passage grave is a marvel in itself. Specialists call it a
corbel vault
. Heavier monoliths below and lighter monoliths above were placed on top of one another in such a way that the next highest monolith always extended a little over the edge of the one below. This created a six-meter high steadily narrowing hexagonal shaft over the center of the grave. At the top of the chimney, the gap was bridged with a flat stone which could be removed as required. (
Image 181
)

Slogans have a stronger echo in empty vaults. Why must Newgrange have been a grave? The grave idea haunts the specialist literature as a fact and can probably never be eliminated. What are these facts? Human and animal bones were found in Newgrange,
ergo
the complex has been built for that purpose. It is also a fact that every dugout, every convenient hole, can be used as a grave—even if
originally
it served a completely different purpose. In the same way, the idea for Newgrange might have been a completely different one even if—much later—bones were added. The rest of the dead was
deemed to be sacred among all peoples, so only the bones in the vault of Newgrange were to be startled and blinded by the sun each year? If Newgrange was conceived as a grave complex from the very beginning, then the deceased person must have had a very special affinity with our central star. If not, the rectangular opening for the shafts of sunlight does not make any sense.

No tribe can manage a cultic structure like Newgrange as a spare-time job. An observation and surveying period of at least one generation was the prerequisite for determining the day, hour, and minute of the winter solstice for the geographical situation of Newgrange. Precise plans or models had to be made, every angle on the
inclined
building site had to be correctly aligned, the position of every individual monolith had to be exactly correct, and of course the cultic stones with their geometric engravings had to be anchored in the tunnel before the complex was closed off. Oh yes, and before the actual building work, the hill had to be removed and leveled at its angle of inclination. Earth and gravel, millions of smaller stones, and the giant blocks of grey granite and syenite had to be brought to the site. The chief architect would probably have scratched his plans in ochre on reindeer skins and laid out angular measurements and string on the ground. In doing so, he kept scrupulously to the
megalithic yard
, the uniform unit of measurement in the Europe of the time discovered in our time by Professor Alexander Thom.
⁵
It corresponds precisely to 82.9 centimeters and spread from Newgrange to be used for all stone structures, be they in Stonehenge or Brittany in France. Presumably the Stone Age journal
Megalith Construction Today
was required reading.

If Newgrange (and other complexes) were conceived as graves, then the deceased person must have appeared to be superhuman to the society of that age. Why? At the birth of a child it could not be predicted whether he would become a hero or any other kind of “superman.” But the construction of the grave, including all the
preceding calculations, measurements, planning, and the cutting of the monoliths and the transport of the massive stones took at least one generation of the time.
Ergo
the father or grandfather would have had to commission the tomb for their future offspring. Whereby, they could not know whether he would become a hero at all and die in his home. He might just as well have died in battle far from his home tents and have been cremated elsewhere.

Here people will raise the objection—I can smell it coming—that these stone structures throughout the world with an astronomic reference performed a vital function as a calendar. This objection is of so little substance that I can hardly be bothered to deal with it again. What was the purpose of Newgrange? Was the place itself, the geographic location, a “sacred point”? Possibly, but then there has to be a surfeit of similar types of point. The world is drowning in megalithic complexes. Furthermore, the “sacred point” does not explain the astronomic and technical know-how.

The only thing that is actually certain is that someone in the mists of antiquity planted an astronomic precision timepiece into the landscape, a memorial which transmits its message with unaltered precision 5,000 (or more?) years later. What message? Who were these time thinkers, these initiates, who were able to impress both their time and the far distant future? And why did they do what they did? What was the trigger? What kind of person was at work here?

The progression from ape to intelligent human is a farce with thousands of open questions and thousands of incomplete answers. Every few years, the relevant science sells us the latest “assured knowledge” about the origin of species. The kind of pseudo-arguments which are used in textbooks to fill the gaping void in our knowledge is a sad sight to behold. I read, for example, that pre-hominids lived in packs and as a result developed intelligent and
social behavior. Gruesome! Many animal species, not just apes, lived and live in packs. But apart from a hierarchy and pecking order, they have not developed any cultural intelligence. It is eternally argued that human beings are intelligent because they adapt better than other species. That objection is so much hot air. Why have other primates such as gorillas, chimpanzees, or orangutans not “adapted”? According to the rules of evolution, these cute animals would also have been “compelled” to develop intelligence. You cannot apply evolution selectively to one chosen species. The fact that we are intelligent really only says in comparison to the non-intelligent species that we should not be intelligent either. Furthermore, there are much older life forms than the primates. Scorpions, cockroaches, or spiders, for example, have been shown to have existed more than 500 million years in the past. The same applies to various species of reptiles, some of which are even said to have descended from the dinosaurs. Now we know that crocodile mothers care lovingly for their young, but crocodile culture is nevertheless lacking, despite all the millions of years in which they have “adapted.” Because they all survived so bravely, these species should have squirmed through much better than the incomparably younger Homo sapiens. Where are the art objects or burial sites of these creatures?

When I read that humans do not have fur because they learned to cover themselves with other furs, I feel that someone is pulling my leg. The pre-hominids are said to have descended from the trees for climatic reasons. What a thought! As if an ape species had realized that in evolutionary theory, it might be needed for humans at some point in the future! It climbed down from the trees but left its compatriots—don’t they imitate everything?—swinging from branch to branch in the trees to the present day. The social attitude of our ancestors left something to be desired.

Nonsense, that is not how it was, there was something else, the clever articles say. Fear of stronger animals as well as easier nourishment had forced the pre-hominids to get up on their hind legs. What a laugh! The ape-like drive to imitate has become proverbial. Why did none of the other ape species follow this intelligent behavior? Were they less afraid of wild animals? And if such logic forced them to develop intelligence, then giraffes, who can see and smell any enemy from miles away, should really have developed a giraffe religion a long time ago. Finally, it is argued that all these changes only affect one particular line. The primates in our line had begun to eat meat to feed themselves better and more easily. As a result, our line achieved a significant advantage over other apes. Mama mia! Since when is it easier to kill a gazelle or salamander than pick fruits off a tree? Furthermore, wild cats or fish of prey have been eating meat for millennia, including the brain. Did they develop painting or mathematics as a result?

In a remarkable article in the specialist journal
Sagenhafte Zeiten
, the director of studies, Peter Fiebag, raises the question about the “human creative big bang”: “Some experts believe a change in the ‘wiring of the brain’ had triggered the ‘human creative big bang.’” And he adds, “A section of DNA was, by mistake, copied from the X chromosome to the Y chromosome.”
⁶
Really, “by mistake,” Fiebag asks? Or did it happen with the aid of extraterrestrial genetic engineering?

Fiebag’s thought has a great deal of merit, even if anthropology has not quite caught up. There, in the salon of the sciences, we are served each year with the latest contradictions. Why not? Science is a living thing and the latest knowledge revises previous findings. Everyone is in agreement that we are unique. That also applies to other animals. But we are more unique than all the others because we have culture: painting, imagination, religion, mathematics,
and the ability to plan for the future. (Though, the latter could be relativized, because a spider also plans for the future when it weaves its web.)

The lines of humans and chimpanzees had already been divided from before Eden, says Dr. David Reich from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Then the two species had begun exchanging genes again: “After the pre-hominids had already lived as their own species for hundreds of thousands of years, they suddenly started to interbreed with their knuckle-walking relatives again.”
⁷

I have some difficulty with the idea of a hominid with an upright gait suddenly spurning the members of his own species and preferring to have sex with an ape lover. And why the resulting bastard should possess better genetic factors remains just as much of a riddle as the question of whether the chromosomes of the disparate pair would be compatible at all.