A theory of everything…

An archæological flight of fancy that includes historical howlers and bizarrely precise measurements proves almost impossible to grasp

400,000 Years of Stone Age Science The Long Journey – How a Stone Age Map Changed the World Derek Cunningham Createspace 2015 Pb, 359p, ISBN 9781508422129

Few books genuinely have the capacity to make this reader gasp for air, but this one managed it. Twice. Early on, in the introductory chapters and when discussing ‘Sir’ Geoffrey of Anjou, Cunningham states that Henry I of England’s “daughter Matilda, whom was then married to Pope Henry V” (p41). Despite mediæval popes and Holy Roman emperors often believing themselves to be the other, this historical (and grammatical) confusion by a Scottish genealogist is unexpectedly disturbing. Surely everyone knows mediæval popes had a game go at everything but marriage (and Morris dancing). However, this was as nothing compared to the first mention of ShangriLa (p171).

But take a deep breath, centre yourself, perhaps enjoy another mushroom and ask why should not the mythical Atlantis be joined by a panglobal leyline to Shangri-La? Future editions also might include Lilliput and Erewhon, and surely they should also plot the mighty St Andrews leyline cross, centred on the Bay of Tonkin.

For Cunningham, like Plato, Atlantis lies far to the west of the Pillars of Hercules, indeed, way out west of La La Land itself, being sited on the southeast coast of China, sunken and lost in black manganese oxide/hydroxiderich sediments. Ironically, it seems these same globally ‘scarce’ black pigments (in the real world manganese oxides/ hydroxides are almost as common as natural rust (ie are everywhere) were needed in Old Stone Age cave paintings, themselves a cyphered map for global travelling Palæolithic cognoscenti. (The travel data needed to be hidden to prevent pan-continental espionage…) The pigments, indeed, were the cause for the monopolistic rise of Atlantis.

This is truly breath-taking, novel material.

Incidentally, on the other side of the (Chinese) Atlantean nexus, the same leyline cuts both Cuzco in Peru and Tianhuanaco [ sic] in Bolivia, so giving it a minimum width of 578.2km (361miles). Even in leyline studies, this is stretching it a bit. A similar leyline centred on Stonehenge would, with a width of 361.375miles (Cunningham is numerically very, very precise), encompass most of Europe’s capitals, perhaps suggesting a Bronze Age link with Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid and Brussels’ Manneken Pis.

Taking in Cunningham’s 400,000 years of allencompassing science,

Why should not the mythical Atlantis be joined by a panglobal leyline to Shangri-La?

everything (the cave paintings at Lascaux, Leonardo’s Last Supper, the Maya long count, the astronomical markings on the ‘Orkney Venus’ and some North African geoglyphs only seen on early uncorrected editions of Google’s earth map) and everybody (from Alexander the Great’s mother to the Native American Hopi Spider Woman) become possible and connected.

Cunningham states often that he is an empirical scientist and reminds us frequently of the onerous tasks and responsibilities that befall such researchers, hence he tests all his conjectures ‘thoroughly’ (they all pass his exacting testing), but he has failed in perhaps the main task of any researcher: that is, to explain clearly his methods (to allow replication by others) and his underlying thinking.

So what is the book about? It belongs to the Heaven’s

Mirror clade, and more especially a sub-set of the ‘Sailors of Stonehenge’ cycle of speculations, but with Cygnus as the main constellation (not Cygnus as we now see it but an imagined starry ante-novæ symmetrical version), a Cygnus that is the stellar image of the Pyramids (“the Swiss army knife of the ancient world”), Mecca and sundry other places of note in the eastern Mediterrean (p79) – oh, and Calanais, Iona, the Ring Of Brodgar and Holy Island in northern Britain (p313) and… there is more.

The Pleiades and Orion (even its shoulders), are downplayed in favour of Hercules (an avatar of Siva, mirroring the location of the Himalayas) and the faint constellation Vulpecula. So in this book the game is the same, the heavenly players have changed, but this time the rules are so arcane (the star charts have to be triplewrapped around the Mercator projection world map and then possibly rotated by a variety of numbers – 13.660 and 5.10 are favourites) that, despite reading the book twice, summarising the intent and purpose of the book remain a trip too far for me.

The book is certainly novel, whilst all the expected people and special places make appearances there is the addition of many new historical characters, sites and authorities (it is doubtful that all of the last will be pleased to have been cited) to the turmoil. 400,000 Years of Stone Age Science is breathtakingly, bewildering (and bewildered) and baffling, but for breadth and thickness (and not just in leyline terms), it is possibly unsurpassed in recent years, at least since the 19th and 20th century fashion for psychotropic writing declined. (Ah, Xanadu… Now which leyline is that on?)