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Science Mysteries
The rift between science and religion dates from the early sixteenth century, when Galileo first announced that, contrary to popular belief, the Earth was NOT at the centre of the universe. Galileo was subsequently tried for heresy - science and religion were off to a bad start. But as the Millennium draws to a close, there are a handful of new theories that seek to heal the rift between science and spirituality. Several new books claim to be overturning conventional notions of history and archaeology. They argue that the myths and legends of the past are based on real events. They believe these ancient civilisations came to an end because of a massive natural catastrophe. The starting point for their hypotheses is one of science's oldest companions - the anomaly. And there are quite a few of them. Take for example the Piri Reis map, named after the Turkish admiral who possessed it around the 1500's. What's rather strange about map is that it shows the coastline of Antarctica, over three hundred years before it was supposed to have been discovered in 1818.
That takes us back to 4000BC, long before the rise of recorded civilization. In geological terms, the map is a time-bomb.
"I don't agree with Bauval and Hancock at all," says Professor Lyn Wadley, of the Archaeology Department at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. "The pyramids on the Giza plateau were built along a diagonal, and this diagonal was along the slope of a hillside - what geologists call a 'strike'. The pyramid builders did this simply in order to give themselves a flat base to build on. It's no more complicated than that. Robert Bauval's suggestion is that the diagonal relates to the belt of Orion. The problem arises when you place the map of Orion over the map of the pyramids at Giza , bearing in mind it is not only the 3 big pyramids, but also several little satellite pyramids that were deliberately built around the three bigger ones. Now, when you place the map of Orion over the map of the pyramids, it becomes obvious that there are some stars in Orion that do t not match the pyramids, and likewise many pyramids that do not match the stars in the constellation of Orion, or in any other constellation for that matter."
"When I was in Egypt in 1986, I was absolutely astounded by some of the artifacts that I saw in the Cairo museum as well as the pyramid itself," says American Tool Engineer, Christopher Dunn, author of "The Giza Power Plant. "I was looking specifically at some of the granite stones that were broken off the second pyramid, and partucularly the sharpness of the corners and the flatness of the surfaces. When I went back to Egypt in 1995, I took some tools with me, some instruments with which I could check the precision of these artifacts. I had in front of me an artifact that had a definite contour, which showed that it must have been cut by some mechanical device that guided a tool in three axes, because the tool marks, and the contour of the object itself was repeatable over a length of about 29 inches. When the tool that cut this contour came to a corner it left a raise, it left a true radius that went completely around the corner bend of the stone." For a civilisation with access to only copper instruments, precision at this level is simply not possible. A further mystery is the feed-rate at which the ancient drills penetrated the rock, calculated from scoring marks on the rock, the feed rate has engineers baffled. No modern drill can do what these drills did thousands of years ago.
But if such a civilization did exist, where did it go? One thing is for certain: to erase an entire civilization would take a massive catastrophe. Catastrophe theory is nothing new - every mythological system makes reference to a flood or a cataclysm of some sort. The idea was lent scientific credibility in the 1950's by a Russian scholar, Dr Emmanuel Velikovsky. The theory states that geological history is punctuated by sudden upheavals - terrible natural disasters that alter the face of the Earth. This alone might explain the preoccupation with the heavens so characteristic of primitive cultures. But where is the terrestrial evidence for such a calamity? The continent of Antartica as we know it could not have been free of ice when these maps were made. Unless... it was somewhere else. According to catastrophe theory, Antarctica was originally 2000 miles to the north, with part of it inhabiting a sub-tropical climate - so maybe mythical Atlantis does exist - beneath the ice of Antarctica. But what kind of a catastrophe could explain such anomalies, including the disappearance of an entire civilization?
"We must have had a tremendous hit from one of those stars," says author Frederick Crooks. "That must have allowed either the crust, or the axis, to tilt. Whatever the case, there seems to be no doubt that this was a sudden event, as many animals were wiped out instantly, and are still frozen in the ice of Siberia and Antarctica." The anomaly in this case is that these animals were flash-frozen with buttercups in their stomachs. Buttercups do not grow inside the Arctic circle. Other evidence includes open mines in Alaska that show bones of mammoth, mastodon and super-bison, all tangled up with thousands of tree trunks and other debris. The way in which these have been deposited suggests a massive catastrophe. Also, vegetation of such density suggested by the number of tree remains could not possibly have grown in that area. Other facts back this up: fossilised remains of coral in Greenland; glacier ice-scour in the equatorial zones of Africa and Brazil; whale bone fossils in North America deposited in land that is supposed to have been of an age millions of years before whales evolved. There are literally thousands of such anomalies across the planet. A more prosaic version gaining credence is global crust displacement. This idea originated in Professor Charles Hapgood [primary researcher into the Piri Re'is maps]. His thesis suggests that the land-masses presently covering both poles underwent a traumatic shift sometime in the last 15'000 years. According to Hapgood, it happened like this: massive build-up of ice developed in the ice ages. The mass of the ice was not evenly spread from the polar regions - some of it was a lot heavier on one side of the earth than the other. This could have caused a massive 'speed wobble' in the Earths' orbit. The thin outer crust of the Earth came loose from the molten magma layer beneath it. Accompanied by massive floods, tidal waves and earthquakes, the surface of the Earth rippled across its interior. Some lands shifted into warmer climates, while others slipped beneath the seas, or were driven into the polar regions where they suffered the direst of winters. It's an extravagant claim, and grossly at odds with the prevailing explanation for geological change: continental shift. No matter how much academia may scoff, a new band of experts remain convinced that a catastrophe buried Antarctica beneath two miles of ice, all but obliterating the civilization that dwelt there. But there were survivors, men and women who escaped the floods to tell the tale of a golden age ended by an apocalypse. This is the stuff of legend - of Noah and Gilgamesh, of Plato and his Atlantis. Maybe myth will prove to be history.
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We know the Vikings found America a few hundred years before Columbus did, so what's the big deal? The big deal is that the Piri Re'is map shows rifts, valleys and river-beds on the Antarctic mainland, which were only verified in 1949, using radar that could penetrate the mile of pack ice that has covered that area of the continent for the last 6000 years. So how does a sixteenth century Turkish pirate have a map that shows the terrain of a continent that has been under ice for six millennia? The only possible explanation can be that the original map-makers lived in a time when Antarctica was not submerged by ice.
The inevitable question arises: where is the archeological evidence for their existence? Perhaps the most compelling evidence lies in the monolithic structures on the Giza plateu in Egypt. The Giza Pyramids and the Sphinx mimic the constellations of Orion and Leo as they appeared in 10'500BC. This needn't imply that they were built at that time, merely that this was when the plans were devised. The implication is the same: writers like Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval claim that before the dawn of time there was an intelligent civilization that gazed heavenward, and wrote of what they saw in the language of mathematics. Needless to say, academia is rather sceptical.
But Egyptian dating feuds are not only waged by the archaeologists - some compelling new evidence is coming from a rather unorthodox source - engineers.
"Ultrasonic machining is totally different from the conventional drilling methods," says Dunn. "A vibrating tool bit is used, and the tool actually cuts using vibration. An abrasive slurry is fed into the cavity to assist and accelerate the cutting action. [From the scoring on the Egyptian artefacts] this is fairly strong evidence that the ancient Egyptians were using ultrasonic technologies to drill. I have yet to have anybody come forward with a conventional, or even primitive means, that could reproduce these artifacts."
One theory has it that a nearby star went supernova.
What might the existence of an ancient civilisation teach us? At the very least, it extends the displacement of human beings from the centre of creation initiated by Copernicus. Just as we are not at the centre of the universe, so we are not at the centre of history. We are merely a part of it, subject to it.
