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The Secret of Being
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Around thirty years
ago, prehistorians felt that they had more or less solved the problems
of human development. And then something very remarkable began to happen.
A few dissenting voices of scholarship began to point to totally inexplicable
evidence. Was it possible, the suggestion went, that perhaps there were
things about which we really knew very little? Put simply, the proposal
was that, from at least as far back as the end of the last ice age,
one factor, hitherto almost totally ignored, had dominated the emergence
of human culture. Above all else, we might say, our ancestors were obsessed
with the study of the night sky. It was the emergence of the new discipline
of archaeo-astronomy which first introduced this heresy, surveying and
measuring the astronomical alignments identified as being built into
megalithic sites. But few were prepared to say what motivated the immense
labour that went into this obsessive observation. Why were these 'primitive'
people so concerned to record the circlings of the stars?
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'For most of the history of humankind, going
back to stone age times, the sky has served as a tool. ...And just
as their culture was partly a product of the tools they made..it was
also shaped by their perception of the sky. From the sky they gained-
and we, their descendants, have inherited- a profound sense of cyclic
time, of order and symmetry, and of the predictability of nature.
In this awareness lie not only the foundation of science but of our
view of the universe and our place in it.'
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