Michael Baigent - Ancient Traces: Mysteries in Ancient and Early History

I should first like to thank my stepdaughter, Emma Milne-Watson, for beginning the discussion out of which the idea for this book arose.

I should also like to thank my wife, Jane, for her interest and support during what proved a rather intensive period of writing and research.

My thanks too for the criticisms and comments made by Joseph Addison, Isabelle Baigent, Tansy Baigent, David Milne-Watson, Lawrence Harvey and Carl Sandeman.

I owe further debts to many: Brie Burheman; Ann Evans; Andrew Nurnberg; Tony Lacey; and my long-time colleague, Richard Leigh.

Finally, I owe much to the efficiency of the staff of the British Library Reading Room at Bloomsbury (alas, now dragged to the wasteland of St Pancras), the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Library.

Picture Credits

I would like to thank the following for their kind permission to reproduce material: Professor Naama Goren-Inbar for are my own.

The map on is reproduced from Admiralty chart 4103 by permission of the Controller of Her Majestys Stationery Office and the hydrographic offices of France and the United Kingdom.

I n the heat of July 1989, Israeli archaeologist Professor Naama Goren-Inbar, together with her colleagues, began to excavate in the northern Jordan valley. Their site was very ancient, around 500,000 years old, and very waterlogged, for it lay close to the Jordan river.

They would have begun just after sunrise and, with considerable relief, stopped for the day at noon, just as the sun finally stole away all their shadows. Security considerations cannot have been far from their minds as they worked; the Jordan was the front line during the years of hot peace, and occasionally there were problems.

They decided first to expose all the geological levels: a mechanical digger was employed to excavate slowly two deep trenches across part of the site. As each bucketload of earth was brought to the surface it was emptied and its contents examined for bones or artefacts.

One morning, to the archaeologists amazement, the digger dredged up part of a well-constructed and highly polished wooden plank. Nothing like it had ever been found before.

The plank was of willow wood, almost ten inches long and just over five inches wide. It had a very flat, very smooth, artificially polished surface which had been so expertly prepared that no trace of any tool marks remained. Furthermore, one edge was completely straight and deliberately bevelled. Underneath the plank the wood

According to current archaeological thinking, no one living 500,000 years ago had any need for straight, flat and polished wooden planks. Of what possible use would one be to a lifestyle which was devoid of straight edges and flat surfaces? Cavemen, we are told, did not use rulers and set-squares.

Nevertheless, this plank was found. It had been made with considerable care, effort and skill. We must conclude, therefore, that a need for it had existed at the time. But what might this have been? Professor Goren-Inbar was perplexed; she had no explanation for it.

Together with her colleagues, she could only conclude that the technical capabilities of these ancient people had been seriously underestimated. And, she added, there may well be further unconventional finds of this type. Finds which may force a revision of opinion regarding the sophistication of early human society.

We can see that our comfortable picture of ignorant and brutish cavemen, set far distant from our modern world not only in time but in intelligence and capability, is suddenly in serious danger of being exposed as a deception. This find does not just provide solid evidence of an unexpected level of skill and technical prowess but it also constitutes evidence of an unexpected social and mental development in other words, it shows that at least some inhabitants of this long-lost epoch possessed minds which could visualize and actualize elegantly constructed objects which we normally associate with a more modern world.

This well-worked plank needs a context: it seems to whisper unobtrusively but insistently to all who will listen carefully, civilization. But of cavemen?

This raises one possible explanation which the archaeologists did not advance, perhaps because it simply did not occur to them, or perhaps because its implications were just too wild. This plank may have been intrusive. Not in the sense of deriving from a later period, but culturally intrusive. Could the primitive humans at this Jordan valley site have obtained the plank elsewhere, from some other, more advanced, more technically accomplished group who had made and used it?

It seems probable that, in time, the very existence of this plank will force us to rewrite our ancient history. But until then it is likely that this extraordinary discovery will be ignored or, at least, marginalized to the extent that it ceases to pose any threat to the standard story of our past.

The unfortunate truth we need to confront is that history can be rather like statistics: anything can be proved; any fraudulent story of the past can be maintained so long as all unwelcome data is excluded. As we will discover during the course of this book, certain stories about human prehistory have so much money and so many reputations vested in them that they are stubbornly maintained even in the face of steadily accumulating contrary evidence. To the extent, in fact, of supporters taking every opportunity to shout louder and more often than their opponents. Which does not, of course, help towards any search for the truth.