Whispers From a Forgotten Past Part III Synopsis: Stonehenge Facts: Latest Stonehenge discoveries and facts online unveiling Stonehenge mysteries and discussing ancient astronomical calculators. Violations Whilst not the largest nor most ambitious stone and earthwork in Britain, Stonehenge is certainly the most studied and speculated about. We actually know very little about the site, and what it was built for, but we do know that the structure was built in stages and over a long period of time. Exact dating cannot be confirmed, yet it is generally believed that the work started around 3100BCE and ended around 1100BC. Archaeologists report that the first phase of construction consisted of a simple circular embankment comprising a few wooden poles and upright slabs. The second phase of the building was marked by the erection of two rows of bluestones forming a crescent at the centre of the site. The doorways and trilithons were completed in phase three and in phase four, about 1100BCE, the bluestones were reset and the roadway was extended. (32) It now appears that the early date of 3100BCE should be pushed back by several thousand of years, not because of some alleged astronomical connection, but because of carbon dating. And it should be pushed back to a time before any such construction should have even entered the minds or abilities of Neolithic man. This re-dating stems from a discovery made in 1997 when the bases of formerly huge wooden sighting posts were discovered at the Stonehenge site. It has now been demonstrated that these posts were aligned to target the Moon’s northern most setting point and carbon dating revealed that they had been placed in position ten thousand years ago. Of course this discovery does not mean that the other accepted datings should be abandoned: we know that Stonehenge was built in stages, it just appears that the earliest stages were built thousands of years earlier that previously identified. Check out this reconstruction of the building of Stonehenge here. Yet up until around 4000BCE, the prehistoric people of southern Britain were still living in scattered groups, surviving on hunted game and fish, and eating wild plants. They lived in skin tents, neither growing their own crops nor keeping animals. Tools were still being made out of flint, bone or deer antler.

It is difficult to understand why such a people would have built an astronomical calculator four thousand years even before this Neolithic lifestyle at a time when the ice-age was finally drawing to a close – unless it was built by a civilisation which predated them.

Further evidence of such an earlier civilisation was found in 1985 when a Japanese diver came across a curiously shaped stepped pyramidal structure off the coast of Yonaguni Island, close to Taiwan. This structure predates the earliest known signs of Palaeolithic settlement of Japan by over 5000 years. Check out the video here.

The find was one of a number hidden under the sea with the best documented of them being named the ‘Monument’. This structure has the general appearance of a vast underwater structure with steps or platforms and has been compared, although overly generously, with the various pyramidal and temple structures in the Americas. (33)

The Monument is over 160ft long in an east-west direction and over 65ft wide on a north-south direction. The top of the structure lies a mere 16ft below sea-level, however the base of the structure is approximately 80ft below the surface.

If the Monument is artificial then it must have been carved at a time when it was above sea-level, and based on data of sea-level rises in the region (34) it will be between 8000 to 10,000 years old.

With the Sphinx in Egypt and the Yonaguni Monument off Japan both indicating the possibility of an ancient and lost civilisation, a similar find from prehistory in the Americas would appear to confirm its former existence. And indeed high on the Peruvian and Bolivian border lies the evidence. The mystery starts with an ancient waterbed that covers an area of 3200 square miles, being 70 miles wide and 138 miles long.  

The inland waterway is called Lake Titicaca and is littered with millions of fossilised seashells. The lake also features a range of oceanic types, as opposed to freshwater marine life. Creatures brought to the surface in fishermen’s nets have included examples of seahorses. (40) During the 19^th Century Professor P. M. Duncan, studying the lake, noted the existence of siluroid, cyprinoid and other marine fishes in the lake. (41) Check out the video here.

According to legend, Lake Titicaca (right) is the birthplace of the Inca civilisation. The sun god instructed his children, Manco Capac and his sister-wife Mama Ocllo, to travel until they found a place where a golden rod would sink into the Earth.

Having discovered such a place on an island in Lake Titicaca, they gave birth to the Inca race, the ‘children of the sun’. This island, known as the Island of the Sun, remains one of the lake’s most scared places and the local Indians still celebrate this ‘birthday’ with a festival every November 5^th. (42)

Close by the lake is the ancient city of Tiahuanaco. There is evidence that the city was once a port, having extensive docks positioned right on the earlier shoreline of the now inland waterbed. One of these wharves is big enough to accommodate hundreds of ships. (43)

There would be nothing at all remarkable about Lake Titicaca nor its city were it not for the fact that the lake, resplendent with fossilised sealife and its nearby port city is now situated some12,500 feet above sea level. At some point in its past, the lake was at sea level, and some immeasurable force has pushed it skywards to rest high in the thin mountain air of the Peruvian Andes where now ‘only the graceful reed boats of the native people who still fish its depths and the restless winds of the past disturb the calm surface.’ (44)

The City of Tiahuanaco is also full of mystery. Lying at a height of some 13,000 feet, it lies on a plateau that looks like the surface of a foreign planet. The atmospheric pressure is nearly half as low as at sea level and the oxygen content of the air is similarly small. This isolation and altitude makes the very construction of the city all the more remarkable. Check out the video here.

Who had built the city? "I asked the natives whether these edifices were built in the time of the Inca," wrote Pedro Cieza de Leon at the time of the Spanish Conquest,

"They laughed at the question, affirming that they were made long before the Inca reign and … that they had heard from their forebears that everything to be seen there appeared suddenly in the course of a single night." (45)

Another chronicler noted the tradition that the stones had been miraculously lifted off the ground, "they were carried through the air to the sound of a trumpet." (46)

The historian Garcilaso de la Vega made the following notes about the city soon after the sixteenth century conquest: "We must now say something about the large and most incredible buildings of Tiahuanaco. There is an artificial hill, of great height, built on stone foundations so that the earth will not slide. There are gigantic figures carved in stone … these are much worn which shows their great antiquity.

There are walls, the stones of which are so enormous it is difficult to imagine what human force could have put them in place. And there are the remains of strange buildings, the most remarkable being stone portals, hewn out of solid rock; these stand on bases anything up to 30 feet long, 15 feet wide and six feet thick, base and portal being all of one piece …

How, and with the use of what tools or implements, massive works of such size could be achieved are questions which we are unable to answer … Nor can it be imagined how such enormous stones could have been brought here." (47)

The ‘enormous stones’ weighed 100 tons and were topped with other 60-ton blocks for walls. Smooth surfaces with precision accuracy join the blocks of stone which were held together with copper clamps (right), a masonry technique not known to have been used anywhere else in South America, but in use in Ancient Egypt. There isn’t much left now of this ancient city.

n the 1500s the Spanish systematically destroyed the buildings, and later many of the stone blocks were looted for houses in a nearby village. More recently some of the remaining stone was taken to lay a railroad right-of-way.

Despite this, what is left is still impressive, boasting a pyramid 700 feet long, 5feet wide and 50 feet tall. There is also a temple 440 foot long, topped with columns up to 14 feet high that might once have supported a roof.

The precision accuracy of the buildings that remain led to a puzzle that was later to be solved by Professor Arthur Posansky (1874-1946). Posansky (left) had spent much of his life studying the ancient city, including the enclosure known as Kalasasaya, one of the main ritual areas of the city. Posansky realised that this area was an astronomical observatory, however the points, which should have marked the winter and summer solstices, appeared to be slightly misaligned. Posansky concluded that if the ancient builders had demonstrated an ability to create this magnificent city with its precision engineering, it would be unlikely that they would have botched such a fundamental and important feature.

Science, as ever, lent a hand to solve the puzzle. Today, the two tropics are 23.5° north and south of the equator, however, over a cycle of 41,000 years, the position of the tropics changes along with the Earth’s roll in space (the obliquity of the ecliptic) from 22.1° to 24.5° .

The Toxodon itself is described as rhinoceros-like, about 2.75 meters long fully grown, and probably a mixed browser and grazer.

It is unlikely that Saurat misidentified the animal for images of toxodons are also featured on ancient Tiahuanaco pottery and even in nearby sculptures. (50) But how could mankind have drawn pictures of such ancient and extinct creatures unless he had seen them?

The answer to this puzzle may lie in a prehistoric waterbed in Texas, USA. But first, a quick resume of time.

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References

(1)   Lehner, M National Geographic April 1991.

(2)   Mellersh, H E ‘Chronology of World History ' P2, Helicon Publishing Ltd., Oxford 1994

(3)   Schwaller de Lubicz, R A, ‘Le Temple dans l’Homme’ Cairo 1949 and ‘Le Temple de l’Homme’ Paris 1957.

(4)   Said, R (ed.) ‘The Geology of Egypt’ pp 487-507, Rotterdam 1990

(5)   West, J A, ‘Serpent in the Sky: the High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt’ New York 1978; Wheaton, Illinois, 1993.

(6)   ‘Great Sphinx Controversy’ Fortean Times, P37 Ed 79 March 1995.

(7)   Schoch, R M, ‘Redating the Great Sphinx of Giza’ KMT, A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt, 3:2 (Summer 1992) p52-59, 66-70.

(8)   For an abstract of their presentation, see R M Schoch and J A West ‘Redating the Great Sphinx of Giza, Egypt’, Annual Meeting, Geological Society of America, Vol. 23, No 5 (1991) p. A253

(9)   Los Angeles Times 23^rd October 1991.

(10)   The Boston Globe 23^rd October 1991 p8

(11)   Lehner, M, ‘The Egyptian Heritage Based on the Edgar Cayce Readings’ Association for Research and Enlightenment Press, Virginia Beach, 1974 (14^th Printing, 1991.)

(12)   Wilson, Colin, ‘From Atlantis to the Sphinx p43, Virgin Books, London 1996

(43)   Wilson, Colin, ‘From Atlantis to the Sphinx’’ p118, Virgin Books, London 1996

(44)   Flem-Ath, R & R, ‘When the Sky Fell’ p56, Orion, London 1995

(45)   Pedro Cieza de Leon, ‘Chronicle of Peru’ Hakluyt Society, London 1864 and 1883, part I Chapter 87 as reproduced in Hancock, ‘Fingerprints of the Gods’ p72

(46)   ‘Feats and Legends of the Ancients’ p.55 Time Life Books, Virginia 1990.

(47)   ‘Royal Commentaries of the Incas’ Reproduced in Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, pp72-73.

(48)   Posansky, Professor A, ‘Tiahuanaca, the Cradle of American Man’ Vol. II pp90-91 Ministry of Education, La Paz, Bolivia 1957.

(49)   Wilson, Colin, ‘From Atlantis to the Sphinx’ p121, Virgin Books, London 1996

(50)   Saurat, Professor D, ‘Atlantis and the Giants’ page Faber and Faber, London date