Ancient Astronomy Around the World - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 25

3. Ancient Astronomy Around
the World
We're here, we did this, this is not nature
But geometry, see it from the moon some day!
- Prof. Edwin Morgan, Planet Wave: The Great
Pyramid (2,500 b.c .)
In the last 50 years there have been amazing changes in our
knowledge of the Solar System, the universe and the past - even
our own. In the 1960s it was thought that there were no varieties
of human older than a million years, and that homo sapiens went
back only 40,000; the history of all previous human forms was
summed up in Ashley Montagu's title, Man, His First Million Years
[ 1 ] . Even at the end of the decade, in a huge book commemorating
the Moon landing, editor David Thomas wrote, “ Moon treats of a
vast number of events through what seems, to this editor at least,
a vast period of time - nearly 4,000 years. This period, of course,
represents but an infinitesimal fraction of the million-year-long
evolution of the human race” [ 2 ].
By the late 1970s it was recognized that homo sapiens went
back at least 90,000 years [ 3 ]. By the late 1990s that became pos-
sibly 130,000 or more [ 4 ], maybe even 300,000 [ 5 ]. By 2007 it was
200,000 years for sure, with the move from the savannah to the
coast back to 164,000 years [ 6 ] . In Nigel Kneale's Quatermass and
the Pit (1958-1959), suggestions that hominid life went back three
to five million years were called 'wild guesses,' but now we know
that earlier forms of humankind date back at least five million
years, maybe even seven million.
Throughout that time, human beings have lived in a much
closer relationship with the sky than we can easily picture today.
The earlier, nocturnal phase of our existence has left us with excel-
lent night vision, especially on the periphery, but throughout the