Ancient Knowledge

[Guest guest]

Ancient Knowledge

 

 

 

Chapter One

 

There have been many species of human being. Some big, some small, some who

could speak, some who could not, some who you wish could not, and some much

more hairier than others. And it has been a long held scientific view that

the earliest species of human had its origin in Africa. Which is fair

enough, for the oldest fossils of our hominid ancestors have all been found

in that continent. The very oldest known fossil of an ape like human

creature is something like four million years old.

 

As for our own species, Homo sapiens, well we're very much the new kids on

the block, our origins dating back just 50,000 years ago. Or so we think.

Palaeontologists will tell you that we modern humans evolved on the hot,

grassy plains of eastern Africa. Hot, very hot inland plains. Yet for some

reason we all have a layer of blubber beneath our skin. Blubber, like whales

and seals. A very thin layer of blubber granted, but blubber nevertheless.

Gorillas have no blubber, chimpanzees have no blubber, indeed, no other

primate in Africa has blubber. Take a close look at your hands. Spread out

your fingers and look at the gaps. You have got webbed hands. See them? Have

a feel of them. Quite big really, eh? That's one reason you can swim so

well. You have also got webbed feet. That's another reason. No other primate

in Africa has webbed hands and feet.

 

Let's look at the evidence: a layer of blubber, webbed hands and feet, and

oh yes, nearly forgot, smooth skin with a distinct lack of sun shielding fur

(except for the tops of our heads). A peculiar set of adaptations for life

on the open plains of Africa, don't you think?

 

You see, if the palaeontologists were to drill down deep through the ice

sheets of Antarctica, many thousands of meters deep, and in exactly the

right locations, they would find things that would make them change their

minds. They would find fossils of hominids that predate the ones from Africa

by tens of millions of years. And, most startling of all, they would find

evidence that Homo sapiens was alive and well and living in Antarctica over

three million years before he ever went to Africa!

 

Now, when I say that our own species of human is called Homo sapiens, that

isn't quite true. We are in fact a subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens. We used

to have a famous relative you might have heard of, Homo sapiens

neanderthalis, more commonly called 'Neanderthal Man' but we sort of evicted

him off the planet about 25,000 years ago. Anyway, both ourselves and the

Neanderthals are subspecies of Homo sapiens.

 

But I digress. Antarctica then, the true cradle of mankind. But how? Isn't

Antarctica the coldest, snowiest, windiest most inhospitable place on earth?

Well, yes, it is now. But it wasn't always like that. Once, it was mild and

green, and warm seas lapped its rich shores, which was the original home of

Homo sapiens. Our blubber and webbed hands and feet are now only a vestige

of how they used to be. Had we continued to evolve in Antarctica, who knows,

perhaps by now we would be fully fledged creatures of the oceans, like the

whales and dolphins. Hey, maybe sailors really have seen mermaids, maybe we

are not the only surviving subspecies descendants of ancient Homo sapiens...

 

Take a moment now to imagine the knowledge amassed by this prehistoric

civilisation, millions of years old. We do have some glimpses. The ancient

Greeks somehow acquired mysterious maps, incredibly accurate maps, outlining

lands the Greeks could only dream of. Copies of these maps still exist

today. They are enough to put a tingle down your spine. These maps, tens of

thousands of years old at the very least, show quite clearly the coast of

Antarctica, but not as it is now, but how it was before the continent froze.

Not only that, but the coastlines of South America and Africa, all the way

to southern Europe. The Greeks were convinced the maps were the work of the

lost people of Atlantis. Maybe they were right.

 

This knowledge then, the minds of our most ancient forefathers, I can reveal

is very different to our present day idea of knowledge. The people of

Antarctica had completely different values and a culture alien to anything

anywhere in the world today.

 

But you can sometimes, at a very deep and primitive level, still connect

with them: when you hear good music, and lose yourself in it; in the dead of

night, when you dream your wildest most incomprehensible dreams; and most of

all, when you are drawn to the sound and smell of the sea, and you stand on

the shore staring longingly at the lapping waves that are your ancestral

home.

 

 

 

 

 

Andy Savage

http://www.mp3.com/stations/ice_age