Colin Wilson on a Hundred Thousand Year Old Civilization

These are some of Colin Wilson’srecent ideas and I can speak to some of his material.

First off, let us deal with theeasy one.  I have done quite a bit ofwork on ancient measures and this earned a chapter in my manuscript titled ‘ParadigmsShift’.  I also concur that the ancientfoot derived measures are linked to the circumference of the Earth.  However, it also appears that each cultureapplied the same method to establish a standard and this caused severalvariations based on latitude.

On top of that I also unraveledhow the actual mathematica worked.  Thisled me to conclude that it was all constructed within a Bronze Age framework asone might expect.  Thus the British footand the Egyptian and the Greek measures are all linked using methods availableto savants of the time and place, who built things like Stonehengeand the Pyramids.

The existence of a seaborne carrytrade during the Bronze Age makes quick work of the task of dispersion of ideasand of methods and of course of measure. It all lasted at least most of two thousand years and could have strandsleading far back in time.

The Neanderthals maintained ahunter gatherer lifeway in Europe as did Cro-Magnonand most others because the only possible agriculture was herding.  However, that leaves completely open thecoastal plains of Europe whose climate wouldbe moderated by the adjacent seas.

Neanderthal could well haveprospered there and surely did.  The endof the Ice Age wiped out any such society and threw survivors back into thehills and a return to hunting.  Ourpresent understanding of time frames does not yet support any of this but if I havelearned anything, it is never to rule such a scenario out because of that.  An organized Neanderthal society could haveeasily concentrated on the sea plains because of strength and have long leftthe hills to the more primitive Cro-Magnon. Thus the Pleistocene Nonconformity would have simply wiped them out as amajor factor.

In point of fact, the traces ofthe Neanderthals conform well to normal expectations of human development ifyou accept the rise of civilizations taking place when they first could aroundfifty to seventy thousand years ago.  Ontop[ of that, I am sure someone did and it may as well be them.

Thus Neanderthals did not die outforty thousand years ago but simply gave up the old lifestyle for a better one,to be caught out 13,000 years ago.

The upshot is that a prioradvanced civilization could have existed for much of that 100,000 years and I suspectit certainly existed throughout the tropics for other human groups.

However that conjecture isunrelated to humanities’ recent knowledge of measure which I am quite able tocover through Bronze Age methods. 

A 100,000-Year-Old Civilisation?

Why it's time to embrace our Neanderthal cousins

By Colin Wilson

February 2011

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/5167/a_100000yearold_civilisation.html

My friend Stan Gooch spent his last years living on an old age pension on acaravan site in Wales.For a long time, his letters to me had revealed increasing cynicism and weari­ness,and friends who went to visit him – deeply impressed by the visionary scope ofhis books – were shocked to find him in an obvious state of indifference anddiscouragement. When tired of exchanging letters by ‘snail mail’, I offered toprovide him with a computer; his reply was that he would never use it. It seemsastonishing that this brilliant writer, author of more than a dozen books (someof them, like The Para­normal, classics in their field), should have beenallowed to sink into the con­dition that the saints used to call accidia, but Isuppose it has been the fate of many men of genius.

Now he has gone, perhaps Stan’s highly original work will one day be given thecredit it deserves. Certainly, it seems that the safe, academic world he turnedhis back on is catching up with him, as recent findings appear to confirm someof his long-held theories about the sophistication of Neanderthal man.

CITIES OF DREAMS

In 1999, I was engaged in pursuing an intriguing little problem. CharlesHapgood, best known as the author of Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, haddied as the result of a car accident that happened in December 1982. Two monthsearlier, he had written to a librarian named Rand Flem-Ath telling him that hehad made “recent exciting discoveries” that had convinced him that there hadonce been a 100,000-year-old civilization with “advanced levels of science”.And since I had agreed to collaborate with Flem-Ath on a book about Atlantis, Iset out to pursue Hapgood’s contacts to see if I could find out what he meant.

Finally, through a tip-off from one of Hapgood’s acquaintances, I found myselfin touch with an archæologist and science writer from New England, who staggered me when he declared that it was he who hadgiven Hapgood this information. What he had told him, he said, was (a) that theGreek measure of distances proved that they knew the exact size of the Earth amillennium or so before Eratos­thenes discovered it (around 250 BC), and (b)that Neanderthal man had a remarkable degree of culture, and was studying thestars by 100,000 BC or earlier.

Now, I had already stumbled on the information about the Greeks in a bookcalled Historical Metrology by AE Berriman (1953), to which thehistorical researcher Henry Lincoln had introduced me. And the second assertionhad been made by Stan Gooch in 1989, in a book called Cities of Dreams.

Gooch was arguing that Neanderthal man had possessed a complex civilisation,but that it was not a civilisation of bricks and mortar, but of ‘dreams’. Thathardly seemed to make sense. Surely civilisation is our defence against nature?Dreams are not much use against a hurricane or a sabre tooth tiger.

Gooch launches his argument by comparing Neanderthal man with Native Americans,pointing out that in spite of their complex culture, the latter had no writtenlanguage and built no houses. What would have happened, Gooch asks, if they hadbeen exterminated by disease or some catastrophe, and had simply vanished?Archæologists would find their skeletons and dismiss them as ‘primitives’, justas we dismiss Neanderthals.

Speaking of the Seven Sisters, Gooch remarks: “The Pleiades are the only [stargrouping] noted and named by every culture on Earth, past and present, from themost advanced to the most primitive”. He points out the similarity of thelegends of Australian aborigines, Wyom­ingIndians and the ancient Greeks. In the Greek legend, Orion the Hunter pursuesthe six maidens and their mother through the forest, until Zeus takes pity onthem, and changes them all (including Orion) into stars. In the Australianlegend, the hunter is called Wurunna, and he captures two of the seven maidens;but these escape up trees that suddenly grow until they reach the sky, whereall the maidens live forever. According to the Wyoming Indians, the seven sisters arepursued by a bear, and climb up a high rock, which grows until it reaches thesky.

Gooch goes on to mention that the Seven Sisters play an equally important rolein the legends of the Aztecs, the Incas, the Poly­nesians, the Chinese, theMasai, the Kikuyu, the Hindus and the ancient Egyptians. This worldwideinterest in the Pleiades, he argues, surely indicates that it originated insome very early and once central culture. 

In Gooch’s view, that culture was Neanderthal. We may doubt this, and prefer tobelieve that it was our own ancestor, Cro-Magnon. But Gooch certainly had accum­ulatedsome impressive evidence of the intellectual sophistication of Neanderthal man.He speaks, for example, of a find made at Drachenloch in the Swiss Alps, where a 75,000-year-old bear altar was discoveredin a cave. In a rectangular stone chest, whose lid was a massive stone slab,archæologists found seven bear skulls, with their muzzles pointing towards thecave entrance. At the back of the cave, there were niches in the wall with sixmore bear skulls.

Now seven is, of course, a number associated with shamanism. The Drachenlochcave was clearly a place of ritual – in effect, a church. Moreover, ashistorian of religion Mircea Eliade tells us, there is a worldwide connectionbetween the bear and the Moon. And this might have been guessed from the factthat the number of skulls in the cave was 13 – the number of lunar months inthe year. This, and many other clues, led Gooch to infer that the religion ofNeanderthal man was based on Moon worship, and Neanderthals were the first‘star gazers’. He argues that, among much else, the knowledge of precession ofthe equinoxes, noted by Giorgio de Santillana and Herta von Dechend inHamlet’sMill, probably originated with Neanderthal man. 

A ‘church’ implies a priest or shaman, so Neanderthal man must have had hissham­ans, ‘magicians’ who played an important part in the hunting rituals, asshamans do worldwide. Is it chance that the Moon godd­ess is Diana theHuntress? Is she perhaps also a legacy from Neanderthal man?

NEANDERTHAL CULTURE 

Since Gooch’s book came out in 1989, new evidence has accumulated indicatingthat Neanderthal man also possessed his own technology. In 1996, it wasannounced that scientists from Tarragona’sRoviri i Virgili Universityhad unearthed 15 furnaces near Capellades, north of Barcelona. Professor Eudald Carbonell statedthat they prove that Neanderthal man possessed a skill level far more advancedthan anyone had supposed. Homo sapiens, he said, was not an “evolutionaryleap” beyond Cro-Magnon man, but only a gentle step from Neanderthal. Each ofthe furnaces served a different function according to its size: some ovens,some hearths, some even blast furnaces. The team also discovered an“astonishing variety” of stone and bone tools, as well as the most extensivetraces of wooden utensils. (Times, 3 Sept 1996.)

One of Gooch’s most amazing statements is that in South Africa, Neanderthal man wasdigging deep mines to obtain red ochre 100,000 years ago. “One of the largestsites evidenced the removal of a million kilos of ore.” Other mines werediscovered dated to 45,000, 40,000 and 35,000 years ago. In all cases, the sitehad been painstakingly filled in again, presumably because the Earth wasregarded as sacred. Neanderthal man seems to have used the red ochre for ritual­isticpurposes, including burial.

In 1950, Dr Ralph Solecki of the Smithsonian Institution had excavated theShanidar cave in Iraqi Kurdistan and discovered evidence of ritualistic burialby Neanderthals, in which the dead had been covered with a quilt of woven wildflowers. His book Shanidar (1971) is subtitledThe Humanity ofNeanderthal Man. He was the first of many anthropologists to conclude that Neanderthalman was far more than an ape.

Gooch points out that red ochre has been in use since at least 100,000 yearsago until today, when it is still used by Australian Aborig­ines. He quotes oneauthority who calls it “the most spiritually rich and magical of allsubstances”.

Now, red ochre is the oxidised form of a mineral called magnetite, which, asthe name suggests, is magnetic. If a small sliver of magnetite is floated onthe surface tension of water, it swings around and points to magnetic north.And in 1000 BC, the Olmecs were using it as a compass needle, floating on cork,a millennium before the Chinese invented the compass. 

Gooch points out that many creatures, including pigeons, have a cluster ofmagnetite in the brain, which is used for homing, and asks if it is notconceivable that Neanderthal man also had a magnetite cluster in the brain,which may have enabled him to detect hæmatite under the ground. This, ofcourse, would be simply a variant of the power dowsers have to detect undergroundwater. 

For whatever reason Neanderthal man sought red ochre, it seems clear that hemust be credited with some kind of civilisation. 

In January 2002, it emerged that Neanderthal man made use of a variety ofsuperglue. It was a kind of blackish-brown pitch discovered at a lignite-miningpit in the Harz Mountains, estimated to be80,000 years old. One of the pieces bore the imprint of fingers and impressionsof a flint tool and wood, suggesting that the pitch had served as a sort ofglue to secure the wooden shaft to a flint blade. The pitch, from a birch tree,can only be produced at a temperature of 300–400ºC. Prof. Dietrich Mania of theFriedrich-Schiller University in Jenasaid: “This implies that Neanderthals did not come across these pitches by accident,but must have produced them with intent”. 

Now clearly, all this is revolutionary. We take it for granted that humanculture began with Cro-Magnon man, Homo sapiens. Our Cro-Magnon ancestorsbegan making drawings in caves about 30,000 years ago and so, we had alwaysassumed, our civilis­ation had its beginnings. But if the Pleiades wererecognised 40,000 years ago, then Neanderthal man could have got there first.

Again, an 82,000-year-old bone flute, discovered by Dr Ivan Turk of the Slovenia Academy of Sciences in 1995,demonstrates that Neanderthal man had his own music. It begins to look more andmore as if Gooch’s comparison of Neanderthal man to Native Americans is valid.A 26,000-year-old bone sewing needle, complete with a hole for thread, wasdiscovered at another Neanderthal site. 

But perhaps the most staggering piece of evidence so far is the small, carvedstatue known as the Berekhat Ram figur­ine, discovered on the Golan Heights in 1980 by the Israeli archæologist Professor Naama Goren-Inbar.Its age was established because it was found – along with 7,500 scrapers –between two layers of basalt, known as tuff, that could be dated. And the datewas between 250,000 and 280,000 years ago. It resembles the famous Venus ofWillen­dorf, but is far cruder. And examination under an electron microscoperevealed that it was not just some odd-shaped stone, but that it had beencarved – by Neanderthal man. His flint tool had left powder in the grooves. 

So Neanderthal man was carving a tiny female figure, probably the Moon goddess,more than a quarter of a million years ago. The implication is that he hadalready developed the religion to which the bear skulls in the Drachenloch cavebear witness – but 200,000 years earlier. 

In Uriel’s Machine, Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight also turn theirattention to Neanderthals, and point out that they had larger brains thanmodern man, adding the startling information that they were around for 230,000years before they vanished. Neanderthals thus had plenty of time to acquire ahigh level of sophistic­ation. They clearly believed in an afterlife, for theyburied their dead with every sign of religious ritual, and with tools and meatto supply their needs in the beyond. They buried them in cloaks covered withornate beads (with buttonholes), decor­ated caps, carved bracelets andpendants. They manufactured at least one perfectly circular chalk disc, whichis almost certainly a Moon disc.

And if Neanderthal man conducted relig­ious rituals, played the flute, studiedthe heavens, and built blast furnaces, he must have had some form of languageother than grunts.

So Stan Gooch’s insights, which struck most people as crazy in 1989 (theycertainly struck me as crazy when I first read Cities of Dreams), are slowlybeing justified. 

THE MYSTERIOUS 'CARL' 

But to return to my New England academic,who claimed to have been the source of Hapgood’s statement that civilisationwas 100,000 years old… 

I shall not give his real name, for reasons that will become clear, but shallcall him Carl.

During that first conversation, it was soon apparent that there was anunforeseen problem. Although our talk lasted two hours, I couldn’t understandmore than one sentence in 10. Like certain brilliant people, whose heads arecrammed with knowledge, Carl was unable – or unwilling – to express himselfclearly and to the point. It was obvious that when I asked him a question, hewanted to say 30 things at once, and it was like a crowd trying to push througha narrow doorway. Nevertheless, I had no doubt that I had solved the problem ofHapgood’s “100,000 years”. I could hardly wait to tele­phone my collaborator.

Here I was in for a surprise. Instead of the congratulations I expected, Rand reacted with deep suspicion. Who was this man, andif he had been Hapgood’s source, why had Randnot come across his name while studying the Hapgood papers at Yale? I pointedout that Hapgood had said: “In certain recent discoveries…” ProbablyHapgood had not had time to write about them yet. But Randmade it clear that he felt Carl was some kind of fraud. But why should he be? Iasked. What possible motive could he have for lying to me? Rand said he didn’tknow, but he intended to find out.

As to the suggestion that Neanderthal man might be more intelligent than wesuppose, he was dismissive. And he told me later that he had mentioned it to agirl who taught in a nearby university, and she had burst into screams oflaughter.

I had arranged to ring Carl back in two weeks, and to install a recordingmachine that would play for an hour. But this proved to be quite inadequate.Carl simply talked non-stop for an hour, and when I told him the tape hadended, just went on talking – for another hour. 

But at least he said some fascinating things – basic­ally, that the antiquityof civilisation was proved by its measures. And if these measures could beshown to date back to the La Quina disc, carved by a Neanderthal 100,000 yearsago, then the point was proven. I had to agree. He also talked about linguisticevidence in Greek, Hebrew, Sumerian and Sanskrit, and cited the exact words. Ihad never come across a man of such immense erudition. His theory wasincredibly difficult, involving music, planetary distances, archæology andatomic numbers. His articles – of which he sent me several – might range fromthe Great Pyramid, Ice Age art and Chaco Canyon to alchemicalsymbolism.

But I soon realised that I could not simply present him to the reader as anunrecognised genius, for some of his views left him wide open to the accusationof being a crank. He not only accepted the reality of the ‘Face on Mars’ (whichI am also inclined to do), but believed it had been created by human beings,and that one of the satellites of Mars was some kind of artefact.

Just as I was beginning to wonder if Randcould be right, and Carl might be an extraordinary and plausible fraud, I wasconfronted with evidence of his genuineness. An old friend, Andy Collins, camepast our house on his way to see the eclipse in Cornwall, and when he overheard me tellingsomeone in the pub about Carl, said he knew him. I was fascinated and asked fordetails. It seemed Andy had met Carl at a Londonparty, and that Carl had quickly monopolised the conversation, until he heldthe whole room enthralled. Andy agreed that Carl was undoubtedly brilliant.

He mentioned a friend of his who lived in the Midlands, and who had been on anarchæo­logical expedition with Carl in Mexico. I rang him up, and as aresult received some more interesting first-hand information about Carl. As atravelling companion, he could apparently be exacting, obsessive, andinfuriating. In spite of which he was – as I had deduced from those long phoneconversations – erudite, a brilliant loner, and certainly no fraud.

Some of his claims, my informant agreed, might be startling – such as his storyabout meeting Einstein when he was 10 years old and having a conversation aboutthe lost tribes of Israel – but then, he was a child prodigy, and came from adistinguished family who might well have had Einstein to tea.

ATLANTIS RISING 

Unfortunately, Carl learned that Rand had beenmaking enquiries about him, and was understandably infuriated. Although Iassured him that I did not share Rand’ssuspicions, Carl’s attitude cooled percept­ibly. Then I began to understandwhat Andy’s friend meant about him being exacting and infuriating. As hard as Itried to shore up our relationship, it quickly went to pieces. And afterfurther exchanges, he ended by telling me that he would prefer to have his nameremoved from the book. I was unhappy at the idea, for it was obvious to me thathe had to be the person who had told Hapgood about the “100,000-year-oldcivilisation”. 

But Rand remained convinced that Carl was somekind of conman, and our collaboration reached a deadlock. In due course, ourbook The Atlantis Blueprint was published in a hacked and truncatedform. Every reference to Neanderthal man had been excised, and in oneparagraph, had been altered to “people like us”, implying that I was talkingabout Cro-Magnon man. This upset me, not only on my own behalf, but on StanGooch’s, for I knew how much he was hoping to see his theories given an airing.All mention of Carl had gone too – although no reviewer seemed to notice thatthe book therefore failed to fulfil its promise to explain Hapgood’s100,000-year-old science.

I was much saddened, of course, but then a consoling thought occurred to me. Somuch of the book had been slashed that I was left with enough material to formthe basis of another. In 2006, I published Atlantis and the Kingdom of theNeanderthals; this time, I made sure that the achievements of Neanderthal manformed a central part of its thesis, and Stan Gooch finally received the credithe deserved.