Our Cosmic Ancestors (21 page)

Not too long ago the geologists discovered that the hard outer crust of our Earth floats on a molten mantle and that continents rest on
NORTH POLE
SOUTH POLE

separate tectonic plates. There are direct relations between the sliding of the plates and the changing of the polar ice caps. What interests us here are the dates when these changes took place and their influence upon the lives of our ancestors. It appears that, in round figures, the poles remain stationary for periods of about 30,000 years, then move around for 6,000 years, then again stay put for 30,000 years, and so on.

Scientists have established that the last four rounds of the poles started 120,000 years ago when the North Pole installed itself in the territory of Yukon in Canada at 63
^°
N and 135
^°
W; then it went to the Greenland Sea at 72
^°
N and 10
^°
E about 84,000 years ago, moved from 54,000 until 48,000 years ago and settled in the middle of Hudson Bay at 60
^°
N and 83
^°
W; it rested there for 30,000 years; then wandered again from about 18000 to about 12,000 years ago when it came to its present location.

Simultaneously the South Pole went through similar gyrations but in the opposite direction. We have to note that its three previous locations were in their turn in the southern part of the Indian Ocean between Australia and the Antarctic but never on Antarctica itself. Only the last movement 12,000 years ago brought the South Pole to the middle of the great continent of Antarctica.

At least half of Antarctica towards South America and the South Atlantic was ice free for 100,000 years, while Palmer Peninsula and Cape Horn, that may not have then been separated from each other, enjoyed a fairly warm climate. There is no valid reason to doubt that during these periods of the last three polar rounds, a very advanced civilization could have existed in this region and might have been the origin of all civilization and knowledge in astronomy, mathematics, metallurgy, and a variety of arts.

opposite
[previous page]The last three displacements of the poles from 90,000 to 12,000 years ago

This illustration shows the positions and motions of the North Pole and South Pole at different times in the past. It show's in particular that, until 12,000 years ago, Antarctica had a much warmer climate and could have been the site of a long-forgotten advanced civilization.

Much has been written about the polar rounds, but very little has been said about the corresponding shift of the equator. The displacement of the tropical zones around the globe had certainly much more influence upon humans than the shift of the ice caps. Certainly climatic changes in the temperate and tropical zones have caused many more migrations and led to the destruction of many more civilizations than any changes in polar regions.

The polar rounds and the shift of the equator also explain why we have found traces of civilizations in regions of the Earth that today seem unfit for human habitation. The jungles of Guatemala and Cambodia, the high plateaus of Tibet, or the deserts of Arabia were all quite different at different times of the polar rounds; and this simple explanation solves many archaeological, ethnological, and geological mysteries.

If we consider where the equator was 90,000 years ago, we discover that this line was very close to many famous archaeological sites like Hoggar in Algeria; Tibesti in Chad; the southern part of Egypt; Bahrein and Dilmun in the Persian Gulf; Sumer and Akkad in Mesopotamia; the southern part of Persia; the Indus valley; Angkor, in Cambodia; Malekula, in the New Hebrides; Rapa, in Polynesia; Easter Island, in the South Pacific; Pisco Bay and the Nasca plateau in Peru; Tiahuanaco, in Bolivia; and the Amazon delta.

Tracing the equator line of 54,000 years ago and starting again from Africa around the world, we find that it touched the ruins of Zimbabwe, in Rhodesia; the anthropological sites of Java; the Nan Madol ruins of the island of Temuen in the Carolinas; the Hawaiian Islands; the Galapagos Islands, in the Pacific; the caves of Cuenca, in Ecuador; and again the mouth of the Amazon.

On the equator of 18,000 years ago we find the kingdom of the Queen of Sheba, in southwest Arabia; the Indus valley; Lhasa, in Tibet; Changsha in China where a 2000 year old mummified princess was found; French Polynesia; and Easter Island. Naturally, not all ancient cultural sites are on these lines of the equator of the last 100,000 years. But it is significant that we find there the most mysterious ones like Angkor, Nan Madol, Tiahuanaco, Nasca, Cuenca, Machu Picchu, and Easter Island.
There must have been a good reason why all of these impressive civilizations established themselves around the equatorial zones of their period. Three reasons can be seen right away. First, there was the flight from ice ages that most probably in the distant past destroyed great parts of humanity more than once. The second reason is astronomical and nautical. If you stand on the equator, all stars are visible - Polaris, the polar star, and the Southern Cross too. It is the best place to study the movements of planets, also the best place for navigation. All you do is observe the polar star for your latitude, and figure out the longitude by observing the time difference between the sunset in the west and moonrise in the east. The third reason is extraterrestrial. It is preferable to land a spaceship near the equator than in a polar region, just as it was with our landings on the Moon.

No matter what the reasons were, the zone between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, the borders of the tropical belt around our planet, has played the most important part in the development of civilization. During the ice ages the climate there was very pleasant, the sea levels in the oceans were much lower and all distances between islands and continents substantially shorter than now. Navigation was simpler because all centers of culture and commerce were on the same line, and one could simply go with the Sun to find them all. There can be no doubt anymore that human civilization has lasted much longer than was previously thought. For instance, the latest radioactive carbon data collected from megalithic temples in Brittany, Spain, and Wales show that these European remnants of ancient cultures are at least 2,000 years older than the pyramids of Egypt or the ziggurats of Mesopotamia.

But we still have to find out where it all began. What was the beginning of civilization? Was it the time when humans first started to communicate by sounds or gestures? Was it when humans made their first attempts to write or count? Or was it when they began tool making? Just recently the discovery was made that ancient iron ore mines in South Africa are 43,000 years old. Yet ancient records contain even older indications of culture. Egyptian priests once claimed that their ancestors had seen the Sun rise twice where it sets now, which represented 40,000 years. Mayan documents in the archives of the Vatican state that their time counting started four long periods ago to give us a date almost 21,000 years ago. Unless I made a mistake in my calculations, the Nineveh constant came into human possession 64,800 years ago, and we probably can't go wrong if we assume that indeed civilization began with the Cro-Magnon period 65,000 years ago.

The understanding of the polar rounds and of the wobbling equator will allow us some day to make the ultimate discovery in Antarctica, the most mysterious of all the continents. Antarctica wasn't discovered until 1820, yet there are several very old maps that show Antarctica
without a trace of ice, with rivers and mountains where today one finds nothing but glaciers.
The two Piri Reis maps, dated 1513 and 1528, are copies of much older ones going back thousands of years; and as studies sponsored by the US Navy Hydrographic Office have shown, these maps are utterly precise and in true scale. Even more interesting, they show many details that could only be found by aerial survey, and yet these cartographic achievements must have been made at least 20,000 years ago, when Antarctica was ice free.

This reminds me of the French writer, Rene Barjavel, who wrote a novel about an ancient civilization that was discovered under the mile-thick ice of the Antarctic continent. Why not? As far as I am concerned, I will not be surprised when some day we will discover the Antarctic cultural sites just as we have found, one after another, the cities of Troy, Mycenae, Knossos, and Dilmun.
There is no reason why some day in the maybe not so distant future we could not find the sunken continent of Atlantis and the mysterious Land of Mu under thick sheets of Ice or under the waves of an ocean.

THE UNIVERSAL CALENDAR

The search for a universal calendar that would enable people all over the world to chart the past and map the future exactly and precisely, has been going on since the most ancient times. Our ancestors did try repeatedly to find a time-counting system that would be independent of human events and happenings on Earth, a calendar that would correlate simultaneous moments of time in one common system all over the globe.

It is hard to believe that still no such calendar exists. One of the most backward features of our modern age is our time-counting system, which was introduced during the Middle Ages by a pope who still believed that the Sun circled the Earth and began the counting of time from an event of uncertain date, the birth of a Messiah who may or may not have existed. That we use such a system when we have computers and travel in space, seems beyond belief; but the worst fact is that this outdated calendar has three ways of counting time. There is our Christian Gregorian calendar of Pope Gregory XIII. There is the astronomical calendar known mostly to astronomers. Then there is the calendar of mathematicians, who are the only ones to use it.

As an example, lets take the Gregorian date of 21 March, seven years before the Christian era. For one using the astronomical calendar, this would be 21 March of the year -6. The mathematician needing an expression that can be fed into a computer would in his turn translate that 21 March into the 286th day before the end of the year, the equivalent of 0.783 of one year, and write our date down as -6.783.

Such an expression can be fed into a computer. It can be compared to any other positive or negative dates in Gregorian, Hebrew, or Moslem calendars, and it can indicate the time with a fantastic precision of a few seconds, minutes, or hours, depending on the number of decimals used. But such a system is neither easy nor simple to use for most people. It would be much simpler to count in whole days and in positive dates only, starting from an event very far in the past, preferably some exceptional astronomical event that took place at least 100,000 years ago, such as the alignment of all planets at the same point on the ecliptic that must have taken place at least once in the history of our solar system.

By pinpointing such a moment, we would establish a zero point for counting time and also a zero point in longitude, a starting line for all planetary movements. The whole world would then have a common chronological system enabling us to make all time computations simple and precise.

I have tried to establish such a starting point in time and longitude for my own use, but encountered some obstacles that seem to be, at the present time, impossible to overcome. The trouble is that the French astronomers on one side, and the Russian and American astronomers on the other, use different values for the same planetary revolutions and conjunctions, with considerable differences for Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. The French data comes closest to the values obtained from the constant of Nineveh for planetary revolutions, but any attempt to calculate the zero point in time and longitude from French data would be rejected automatically by the Russian and American astronomers. So I have given it up for the present, hoping that the time might come when uniform astronomical tables will be introduced globally.

The main problem is the impossibility to calculate precisely the past conjunctions of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Here the Russian and American numbers are closer to those of the Nineveh Constant than the French data. The difference shows up in the third and fourth place after the decimal point only, but for calculations over very long periods of time, the accrued error would be far too great for a precise calendar. Over a period of only 5,000 years the difference between the French and the American data would amount to as many as three years, and the same happens when we try we try to calculate the positions of these planets at that time. If 1 ask a French astronomer what the positions of the five exterior planets were in the year 3144 BC, for example, and if a conjunction took place during that year, the answer will be, "No, there was no
conjunction at this date according to the calculations of Leverrier and Gaillot." But an American astronomer will confirm a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in that year and another one of Uranus and Neptune thirty degrees further on the ecliptic. I would like to know who is right.