Page 238 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

it takes roughly 72 years (an entire human lifetime) for the equinoctial
sun to migrate just one degree along the ecliptic. It is because of the
observational difficulties entailed in detecting this snails’ pace rate of
change that the value worked out by Hipparchus in the second century BC
is hailed in the Britannica as a ‘notable discovery’.
Would this discovery seem so notable if it turned out to be a
rediscovery? Would the mathematical and astronomical achievements of
the Greeks shine so brightly if we could prove that the difficult challenge
of measuring precession had been taken up thousands of years before
Hipparchus? What if this heavenly cycle, almost 26,000 years long, had
been made the object of precise scientific investigations long epochs
before the supposed dawn of scientific thought?
In seeking answers to such questions there is much that may be
relevant which would never be accepted by any court of law as concrete
proof. Let us not accept it either. We have seen that Hipparchus proposed
a value of 45 or 46 seconds of arc for one year of precessional motion.
Let us therefore not attempt to dislodge the Greek astronomer from his
pedestal as the discoverer of precession unless we can find a significantly
more accurate value recorded in a significantly more ancient source.
Of course, there are many potential sources. At this point, however, in
the interests of succinctness, we shall limit our inquiry to universal
myths. We have already examined one group of myths in detail (the
traditions of flood and cataclysm set out in Part IV) and we have seen that
they possess a range of intriguing characteristics:
1 There is no doubt that they are immensely old. Take the
Mesopotamian flood story, versions of which have been found
inscribed on tablets from the earliest strata of Sumerian history,
around 3000 BC. These tablets, handed down from the dawn of the
recorded past, leave no room for doubt that the tradition of a world-
destroying flood was ancient even then, and therefore originated long
before the dawn. We cannot say how long. The fact remains that no
scholar has ever been able to establish a date for the creation of any
myth, let alone for these venerable and widespread traditions. In a
very real sense they seem always to have been around—part of the
permanent baggage of human culture.
2 The possibility cannot be ruled out that this aura of vast antiquity is
not an illusion. On the contrary, we have seen that many of the great
myths of cataclysm seem to contain accurate eye-witness accounts of
real conditions experienced by humanity during the last Ice Age. In
theory, therefore, these stories could have been constructed at almost
the same time as the emergence of our subspecies Homo sapiens
sapiens, perhaps as long as 50,000 years ago. The geological
evidence, however, suggests a more recent provenance, and we have
identified the epoch 15,000-8000 BC as the most likely. Only then, in
the whole of human experience, were there rapid climatic changes on

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