Transcription
If you look at the entirety of history of hominids, humans or hominis have been explorers. I, I didn't even know this when I was preparing for this. Yeah, looking at Homo erectus, yeah, 1.9 million years ago, absolutely, almost right away they spread out through the whole world. And we, Homo sapiens, evolved from them. And we should also mention, since we're talking about a sort of controversial debates going on, as I understand, there's still debates about the dynamics of all that was going on there. Like we mentioned in Africa, that it's the, you know, I think the current understanding, we didn't come from one particular point of Africa, that there's multiple locations. This is the Out of Africa Theory. I think it's more than a theory, it's, it's really strongly evidenced. Why? Because we're part of the great ape family, and it's, and it's an African family. There's no doubt that that human beings are deep origins in Africa. But then there, as you rightly say, there were these very early migrations out of Africa by species that are likely ancestral to anatomically modern humans, including definitely Homo erectus, and and and the astonishingly distant travels that they undertook.
Yes, I think, I think there is an urge to explore in, in, in all of humanity. I think there is an urge to find out what's around the next corner, what's over the brow of the, of the next hill. And I think that goes very deep into human character, and I think it was being manifested in those, those early adventures of people who left Africa and traveled all around the world and then settling in different parts of the world. I think a lot of, a lot of anatomically modern human evolution took place outside Africa as well, not, not only in Africa.
So I guess the, the general puzzlement that you're filled with is, given that these creatures explore and spread and, uh, try out different environments, why did it take hundreds of thousands of years for them to develop complicated society, settlements? That's the first big question. Why did it take so long? And that raises in my mind a hypothesis, a possibility. Maybe it didn't take so long. Maybe, maybe things were happening that we haven't yet got hold of in the archaeological record, which, which await to be discovered. And of course, there are huge parts of the world that have not been studied at all by archaeology. But the fact that, the fact that huge parts of the world have not been studied at all by archaeology is not, in it, on its own enough to suggest that we're missing a chapter in the human story. The reason that I come to that isn't only puzzlement about that 300,000 year gap, it's also to do with the fact that there's common iconography, there's common myths and traditions, and there's common spiritual ideas that are found all around the world. And, and, uh, they're found amongst cultures that are geographically distant from one another, and that are also distant from one another in time. They don't necessarily occur at the same time. And this is where I think that archaeology is perhaps desperately needing a history of ideas as well as just a history of things. Because an idea, um, can, can manifest again and again, throughout the human story.
So that, so there are particular, there are particular issues, uh, for example, the notion of the afterlife, destiny of the soul, what happens to us when we die. And believe me, when you reach my age, that's something you do, you do think about. What, what, what happens? I used to feel immortal when I was in my 40s, but now that I'm 74, I definitely know that I'm, that, that, that I'm not. Well, it would be natural for human beings all around the world to have that same, that same feeling, that same idea. But why would they all decide that what happens to the soul after death is that it makes a leap to the heavens, to the Milky Way? That it makes a journey along the Milky Way? That there it is confronted by challenges, by monsters, by closed gates? The course of the life that, that person has lived will determine their destiny in that afterlife journey. And this idea, the, the path of souls, the Milky Way is called the path of souls. It's very strongly found in the Americas, right from South America, through Mexico, through into North America. But it's also found, uh, in ancient Egypt, uh, in ancient India, in ancient Mesopotamia, the same, the same idea. And I don't feel that that can be a coincidence. I feel, I feel that what we're looking at is an inheritance of an idea, a legacy that's been passed down from a remote common source to cultures all around the world, and that, and then has taken on a life of its own within those cultures. So the remote common source would explain both the similarities and the differences, uh, in the expression of these ideas.
The other thing, very puzzling thing, is, um, this sequence of numbers that are a result of the precession of the equinoxes. At least I think that's the best theory to explain them. Here, I think it's important to pay tribute to the work of Georgio de Santillana, and he, and Vashan. Georgio de Santillana was professor of History of Science, actually at MIT, where, where you're based, back in the 60s. And he, Vashan was professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University. And they wrote an immense book in the 1960s called Hamlet's Mill. And, and Hamlet's Mill, uh, differs very strongly from established opinion on the issue of the phenomenon of precession. And I'll explain what precession is in a moment. Generally, it's held that it was the Greeks who discovered the precession, and the dating on that is put back not very far, maybe 2,300 years ago or so. Santillana and Vashan are pointing out that knowledge of precession is much, much older than that, thousands of years older than that. And they do actually trace it, I think I'm quoting them pretty much correctly, to some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization. Reading that book was one of the several reasons that I got into this, this mystery in the first place.
Okay, now the precession of the equinoxes, to give it its full name, is, is, uh, results from the fact that our planet is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars. And our planet, of course, is rotating on its own axis at roughly a thousand miles an hour at the equator. But what's less obvious is that it's also wobbling on its axis. And that it, so if you imagine the extended North Pole of the Earth pointing up at the sky, in our time, it's pointing at the star Polaris. And that is our pole star. But Polaris has not always been the pole star, precisely because of this wobble on the axis of the Earth. Other stars have occupied the pole position, and sometimes the extended North Pole of the Earth points at empty space. There is no pole star. That's one of the obvious results of the wobble on the Earth's axis. The other one is that there are 12 well-known constellations in our time, the 12 constellations of the zodiac that lie along what is referred to as the, the path of the sun. The Earth is orbiting the sun, and we are seeing what's behind it, what's, what's in direct line with the sun in our, in our view. And the zodiacal constellations all lie along the path of the sun. So at different times of the year, the sun will rise against the background of a particular zodiacal constellation. Today, we live in the age of Pisces. And it's definitely not an accident that the early Christians used the fish as their symbol. This is another area where I differ from archaeology. I think, I think the constellations of the zodiac were recognized as such much earlier than we suppose.
Anyway, to get to the point, the key marker of the year, certainly in the northern hemisphere, was the Spring Equinox. This was the question was, what constellation is rising behind the sun? What, what constellation is housing the sun at dawn on the Spring Equinox? Right now, it's Pisces. Another 150 years or so, it'll be Aquarius. We, we do live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Back in the time of, um, the late ancient Egyptians, it was Aries. Going back to the time of Rameses, or before, before that, it was Taurus, and so on and so forth. It's backwards through the zodiac until 12,500 years ago, you come to the age of Leo, when the constellation of Leo houses the sun on the Spring Equinox. Now, this process unfolds, unfolds very, very, very, very slowly. It unfolds, the whole cycle, and it is a cycle, it repeats itself roughly every 26,000 years. Put a, put a more exact figure on it, 25,920 years. That may be a convention, some scholars would say it was a bit less than that, a bit more, but you're talking fractions, it's, it's in that area, 25,920 years. And, and, uh, to observe it, you really need more than one human lifetime, because it unfolds very, very slowly, at a rate of one degree every 72 years. And the parallel that I often give is, hold your finger up to the horizon, the distant horizon. The movement in one lifetime, in a period of 72 years, is about the width of your finger. It's not impossible to notice in a lifetime, but it's, but it's difficult. You've got to pass it on.
And, and what seems to have happened is that some ancient culture, the culture that Santillana and Vashan call some almost unbelievable ancestor culture, worked out the entire process of precession and selected the key numbers of precession, of which, of which the most important number, the governing number, is the number 72. But, but we also have numbers related to the number 72. 72 plus 36 is 108. 108 divided by 2 is 54. These, these numbers are also found in mythology all around the world. There were 72 conspirators who, um, were involved in killing the god Osiris in, in ancient Egypt, and nailing him up in a wooden coffer and dumping him in the Nile. There are 432,000 in the Rig Veda. 432,000 is a multiple of 72. And, and, uh, at Angkor, in Cambodia, for example, you have, uh, the bridge to Angkor Thom, and on that bridge, you have figures on both sides, sculpted figures which are holding the body of a serpent. That serpent is Vasuki, and what they're doing is they're churning the Milky Ocean. It's the same metaphor of churning and turning that's defined in the story of Hamlet's Mill, of Amleth's Mill. There are 54 on each side. 54 plus 54 is 108. 108 is 72 plus 36. It's a precessional number, according to the work that Santillana and Vashan did. And the fascination with these, this number system and its discovery all around the world, is one of the puzzles that that intrigue me and, and suggest to me that we are looking at ancestral knowledge that was passed down, and probably was passed down from a specific single common source at one time, but then was spread out very, very widely around the world.