Evidence of the Gods (22 page)

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Authors: Erich von Daniken

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Things become even more confusing: mysterious bones were found in a cave in the Altai Mountains in central Asia, and analyzed at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig: “The clearly human bone from the Denisova cave are not the same as the human genome. Sensationally the genetic material of the Denisova hominid differs from Homo sapiens by more than twice as much as from the Neanderthals.”
8

In the name of all that is Milky Way! Perhaps our venerable anthropology might dare to take a creative leap toward the Director of Studies Fiebag. It can be proved, after all, that the Stone Age people mastered the high art of mathematics and geometry and demonstrated it on site. Or do we all have to think differently? Do different types of humans perhaps exist alongside one another, the more stupid ones and the knowledgeable ones? The latter left examples of their skills, which are ignored by society to the present day, although any fool could verify them.

Poor Pythagoras!

Near the town of Carnac in Brittany, France, there are thousands of menhirs in long rows. (
Images 182

185
) Dr. Bruno P. Kremer from the Institute of Natural Science of the University of Cologne, who has published several papers on this arrangement of stones, estimates the number of menhirs still existing today as “more than 3,000.”
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And Pierre-Roland Giot, the leading expert on Brittany in France, is of the opinion that something approaching 10,000 menhirs must once have stood in the landscape.
10
Many of the granite blocks have been destroyed today, worn away by wind and weather. (
Images 186

189
) The ranks of three to 10 stones give the appearance of a petrified army. The smallest are barely 1 meter tall; the giant among them, the menhir of Kerloas near Plouarzel, is 12 meters high and weighs 150 tons. The largest “long stone” in the whole area is the menhir of Locmariaquer. It lies broken on the ground, was once 21 meters high, and weighed a good 350 tons. (
Image 190
) The most impressive thing is probably the long parallel columns of the Alignements (alignments). Near Kermario, there are 1,029 menhirs in 10 rows on an area about 100 meters wide and 1,120 meters long. At Ménec, there are 1,099 standing stones arranged in columns of 11. The Alignement of Kerlescan comprises 540 menhirs in rows of 13 and at Kerzehro we can count another 1,129 menhirs in columns of 10.

These are just some of the details, but they give an idea of the enormous work which was undertaken by someone at some stage. Carbon-14 dating at the dolmen of Kercado produced an age of 5,830 years. May the gods be thanked for this date, even if it might subsequently turn out to be too recent. At 5,830 years, all the nonsense put forward in all seriousness in the previous literature can at least be put to rest. It has been suggested, among other things, that primitive nomad tribes had cut and aligned stone blocks in European pre-history to copy the peoples of the East who possessed mighty structures in Egypt and elsewhere. Another current of thought suspects that the whole of the area which is Brittany today had once been sacred land of the Druids—but they reached their height in the last pre-Christian century. If therefore the Druids located their holy places in the network of menhirs, they must have taken over a complex that had already been finished and completed. It was originally believed that the stone columns were gravestones—but no bones ever materialized. Then someone thought it was a gigantic calendar in stone. Error. Even an astronomical alignment was assumed to be behind the long rows. In the meantime, we know better: they are about sophisticated geometry.

The western cromlech near Le Ménec includes two Pythagorean triangles whose sides have a ratio of 3:4:5. Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher from Samos, lived at about 532 bc. He cannot have instructed the “nomad tribes and gatherers of berries” in his teachings. Poor Pythagoras! Your helpful theorems were already applied millennia before you.

If the trapeze-shaped sides are extended from the Manio I “warrior grave,” they meet in an angle of 27 degrees at a distance of 107 meters. Exactly the same triangles with the same diagonals of 107 meters and the same side ratio of 5:12:13 occur several times in the stone settings of Carnac. Here it is surprising that the simple Pythagorean triangle with the classic ratio of 3:4:5 was seldom used. The megalithic people made use of higher geometry. In the journal
Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau
,
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Dr. Bruno Kremer points out that the individual ensembles were built in accordance with fixed “designated measures which allow us to conclude that highly developed surveying techniques existed as early as the Mesolithic period.”

This involved not just applied geometry, but also the spherical shape of the earth, division into degrees, azimuth, organization, planning, transport of the stones, and many other things. Dr. Kremer refers to an angle of 53°8’ which is based in a Pythagorean triangle with the ratio 3:4:5. The 53°8’ corresponds “pretty precisely to the azimuth of the sunrise at the summer solstice
at all locations on the geographical latitude of Carnac
.”

The long stone columns of Le Ménec and Kermario run in a northeasterly direction and at their longest point touch the Alignement of Petit Ménec. This line is also the hypotenuse of a Pythagorean triangle. If we draw a line northward from the western end of the stone column of Le Ménec, it meets the dolmen of Mané Kérioned after 2,680 meters. From here, another line at exactly the same angle of 60 degrees heads for the menhir Manio I.
Once again the distance is 2,680 meters. The three points form an isosceles triangle; they are all equidistant.

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