Read Who Built the Moon? Online
Authors: Christopher Knight,Alan Butler
Tree-dwelling species became monkeys and some of these creatures came down from the trees and began to move across the open savannah, most likely created by yet more climatic changes. Down on the ground these anthropoids were vulnerable. If they were going to survive they were going to need something that had not been specifically necessary to earlier creatures.
They needed bigger brains.
Evolution responded and a whole family of hominids was the result, of which
Homo sapiens
is now the only surviving example. But despite our general sense of specialness, recent events point to our solus position as being surprisingly recent.
One of the greatest breakthroughs for humans was the control of fire; but the earliest known evidence of regular fire using is unequivocally attributed to our larger-brained cousins, the Neanderthals, some 200,000 years ago. We coexisted with these people until they finally disappeared in southern Europe around 25,000 years ago. Science had believed that an earlier hominid,
Homo erectus
, had become extinct hundreds of thousands of years ago, until the mid-1990s when remains found on the island of Java in Indonesia were found to indicate that they too were around until 25,000 years ago.
Both these alternative humans disappeared at a time when midsummer’s day fell around June 21
st
in the northern hemisphere – just as it does today. The dates on which astronomical events such as the summer and winter solstices and the spring and autumn equinoxes fall, move backwards through the calendar by one day (around one Megalithic degree) every seventy-one years. This is due to the long, slow wobble of the Earth on its axis, known as ‘the precession of the equinoxes’ which takes 25,920 years for each cycle.
This movement through the calendar has no effect on people at all, but it is interesting to note that a recent discovery suggests we were not alone as a species as recently as 13,000 years ago, when the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere fell in late December; the exact opposite of where it is right now.
The discovery of what is claimed to be a previously unknown branch of hominid occurred on the island of Flores, near Java, and was announced to the world in 2004. Remains have been found of a dwarf hominid, named
Homo floresiensis
, which was only as tall as a modern three-year-old with a facial morphology very different to
Homo sapiens
. Strangely, these miniature people had mini-brains yet they produced relatively sophisticated tools.
Not only have we recently shared the planet with other hominids, it now seems that the ancestors of today’s Europeans may have interbred with other types of human in the not too distant past.
As part of a large-scale gene-mapping programme, researchers at deCODE Genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland, were looking at the families of nearly 30,000 Icelanders. They found that women who had an inversion on chromosome 17 had, on average, 3.5 per cent more children than women who did not. Kari Stefansson, deCODE’s chief executive, considered this to be a very significant impact in terms of an evolutionary timescale. It is possible to roughly date the origin of this phenomenon by counting the number of genetic differences that have accumulated in it compared to a normal DNA sequence. It turns out that this element has so many differences that it must have occurred about three million years ago. Which is long before modern humans evolved.
Stefansson has suggested that this element of the DNA might have been native to some other species of early human and came to our own species around 50,000 years ago. He added: ‘There aren’t all that many ways you can explain it except by the reintroduction into the modern human population… That raises the possibility it was reintroduced by cross-breeding with earlier species.’
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But as these other humans disappeared,
Homo sapiens
developed a growing intelligence that allowed us to begin to manipulate the environment in which we live. The great breakthrough was the development of agriculture – a move that allowed civilization to emerge.
With civilization came the ability to count and ultimately a way of expressing language in a written form. Knowledge that had once been laboriously passed from one generation to the next could now be stored and retrieved from places outside the human brain. Intelligence also created technology and a great desire to understand the workings of the world and the cosmos of which it was part. But this curiosity began long before we sent representatives of our species to walk on the Moon. It had been present for more than 30,000 years, when the first lunar calendars were created. It is almost certain that after the Sun, the Moon was the most important heavenly body to captivate our species.
How little those cave dwellers, who scratched their knowledge of the lunar cycle onto animal bones and antlers, were aware that without the presence of the lunar disc that so captivated them, the Earth would probably be a lifeless rock, silently spinning around the Sun, like the inferno of Venus and the frozen wastes of Mars.
‘Rather than transmitting radio messages, extraterrestrial civilizations would find it far more efficient to send us a “message in a bottle”, some kind of physical message inscribed on matter. And it could be waiting for us in our own backyard.’
Professor Christopher Rose of Rutgers University, New Jersey & Gregory Wright, a physicist with Antiope Associates, New Jersey
The idea that intelligent life forms might exist elsewhere in the cosmos is a comparatively recent interest for humanity. For thousands of years and across countless cultures, it was more or less accepted that anything dwelling outside our own immediate environment inevitably fell into the classification of a god or a servant of the gods, such as the saints, angels or seraphim that inhabit the heaven of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Even after the telescope appeared, around the year 1600, the Catholic Church in particular was not keen to have its dogmas regarding the nature of the Earth and its relationship with space tampered with in any way. In Christian doctrine, the Sun and the Moon have both been directly created by God, as have the stars and planets. The first book of the Bible, Genesis, lay down the order in which God created the observable cosmos and anyone who seemed to be throwing a spanner in the works, for example Galileo (1564–1642) who suggested that the Sun, and not the Earth, was the centre of the solar system, was liable to be severely censured. Galileo was forced to recant his heretical views and was condemned to perpetual house arrest but was probably lucky to escape with his life.
Even before Galileo’s time, thinking people were not fooled by the Church’s account of the solar system. The Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521) understood what he was seeing at the time of a lunar eclipse: ‘The church says the earth is flat, but I know it is round for I have seen its shadow on the moon and I have more faith in a shadow than the church.’
Only the effects of the Renaissance and Church reformations across Europe broke the hold of old church dogma. By the late seventeenth century, with telescopes proliferating and almost anyone able to take a close-up view of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars, the cat was truly out of the bag and the genuine nature of the solar system in particular was beginning to become apparent.
Since Charles Darwin wrote
The Origin of Species
in the mid-nineteenth century it has become clear that life on Earth has evolved over billions of years from the first single-cell entities through to all of the creatures in the world today. Darwin’s ideas were argued over fiercely at the time, but the massing evidence from palaeontology, genetics, zoology, molecular biology and many other fields gradually established evolution’s truth beyond reasonable doubt.
It is ironic, therefore, that the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever known, the United States, has large numbers of ‘Creationists’ – people who still cling to the teachings of the mediaeval Church. They are currently trying to persuade politicians, judges and the general public that evolution is an unproven myth cobbled together by atheists. They lobby for their ideas, such as ‘intelligent design’, to be taught as alternatives to evolution in science classrooms. Their proponents admit that their aim is to keep the scriptures of the Christian religion taught in school as the word of God, rather than a collection of ancient Jewish texts.
Their arguments against Darwin’s concept of ‘natural selection’ are not well reasoned or based on any normal principle of modern science. These people appear to be intellectually stuck, hundreds of years in the past, at a time before masses of new data became available. However, it is interesting to note that academics once thought like this too. Dr John Lightfoot, the Vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge was not frightened of being precise about the origin of the entire Universe when he said in 1642:
‘Heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were created together, in the same instant, and clouds of water... This work took place and man was created... on the 17th of September 3928 BC at nine o’clock in the morning.’
Poor Dr Lightfoot seems to have been ignorant of even the most basic facts of science. He clearly did not realize that there is no such thing as nine o’clock in the morning because every hour of the day exists simultaneously on our revolving planet; it just depends where you are standing. Happily, the very year that Lightfoot made this statement, a baby boy was born in the village of Woolsthorpe in Leicestershire. The infant’s name was Isaac Newton and he went on to become Cambridge University’s most famous professor and a man that would create a leap forward in humankind’s understanding of the Universe.
Newton however, did not dismiss the role of God as he wrote on Judaeo-Christian prophecy, the decipherment of which he saw as being essential to the understanding of God. His book on the subject espoused his view that Christianity had gone astray in 325 AD, when the crumbling Roman Empire declared that Jesus Christ was not a man but an aspect of the very deity that had built the Universe.
Today we have the benefit of masses of data from all kinds of disciplines that point to the Earth being nearly five billion years old, but many creationists frequently quote the chronology produced by James Ussher who was Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland in the early seventeenth century. His analysis, based on his interpretation of the King James Bible, allowed him to confidently declare that the creation of the world occurred in 4004 BC.
Such a dating raises all kinds of problems, from fitting in the obvious existence of dinosaurs, for example, to the fact that the city of Jericho, near to the River Jordan, has been continuously occupied for 10,000 years. (Interestingly, the origin of the name ‘Jericho’ is Canaanite and means ‘the Moon’).
There are creationist websites that put forward ‘evidence’ that their writers believe demonstrates that people and dinosaurs lived at the same time – presumably around the time that the Megalithic Yard was being introduced! But these are not fringe ideas as there are large numbers of people who believe that geological time is a myth. According to a survey run by the Gallup Organization in 1999, the majority of Americans educated up to high school level or less, believe that God created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years or so. And a worrying forty-four per cent of college graduates believe the same.
An international research team led by scientists at the University of British Columbia sees the creation as being a little earlier than Dr Lightfoot and Archbishop Ussher. Professor Harvey Richer, the study’s principal investigator, confirmed previous research that sets the age of the Universe at thirteen to fourteen billion years. The team measured the brightness and temperatures of white dwarf stars (the burned-out remnants of the earliest stars which formed in our galaxy) because they are ‘cosmic clocks’ that get fainter as they cool in a very predictable way.
More recent calculations, by Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and Brian Chaboyer at Dartmouth College, published in the journal
Science
, put the Universe at anything up to twenty billion years old.
Creationists often try to invalidate all of evolution by pointing to science’s current inability to explain the origin of life. John Rennie, the editor in chief of
Scientific American
has countered this by saying:
‘…even if life on Earth turned out to have a non-evolutionary origin (for instance, if alien’s introduced the first cells billions of years ago), evolution since then would be robustly confirmed by countless micro-evolutionary and macro-evolutionary studies.’
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It is true that, whilst science can explain how life has evolved on Earth, the way it all began is a complete mystery. And, as far as we know, the Earth is the only location where life exists.
In the nineteenth century some people speculated that there might be life, or even people, living on the Moon. It is now certain that no natural life could exist on the Moon, which is a barren world constantly irradiated by the Sun and lacking in both available surface water and a sufficiently dense atmosphere to support life. There was a more recent time when Venus, the second planet out from the Sun, seemed a potential candidate for some type of life because its dense clouds hid the surface from view so that, for all we knew, it might be as green and verdant as that of the Earth. But as we now know, it is furnace hot and continually subjected to sulphuric acid rain. As a result, the chances for life seem almost nonexistent.
Mars is certainly cooler and there may be water existing near its polar regions. At the time of writing this book, some people are still clinging to the possibility that there could be some sort of primitive life on Mars either now, or at some time in its remote past. If it does exist at all, life on Mars is likely to be extremely simple. Other planets in the solar system, being gaseous giants in the main, are even less likely to support any sort of life as we know it.