Connecting a Global Flood with the Mystery of Mankind's Ancient Past (cont.)
By David Warner Mathisen
Like the conventional view of geology, this timeline of human history
may be widely accepted, but it does not comport well with the
evidence. What we find instead is evidence of extremely advanced
scientific understanding as far back in human history as it is
possible to see. Not only do we find evidence of precisely aligned
megalithic structures, some of them with impressively joined stones
of enormous size, but we also find evidence in both monument and myth
of an understanding of astronomical concepts such as the precession
of the equinoxes. Precession is a very subtle phenomenon: it takes
71.6 years to perceive even one degree of difference in the position
of a star when the earth is at its exact same location in its orbit.
To arrive at the understanding of precession, then, requires the
ability to know when the earth is at its exact same location on its
annual circuit from one year to the next. On top of that, it
requires the ability to measure the location of stars and the ability
to record their location accurately. It then requires accurate
records for longer than a single human lifetime (because the motion
is so slow that it only makes one degree of change in a span that is
about as long as a human lifetime). Finally, it requires the
analytical skill to observe that the records demonstrate this motion,
a very subtle motion, and then the analytical skill to create a
framework to explain that motion. These are not skills that
hunter-gatherer societies would be expected to have the time or the
resources or even the inclination or need to develop, and yet the
very earliest civilizations of whom we have evidence have each left
irrefutable evidence that they not only knew about precession but
understood it at a very high level of sophistication.
Conventional history does not admit knowledge of precession until the
time of Hipparchus of Nicea (c. 190 BC – c. 120 BC), whose work
set the stage for Ptolemy (c. AD 90 – c. AD 168). Neither of
these relatively late astronomers, however, came anywhere close to
the actual constant of precession (which is one degree every 71.6
years) but instead appear to have fixed a lower limit (no slower than
one degree every 100 years, with an indication that the actual rate
was probably faster than that, but which they were not able to nail
down with any greater precision). What, then, are we to make of the
fact that the mythology and architecture of people who lived many
thousands of years before Ptolemy and Hipparchus demonstrate
knowledge of a constant of precession that is quite precise: one
degree every 72 years? This and other evidence familiar to readers
of Graham Hancock and other authors points to the conclusion that the
ancient history of mankind was actually much different from the
simplistic timeline that is taught in schools to this day.
One reason that catastrophic theories such as those involving a
global flood are so threatening to the defenders of the conventional
timeline is that these catastrophic theories threaten conventional
frameworks of human history and even Darwinian biology (which has
become something of a religious tenet in the past one hundred years).
If we subscribe to a theory which requires millions of years to
carve the Grand Canyon, then we can also support theories in which
biological species evolve into their present forms over millions of
years, and in which mankind follows a long but generally unbroken
line from primitive ignorance to modern sophistication. This
storyline is immensely comforting to many (it places us at the
pinnacle of history, for one thing, and makes continued progress seem
like our natural birthright and something we need not fear will ever
be interrupted).
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