Do common themes mean common origin?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, archaeology, early america

We lived in Ohio when I was a teenager. On one occasion we drove downstate to see the Serpent Mound, shown here in a recent view from a drone. We walked all around it and marveled at its size. The linear size is about 540 feet, the length along the approximate arc from tail to head, including the "egg" in its mouth, is about 740 feet, and to walk the full length along the snaking ridge is a bit over a quarter mile, about 1,340 feet. It was apparently constructed of earth carried in baskets and dumped and tamped into place, probably about 2,300 years ago, but maybe much earlier.

A detailed study of the construction, timing, and significance of Serpent Mound, located in Adams County, Ohio, opens the latest book by Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to America's Lost Civilization. Researchers he consulted while visiting the mound have reached the conclusion that a mound of some kind was first built about 5,000 years ago, and extensively renovated centuries later, perhaps twice. 

Pay attention to the oval and the "mouth" of the serpent at the upper-right corner of the picture. From the apex of the "jaws" through the center of the oval, the sight line intersects the horizon at the location of the Summer Solstice Sunset. However, it is not exactly the sunset point today. The earth's axis shifts a little, a degree or two, over many centuries. That sight line more accurately picks out a point on the horizon where the solstice sunset was about 3,500 years ago, plus or minus a century or two. That is the most likely era of the first "reconstruction" of an ancient mound that was already about 1,500 years old.

This mound is just the most spectacular of the "monuments" left by the "mound builders" of early North America. There were once hundreds of thousands of mounds and mound complexes, mostly in the continent's midsection, from Louisiana northward. Most have been plowed over. Several hundred are left, in various conditions, and traces of thousands more can be seen using radar or lidar. For decades the "archaeological establishment" has claimed that they were not so very old, at most a couple of thousand years. That view remains among a few archaeologists, mostly those who call Graham Hancock a "pseudoarchaeologist". But many, many more "real" archaeologists have gathered evidence for much greater age, and a greater range of ages, for these mysterious structures.

A guiding theme of America Before is that many major cultural paradigms seem to have been inherited from one older (much older) civilization. Evidence is seen in the astronomical alignments found in many ancient structures in both North and South America, and in Europe and Africa. Whether Stonehenge in England is actually a big calculator for predicting eclipses or not (I think it is, but I'm probably in the minority), what is certain is that it contains several notable alignments with equinoctial and solstitial sunrise, sunset, and also the extrema of the lunar cycle. Further, there is the similarity of funerary practices and beliefs between cultures of the late stone age around the world, most importantly the belief that the soul of the recently-deceased undergoes a journey among the stars, beginning in the constellation of Orion, and proceeding along the Milky Way, with ordeals and a final test that may result in either blessing or obliteration. There is also much mention of similar geometric features to be found world-wide in funerary and ritual art, such as collections of squares, circles, and triangles, and also squares inscribed in circles or vice versa.

I do not wish to be dismissive, but I don't find the geometry arguments very interesting. I used to experiment with pressing on my closed eyelids to see phosphenes. After some initial fireworks, various geometric patterns typically followed. Many of these look like the artwork used to claim cultural similarity. Apparently such patterns are also seen when under the influence of ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic drug of the Americas, one of several related drugs used worldwide. I see such phenomena as rooted in common structures in the retina and brain, not in cultural dissemination or inheritance.

Considering the journey of the soul, the phenomena described in books such as Life After Life by Raymond Moody (1975) may have a common basis in biology, not culture. Regardless of culture or religion, the experience of a "white tunnel" and a meeting with an awesome being, whether a loving one or judging one, very frequently accompany near-death experiences. I know a few people who have had such experiences. Whether they "prove" an afterlife, or are also rooted in "what the brain does when shutting down", these experiences can lead to soul-journey myths regardless of culture.

The connection with Orion is an interesting feature. The big Hunter in the sky is the brightest constellation, and its proximity to the Milky Way is suggestive that it might be related to a "soul road". The constellation is just south of the Sun's path on the sky, tucked below and between Gemini and Taurus. Its southernmost bright stars, Rigel and Saiph, are just under 30° south of the Sun's path, which means that ancient people all along middle North America and North Africa, at a latitude of about 30° north, would see either of these stars as a first step to the "sword" of the hunter, and up to its belt, which leads to the Milky Way, just a bit farther in that direction. I think it is significant that the three biggest pyramids at Giza, and a couple of other sets of three large pyramids or mounds in the Americas, seem to echo the belt of Orion. Such an "as above, so below" theme is a common reaction to the beauty of the sky.

A fun side note: when I was about ten, I was given a couple of sheets of glow-in-the-dark stars to stick on the walls and ceiling of my bedroom. I was already very interested in astronomy, so I used a cheap sky-sighting viewer that was available for $1 from Edmund Scientific, to locate stars of appropriate size such that when my head was on my pillow, my room appeared as the mid-Autumn sky. It took days!

Given that the sky was a much more evident presence at any time prior to the invention of street lights, and the fascination nearly everyone has with the sky when they get under a really dark, clear sky, the shapes seen in it were once a common inheritance of all peoples.

So we come to the theme of the book. Was there a high civilization in the ice age, before some 13,000 years ago? This seems to be a theme of Mr. Hancock's life. If such a civilization existed, and it was centered in North America, a comet-induced extinction event seems to have wiped out all evidence for it. Much of the book discusses the Younger Dryas period, which began with abrupt cooling of the Earth around 12,800 years ago. Whatever else was driven to extinction at this time, the Clovis culture was extirpated; it was once thought to represent the earliest human settlements in the Americas.

These distinctive fluted Clovis stone points are unique, found nowhere (and nowhen) else. We don't know what preceded them. They are found only below a soil horizon called the Black Mat, that represents continent-wide, and perhaps global, burning of vegetation, that occurred intensively for about two years around 12,800 years ago. According to evidence found in ice cores from Greenland, the burning interval was 12,830-12,828 years before 2018, or 10,813-10,811 BCE (noting that there is no "year zero").

There are numerous proxies of cometary impact, including nanodiamonds and a spike in abundance of platinum and iridium, found from 12,836-12,815 years ago, or 10,819-10,798 BCE. Author Hancock, following others, posits a series of impacts from a comet that broke up, possibly one associated with the Taurid meteor stream, leading to about 8 major impacts by multi-kilometer ice-and-rock bodies and many more smaller impacts. Maps in the book show an impacted area across all of North America and reaching to mid-Europe. Considering that the Laurentide ice sheet was still partially present, still melting in a relatively "new" interglacial interval, these impacts are presumed to have mainly blasted out large masses of ice.

There is a further set of geomorphological features that may indicate just such an "ice splash". This map from the book (p. 414) shows a possible oblique crater that we now call Saginaw Bay, in Michigan, and the "butterfly pattern" of splashed-out ice that would result from impact of a multi-km scale impact on a glacier a mile or two thick.

The "East Arc" corresponds to features called the Carolina Bays in the Carolinas, and by several other names in Delaware, Maryland, Georgia and Florida. The "West Arc" corresponds to the Nebraska Rainwater Basins. Areas north of the line marked "Extent of Ice Sheet" should have no remaining features because the chunks of ice landed on thick ice.

Geomorphologists and others who pooh-pooh the idea of such an ice splash claim the Bays and Basins are fluvial features somehow related to sand ripples, caused by rapid melting of the ice cap. Note, however, that the Carolina Bays, as seen in this aerial photo, are oriented northwesterly, as they should be due to oblique impact of big chunks of ice coming from Saginaw Bay, and the Nebraska Basins are oriented northeasterly, also pointing toward Saginaw Bay. They only occur where there were thick, soft sediments.

I know something about fluvial structures, having interned on several very interesting projects while studying Geology in graduate school. This picture shows an area of the Channelled Scablands in Washington State. These are fluvial, scoured out by rapid melting of the ice sheet. There are no series of oriented ovals.

Thus, so far as physical evidence goes, it is pretty clear to me, and to anyone who doesn't have an axe to grind, that a 21-year bombardment by a fractured comet is the best explanation of these and many other features, and that the timing of other impact evidence does explain the sudden end of the Clovis culture in America.

Other matters, such as what preceded Clovis, include evidence going back at least 30,000 years, and perhaps much longer (130,000 y!). I have long thought that there was more than one "immigration pulse" to the Americas, and that walking along a Bering Strait land bridge, exposed by lowered sea levels, was just one possibility. Coastal navigation in rafts or boats is another. Humans have been seafaring for at least 50,000 years; witness the peopling of Australia, which could never have been accomplished by walking. Such things are not yet clear enough to draw firm conclusions.

Late chapters take a different turn, and there the author leaves me. He posits spiritual things, even a "psychic technology" that he calls on to explain features of certain megalithic monuments. Let me state that as a Christian who knows the Bible well, I do not discount that some psychic phenomena may indeed be possible. However, rather than dig into that here, let me refer an interested reader to The Latent Power of the Soul by Watchman Nee. Mr. Nee discusses the scanty descriptions of human abilities before the "fall of Adam", and considers that certain extraordinary powers have been "imprisoned" in the human body. If we all could easily accomplish telepathy and telekinesis, we would be so dangerous to one another that the human species would have been wiped out within the first generation from the time these powers were attained. Occultic practices are attempts to subdue the body in various ways so as to regain these forbidden powers. Fortunately, they don't work very well. To any atheist or agnostic reading this: understand that any Bible-believing Christian who takes the faith seriously believes there are actual entities such as demons and angels (separate orders of being) and that God permits certain miracles to be performed. But in this era in particular, supernatural phenomena are severely restricted, as the New Testament writers predicted.

Mr. Hancock dives deep into such things, with very little to go on but speculation. In that regard, I think he is not really a "pseudo-" anything, but just dramatically wrong in this regard. He is no charlatan, and he is no "pseudoarchaeologist". He is as "real" an archaeologist as the more "official" crowd, with numerous ideas about physical archaeology and geology that the rest ought to follow up. He points out (with relish) how wrong the "in crowd" have been in the past, such as with the "Clovis First" theory, which is now quite out of date. We have verified evidence for pre-Clovis people in the Americas 25,000-30,000 years ago. We also have plenty of evidence that the Amazon basin was gardened using biochar for thousands of years. With much left to find, it would be best for the "established" scientists to dig deeper than their prejudices. Much deeper.