Evidence of the Gods (7 page)

The latest theory about Easter Island comes from the German archeologist Kurt Horedt.
²³
He discovered a remarkable similarity between Germanic runes and the illegible characters of Easter Island. Two lines of inscription with nine runes were discovered near Gallehus in Northern Schleswig (Germany) in the 16th and 17th century. Seven of them reappear in almost identical form on the wooden tablets of Easter Island. How is that possible?

Did northern Germanic peoples end up on Easter Island 1,500 years ago? That would also explain the features of the statues on Easter Island, according to the archeologist Kurt Horedt. Even the red hats on the heads of the statues could be identical with the shock of red hair of the Teutons. Was it ancient Germanic peoples, then, who served as a model for the statues? Shipwrecked sailors, perhaps, who set up all the statues around the shore of the island to draw attention to themselves? Were they supposed to draw the attention of the crews of other Germanic vessels who happened to have strayed into the area? After all, radio did not exist at the time.

Nothing is impossible. The thing that puzzles me is merely the question: how did Germanic peoples—long before Columbus!—get from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific?

North of Dunedin in New Zealand, there are about 100 spherical boulders lying on Moeraki Beach. The largest has a diameter of 3.16 meters. These giant geodes are literally flushed out of the rock, roll a few meters, come to a halt, and are then washed over by the daily tides. (
Images 57
and
58
) Many have broken apart, crumbling away as the result of the action of wind and waves. No one has any idea how many of the boulders have already been swallowed by the surf, worn down over thousands of years. (
Images 59
and
60
) Yet the rock keeps flushing out new boulders from the sediment as if a rock mother were laying eggs.

Geologists assure us that this is a perfectly natural process. The boulders are formed through the deposit of calcite in soft sandstone. This calcite forms a core around which the rock solidifies over millennia, rather like a pearl around a grain of sand. The comparison is flawed, however, because the oyster with the pearl is constantly in motion in the water; the rock, by contrast, does not move. Why, actually, does this geological miracle not happen on many other beaches around the world? And why would rock solidify around the calcite core
as a ball
? (
Images 60
–
63
)