I brought three books with me on vacation this week:
- Guns, Germs, and Steel
- Lost Discoveries
- Uriel's Machine
The first two books – Guns, Germs, and Steel and Lost Discoveries - are solid popular science books. They might be controversial, but I doubt that any critic would characterize either book as wacky. Uriel's Machine is wacky. But entertainingly so.
All three of these books challenge the traditional western historical narrative. If your self-worth is based on a sense of European racial superiority, you probably won't care for Guns, Germs, and Steel. The book…
attempts to explain why Eurasian civilization, as a whole, has survived and conquered others, while refuting the belief that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual or moral superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies do not reflect cultural or racial differences, but rather originate in environmental differences powerfully amplified by various positive feedback loops.
I'm no fan of political correctness being inserted into history. Fortunately Guns doesn't suffer from that problem. Jared Diamond doesn't suggest that the West stole its wealth and accomplishments from others, or that it covered up some magnificent African Golden Age. Rather, the initial advantages of the Western World are leveraged over the last 10,000 years. Advancement is exponential. Once a civilization gets a little ahead on this upward curve, it tends to stay ahead.
"Lost Discoveries" expanded my idea of the Western intellectual heritage. It's not just the Greeks that we owe. One huge contribution - the "Arabic" number system - with its zero and a place-dependent values, comes to us from India. We have 60-minute hours and 60-second minutes because of the Babylonian sexagesimal number system. The twelve hour clock-face is a direct descendant of the Zodiac wheel.
But the wacky Uriel's Machine has some neat stuff too. When wading through the book make sure to carry your inner skeptic with you. No, the sudden arrival of domestic animals 10,000 years ago was not the result of ancient genetic engineering. Selective breeding – yes; Recombinant DNA technology – no.
But interspersed within the silliness are, I think, some real gems. The book argues convincingly that Megalithic cultures – like those who built Stone Hinge – used their Stone Age observatories to understand seasons for agriculture. From a central point they would mark each sunrise. From this they deduced that the year moved in 366 day cycles – that's 366 sunrises each year. They then described a 366 degree circle. It appears, in other words, that they had a heliocentric model of the solar system in the Stone Age.
The Babylonians then dropped it down to a 360 degree circle because it worked better with their sexagesimal number system (60 x 6). Anyway, that's the argument that's made.
In the 1960's Alexander Thom noted that most European megalithic sites were built using a standard unit of measure he dubbed the Megalithic Yard – 32.64 inches. This short yard survived into modern times in places as distant as India (the 33 inch gaz) and Spain (the 32.5 inch vara). Dr. Thom said,
This unit was used from one end of Britain to the other. It is not possible to detect by statistical examination any differences between the values determined in the English and Scottish circles… The length of rods in Scotland cannot have differed from that in England by more than 0.03 inch… If each small community had obtained the length by copying the rod of its neighbour… the accumulated error would have been much greater than this.
The modern meter is kept standard by defining it on the basis of a certain wavelength of light. The authors of Uriel's Machine may have discovered how the megalithic yard was standardized.
What these ancient engineers had done was to mark out a circle of substantial diameter using a cord and centre pin, and then divide the circumference into exactly 366 equal cords by trial and error. They had then erected two poles to mark out one 366th part of the circle, and swung an adjustable pendulum until it produced exactly 366 beats during the transit of a convenient bright star between the two posts. The length of the pendulum is now exactly one half of a megalithic yard.
You can produce this measurement at any latitude and with different weights at the end of the pendulum. It is a completely standard measure.
Back in college I had a history professor named Dr. Tankersly who emphasized three guidelines when studying history:
- Don't think of ancient people as stupid. They were just as smart as us, but had fewer shoulders to stand on.
- Don't think of ancient people as more noble, smart, or worthy than we are today. There were highs and lows, but there was never a Golden Age where everyone was enlightened.
- Lastly, history rarely takes sharp turns. Closely examine any "sudden development." You probably don't have the whole story.
Guns, Germs, and Steel states that people have been biologically modern for at least 50,000 years. I doubt, then, that people sat around in caves for those first 45,000 years making no advances at all. When the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations arose 5000 years ago it seems probable that they were building on earlier advances.
The difficult task of reading the text is ongoing. Apparently it deals with the beliefs of the 
