The Atlantis Blueprint (25 page)

In other words, Lash has shown that precession had been known for thousands of years before the Dendera temple was rebuilt.

Moreover, if Chatelain is correct, then both the Sumerians and the Maya also knew the exact length of the precessional cycle (the Nineveh constant is exactly 240 times this cycle) and the two vast Maya numbers discovered at Quiriga can be divided by the Nineveh constant.

As to the Mayan knowledge of astronomy, Peter Tompkins writes:

We are being asked to accept that the same measurement – based upon the circumference of the earth – was used in ancient Egypt, Sumer, Teotihuacan and Palenque. But, even more incredible, that fairly primitive Indian people, who thought the sun might disappear permanently at the end of every 52 years, had a knowledge of the heavens that would not shame a modern Astronomer Royal. Chatelain says: ‘The Mayas also knew of the precession of the equinoxes and the existence of Uranus and Neptune.’ How did they know about Uranus and Neptune without telescopes, thousands of years before Western astronomers discovered them?

The great Mayan specialist Sylvanus Griswold Morley observed:

The passage I have italicised underlines the problem. Graham Hancock has an interesting remark about the Maya in
Fingerprints of the Gods,
in which he talks about their amazing knowledge of astronomy, quoting the Mayan archaeologist Eric Thompson, who in 1954 asked how the Maya had come to chart the heavens yet failed to grasp the principle of the wheel, to count in millions yet never learned to weigh a sack of corn. Perhaps, Hancock suggests, the answer is quite simple: the Maya received their astronomical knowledge from ‘elsewhere’ – from a much older civilisation.

Gordon Eckholm found an intriguing piece of evidence that the Maya did know about the wheel. In an archaeological dig in the 1940s, Eckholm unearthed a Mayan toy – a dog on four wheels, such as Western children have been pulling about the nursery on a string for centuries. Eckholm pointed out the similarity between this toy and a Chinese wheeled toy of the same period (he dates them both about 2,000 years ago). The

Maya had a wheeled toy, yet did not see that wheels could be used on carts or other vehicles. Apparently no one looked at the wheel and had a ‘Eureka’ experience, which seems to suggest that the Maya were indeed, as Thompson said, ‘unremarkable’. This hardly seems to be borne out by their astronomy or by their amazing calendar, with its ‘Long Count’.

Chatelain makes the same point:

Since the Sumerians were at the height of their achievement 3,000 years before the Maya, we can probably rule out a ‘direct connection’, even if Hapgood is correct in believing that there was a worldwide maritime civilisation in 7,000
BC.
What seems far more likely is that we are dealing with an ancient culture that had been studying the heavens for thousands of years, a culture based on seafaring.

Chatelain, like von Däniken, believes that this knowledge came from space visitors but surely it is far more likely that it was observed by astronomers who had studied the sky for thousands of years. It seems a reasonable speculation that one reason the ancients were so interested in the sky was that they made use of their knowledge of the stars in navigation.

A discovery made in 1997 adds powerful support to this argument. Exploring an ancient lake bed at Mata Menge, on the island of Flores (which is east of Java and Bali), a group of
palaeoanthropologists from Australia found stone tools. The bed of volcanic ash in which the tools were found by Mike Morwood and colleagues from the University of New England (New South Wales) dated from more than 800,000 years ago, the time of
Homo erectus.
Animal bones from nearby gave the same date. What was unusual is that Flores is a relatively small island, not known to be a site of ancient man. The nearest such location is the far larger island of Java, the home of Java man, who also belongs to our earliest ancestor,
Homo erectus.

To reach Flores, these primitive men would have had to sail from island to island, making crossings of around a dozen miles. Moreover, Morwood argues, the organising ability required by a fairly large group to cross the sea suggests that
Homo erectus
possessed some kind of linguistic ability.

This was a conclusion that I had reached when, in
A Criminal History of Mankind
(1983), I discussed the finds made in caves near Chou-kou-tien, in China, in 1929: fourteen skulls of
Homo erectus,
which had a sloping forehead and receding chin. All the skulls were mutilated at the base, as if the brain had been scooped out. Peking man, as he came to be labelled, was a cannibal
—
for we presume that he was killed (and roasted and eaten) by other Peking men, approximately half a million years ago.

Cannibalism is seldom a matter of nourishment; even as practised in recent times, it is mainly ritualistic, based upon the belief that the strength and vitality of a dead enemy can be absorbed by eating him. Peking man apparently had plenty of other meat, as suggested by the many animal bones in his caves. If he practised ritualistic cannibalism, then we must assume he had some kind of language, since it is hard to imagine a ritual without language.

Homo erectus
was the first man we recognise as our ancestor, the first to walk upright all the time. His heart had to work harder to increase the supply of blood to his brain, which increased the size of his brain and also his intelligence. It
seems at least a reasonable assumption that his brain had a ‘language matrix’, just as a bird’s has a flight matrix.

This, at all events, seems to be one important implication of the traces of
Homo erectus
found on Flores. We cannot imagine even a chimpanzee building a raft, because it cannot communicate linguistically.

Why should
Homo erectus
want to move to Flores from Java? Presumably in search of that basic instinctive requirement of all animals – territory. He would have been able to see other islands from Java mountain tops, and if the competition for food or aggressive neighbours were making life hard, then he may have decided to move on, taking his family with him. But if he was able to build a raft, then he must have been far more intelligent than his predecessors.

Another recent discovery, described by science writer John McCrone,
³⁰
adds weight to this notion that
Homo erectus
was possibly more intelligent than we give him credit for, in that he was using fire as long ago as 1.6 million years. From the 1970s onwards, many anthropologists have supported the view held by Louis Leakey that man learned to make fire a mere 40,000 years ago. In Leakey’s view, man became a warlike creature as a result of sitting around a fire at night, telling stories of battle and heroism. So fire was responsible for the ‘cultural explosion’ that created
Homo sapiens.

But in the 1970s and 1980s, evidence of campfires was uncovered at Koobi Fora and Chesowanja in Kenya. ‘Lenses’ of orange earth were found in association with the bones and stone tools of
Homo erectus,
and similar lenses – about 18 inches across – were found beneath the campfires of local people. In 1999, a study by Ralph Rowlett of the University of Missouri–Columbia established beyond doubt that these lenses were made by campfires, not bush fires caused by lightning.

Rowlett’s colleague Randy Bellomo made an interesting use of earth magnetism to demonstrate that such fires had been made over many years. As Hapgood had noted, iron in
the soil aligns with the magnetic pole, and heating ‘perman-ises’ this alignment like a compass. Bellomo found that the Koobi Fora iron sediments had several slightly different magnetic alignments, implying repeated visits of a nomadic tribe over a long period.

Brian Ludwig of Rutgers University studied 40,000 or so flint artifacts and the debris of tool-making, trying to determine if tool-making methods had remained static. He found dimples known as potlid fractures – fractures due to exposure to fire – on tools from 1.6 million years ago.

So again, we have evidence that
Homo erectus
was a more intelligent being than any anthropologist had dared to suggest. And this again suggests that he possessed some form of language.

And if he could communicate in language and build a raft, then the next question becomes self-evident: could it be that
Homo erectus
was not only the first man but the first longdistance sailor? The upright posture is ideal for scanning the horizon at sea. And he had plenty of time – half a million years or more – to develop from island-hopping to sailing the open sea. He also had plenty of time to develop his obsession with the stars.

All this raises another pertinent question. If our ancestors were sailing the seas 800,000 years ago, why did it take man another 792,000 years (the first recognised civilisation, Jericho, is dated at 8,000
BC)
to start building civilisation? The answer must be that it didn’t take so long. Our problem is that we do not recognise the signs of civilisation when we see them – such as the stone balls of Costa Rica that suggest that man was navigating thousands of miles of ocean ‘before civilisation’. But if there was no civilisation, why should he bother? Men sail the ocean largely for trading purposes. Surely it is more likely that Hapgood is correct, and that a worldwide maritime civilisation existed in 100,000
BC?

Again, there is evidence that our ancestors of 400,000 years ago – by then
Homo sapiens
– were more intelligent
than we give them credit for. In
Timescale,
Nigel Calder states: ‘Piagetian tests applied to stone tools from Isimila, Tanzania, which may be as much as 330,000 years old [by uranium-series dating] are said to indicate that the makers were as intelligent as modern humans.’31 Raising this question in
From Atlantis to the Sphinx,
I commented that the reason civilisation had not developed much sooner was because human beings tend to live mechanically, doing today what they did yesterday and last year. There are probably millions of human beings in the world today whose intelligence is as great as the famous scientists, artists and intellectuals in our history books, yet they remain unknown because they fail to make any determined attempt to pull themselves out of their daily routine.

When I wrote these comments, Mike Morwood and his team from New South Wales had not yet discovered the tools in the lake bed in Flores that indicated that
Homo erectus
was sailing the seas 800,000 years ago. This, in turn, altered my view about human language. Like most people, I had begun by assuming that man developed language in the past 30,000 years or so. The discovery that Peking man was a cannibal had made me revise that opinion to the extent of believing that he was intelligent enough to possess some kind of ritual, and therefore language. I was inclined to believe that the ‘brain explosion’ that has occurred in the past 500,000 years – the sudden increase in man’s brain size – was the result of the development of language.