I tightened the ropes on the windward side of my 3 man Pinnacle tent as the westerly drew its first predictable breath of the morning. I packed the cooking gear and cooler box into the tent, zipped and locked it. Here on the Transkei Coast, the locals embedded themselves any chance they got with backpackers and campers, and tended to look out for your belongings in exchange for hard cash. Still, if they really wanted to rip me off, fat lot of good a locked zipper would be. I kept the expensive stuff locked up in the Toyota
Land Cruiser. Fishing reels, gun, wallet, documents. This area of South Africa is perhaps not as well known as the Cedarberg mountains or the Eastern Free State for its cave art, but close by in the Eastern Cape recent discoveries had made big news in archeological circles and I wanted to know more.
Deep down, I have always been driven by a more primal need to discover new sites of ancient civilisations. My attraction to archeology is seeded by a genetic code seemed authored by an ancient wanderlust. I looked around at the landscape I love more than any other in my adopted country (home is Scotland, where more ancient, magical ancestral stories await). Here, the air carries the sharp essence of the hills' sweat-beaded flanks and the musk of root and leaf. Tangled limbs of milkwood wrestle on scorched white sand, while oiled currents of heat dance a gentle shimmy down to the satin sea. The sounds too tug sweetly at my memories, my senses crossing boundaries with colours that taste, sounds that smell and forgotten moments rising in the barrel of a wave and splashing revived and fresh at my feet. This Summer, many years ago, I set camp on a rise above the stretch of sand and rocky coast that curved between two large estuaries a dozen or so km's apart but both clearly visible on any bright morning. Behind me, the hills lumped up to the highlands, a vast, sparsely populated sweep of tropical forest, grassland and darkly sliced cliffs. I had spotted a ridge from the track on my drive into the area the day before, and noted the formations higher up took promising form for rock art. For now though, I wanted to spend some time at the shore among the shells and the coves and the ancient milkwood nooks, crannies and crawlspaces along this wild, virgin coast. Back then, as now, I wondered at the volumes of shells, skeletal chips and bone-bIeached driftwood that rearrange their artful displays in every square inch of every long mile of this coastline every day. Look up, and the tiny shimmering flakes carpet the curves and folds of beaches and bluffs as far as the eye can see. Look down, and the individual pieces begin to reveal themselves in multitudes of shapes, textures and colours. I crouched at the edge of the tide's new claim one morning, and scooped a fistful of the cool, crackling flakes of creatures long dead and undiscovered. I opened my fingers to let the shingle pour over my skin and settle back into the vast, infinite anonymity of its place in the universe, each tiny flake coded with the mysteries of the cosmos. So much to discover, so much to miss. It was just such a landscape that kindled in me the first early sparks of the bigger questions that burn in me today. As far back as I can remember, my friends and I spent long summer holidays here on the Transkei Wild Coast. Its calling still echoes across the years that fill the spaces between then and now, and still it strikes the same deep chords that have always hummed through the hills and strummed over softly waving valleys. Time has not changed much of this place, but it has of me.
Back then, I crunched happily along the cool tide-shadow, letting my thoughts find their own way to the reasons I always yearn to come back to this place. I know, that since I was two shells and a driftweed high, I would always be happiest crouching for hours at the lip of a rockpool, soaking in the magic of the intricate designs and curiously unfathomable purpose of creatures such as urchins, anenomies and sea cucumbers; the perfectly-crafted beauty of the starfish and pansy shells; the jewelled layers of crushed and washed fragments of shells and stones and bones and wonder.
I remember the day a reflection in one of the pools caught my eye and I reached in to pick up what looked to be part of a small animal’s jawbone, perhaps an otter. I held it up and noticed accents of curvature and trim that seemed unnatural. I kept it to myself and only revealed it many years later to my PhD mate Mick, who turned it delicately between his fingers before saying “It’s a fish hook Allan. And it looks to be a very old fish hook. It could be anything from 12 – 40 000 years old.” This was the defining moment, one could safely say, that prehistory had me well and truly hooked. It wasn’t so much the flush of adrenalin surging through me; it wasn’t just the immensity of my scent of Destiny and the promise of a place in history, forever the patron of a precious, immortal icon of humanity’s earliest period of awakening consciousness. It wasn’t so much all these things as it was - what more is there?
(I have since lost that fishhook, details of which will not be revealed here.)
All of these vast, illuminating revelations poured onto the thirsty canvas of my shifting curiosity. The questions folded out of each other as I imagined vivid scenarios populated by cunning, mysterious creatures crafting their way out of a million-year cosmic coma into an age of imagination and expanded consciousness. I began to read and research human anthropology at a depth far beyond the accepted parameters and shallow confines of knowledge served up at my school, or should I say, lack of schooling. I became increasingly excited by the patterns and connections which revealed themselves in places totally remote from each other and beyond the possibilities of shared human experiences. And yet, it became apparent that the spontaneous dawning of our ancient ancestors’ creative and spiritual awakening not only occurred during the same time-frame on opposite sides of the world 40 000 years ago, but all the evidence of this awakening shared a profound similarity of theme, context and style. After hundreds of thousands of years of existence on earth as physiologically modern humans, mankind suddenly experienced a revolution of the mind and began to shape our spiritual destiny. On cave walls from upper Palaeolithic Europe to southern Africa, man began to record bizarre visions of half-men half-beast at the same time, 40 000 years ago. What on earth inspired such remote and spontaneous therianthropic nightmare visions among populations so distant from each other they might as well have been in different galaxies?
The mind-boggling possibilities presented by this ancient mystery began to stake out the boundaries of what would become an obsession of mine and a calling which I am busy journaling in a novel. The more I learn about the physical evidence which has been revealed and recorded in vivid new glimpses into prehistory, the more I wonder at the inaccurate version of human history as anaesthetized by modern western culture.
Transkei has always been a place which fills my soul with rich and burnished harmonics; as night began to fold around my campsite, the darkness brought with it more of the familiar mnemonics so unique to this ancient, magical place – crickets, frogs, beetles, birds all playing in a key indigent only to this patch of night.
As the heat of the late afternoon was at last inhaled by the pastel yawn of an east African sunset, I busied myself with the pleasures of camp domesticity; hauling in firewood, constructing a circular stone fireplace a good few feet away from my tent and damping down a wide fire perimeter with a spread of beachsand.
As I worked, i felt myself reattaching to the familiar connections I have established with this remote coastline over the years. Memories which had shuffled into the shadows of the daily grunt and grind of life in the city folded back out around me among the blankets of grass, sand and sea, so sweetly stitched with the joy and the longing of so many lost summers.
As my fire spat and spun its spirit against the blackness of the night that pressed against the circle of stones, I felt myself warmed and buoyed by the glow of the flames against my skin and in my soul. I became aware of my senses shedding their dulling street skins and fizzing out into the night; to dip again, pure and raw, into the full and promising wind.
I heard a shrill laugh in the darkness, way distant, and knew the local boys were wading the tidal pools for crayfish, which they caught with lanterns and sticks and cunning. By first light, they would tip their harvest outside my tent and begin their familiar “Kolofish” banter, which they always conducted with wide gleaming smiles and careless closing prices.
Hungry, I scraped a shovelful of glowing embers to the edge of the fire and prepared a coal-pit and grid corner to cook the fish I’d caught earlier.
Which brought my mind back to the prehistoric fishhook.
What astounds me as much as the excitement of discovering new routes back from the dawn of human consciousness, is the arrogance of blind denial, the fear of open debate, the acceptance of a restrictive knowledge-template stripped bare of any pretence of form or structure, yet still held up as the universal style-guide of our ill-framed image of our evolution of consciousness.
There is undeniable evidence of revelations which challenge our petrified senses just as they numb the skin for another whitewash of institutionalised thinking; the conformity to the view of the accredited few “custodial experts” who manage to control the manifesto of Prehistoric Knowledge, Absolute and Unchallenged.
Amen.
I refer, of course, to the universally accepted manifesto of anthropological knowledge which prevails throughout western teaching culture, its institutions, its academic elite as well as the intellectually contained communities of students.
I can’t help but be amazed, and angered, that while most western cultures nurture the fantasy of heaven and hell, of angels and demons and holy ghosts, completely and unquestioningly, they can at the same time, with absolute authority, confine the possibilities of alternative realities of pre-history and the evolution of human consciousness to a quaintly limiting belief-horizon.
I have always found it fundamentally hypocritical of society to be so devoutly certain of the existence of the holy trinity and a place called heaven, while pooh-poohing such perfectly rational hypotheses that technologically advanced civilisations preceded our own by many thousands, or hundreds of thousand years; passing forgotten knowledge on to our ancient ancestors.
At the centre of everything, in an ancient landscape like the African east coast, I am consistently reminded that the only religion worth embracing is the honesty and purity of the open mind seeking the origins of consciousness and the purity of Truth.
At the core of this personal quest is the mystery of the origin of imagination and higher-order consciousness that sprung up, spontaneously, with similar themes, at opposite ends of the world, in cave-art around 40 000 years ago, after hundreds of thousands of years of total spiritual stagnation.
For the first time, the leap forward was not determined by evolution’s survival blueprint.
Ancient dream-state images on cave walls did not contribute to the survival of the species.
Painting human/animal hybrids and alien-like figures in dark places on cave walls wouldn’t make us stronger, more resilient.
What was it in the otherwise structured and systemic order of evolution that equipped the human mind with this sudden illuminating light of Soul?
If previous civilizations had risen and fallen before ours, the extinction events that wiped them out would have been total and catastrophic. Most religions today capture such distant events in the simplified narrative of myth and fable. Going back only a few thousand years.
But religion, the organized kind, is simply politics of the spirit and social engineering; not at all concerned with Truth.
The fact is, very little would remain from any distant advanced civilization following an extinction event; whether flood, fire, comet strike or pre-historic nuclear war – leaving very little for the religious architects and sycophants to cover up: And most records of accounts from pre-history have been destroyed by the church or reworked to fit their own agenda.
But evidence of an alternative human history does exist. More people, with more insights and new technologies, are committed to this search for Truth.
In Abydos, Egypt, in the Temple of Seti 1, 3,000-year-old hieroglyphs bare a remarkable resemblance to modern helicopters, planes and futuristic aircraft among the usual insects, symbols and snakes.
Also, a wall-carving from the Temple of Hathor, many thousands of years old, depicts a scene where giant God-like figures are carrying electric light bulbs, complete with filaments, cables and power switches.*
Many of the subterranean tunnels so beautifully carved by these ancient Egyptian craftsmen show no sign of fire-torch or oil lamps having been used in the years it must have taken to complete these complex works of art – in total darkness?
Wilhelm Koenig, a German archeologist, digging at a 2 000 year old site in Iraq, unearthed various ancient pots containing cylinders lined with asphalt and what looked like an iron plug - dry cell batteries. Samples of which, under controlled and monitored conditions, worked perfectly.**
Does this point to the possibility that this extremely ancient form of electricity was taught to us by an early advanced civilization, then forgotten for thousands of years only to be re-discovered in the 19th century?
In Utah, 8 000 year old rock-art depicts dream-state images remarkably resembling astronauts. (See illustration above.)
The discovery of the Piri Reis map found in Turkey in 1929 reveals a mystery so profound it defies any conventional explanation. This map, drawn in ancient times, shows the coastline of Antarctica and its inland topography, without the ice cover! Only viewable from space!
It is only recently that sonar technology has allowed scientists to map the continent under its cloak of ice, thus confirming the absolute accuracy of the ancient map. Knowing that Antarctica has been ice-bound for 6 000 years, even the most persistent cynic must be convinced that highly advanced cultures and technologies must have preceded our own civilization. ***
I often wonder why the education systems in schools and colleges throughout the western world still, after all this knowledge has been revealed, continued to propound the ridiculous notion that our modern civilization arose, suddenly, and intact, from nothing, only 5 000 years ago? Given that our Western education system continues to propound this notion, who is to say it hasn’t all happened before?
The evidence revealed by those who have turned the accepted understanding of Pre-history arse-over-tit could comfortably support the theory that our planet has been home to advanced civilizations going back many hundreds of thousands of generations.
Soon the fish was done just the way I like it; smoked and flamed to a crisp on the outside, succulent and flakey to the cut. A few potatoes wrapped in foil and placed among the coals made the perfect accompaniment.
This was Michelin star, bush style. And as always, as far back as I can remember, I licked my plate when I was done.
Blinking away my intentions to work on my research notes after supper, I just made it into my sleeping bag before the sudden arrival of a Summer storm dumped its swarming offspring onto these ancient plains, spitting my fire to cold dust and leaving shimmering pools in which the last scatterings of the moon splintered and died.
Soon, a sweet, dreamful sleep carried me away to the stars, where the Sky Tribes burned their fiery trails across the heavens, the patterns of their passings unknown and undisturbed.
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*”The cables are virtually an exact copy of engineering illustrations as currently used. The cable is shown as very heavy and striated, indicating a bundle of many (multipurpose) conductors rather than a single high-voltage cable…” Dr John Harris, Oxford University.
**” I don't think anyone can say for sure what they were used for, but they may have been batteries because they do work.” Dr Marjorie Senechal, Louise Wolff Kahn Professor Emerita in Mathematics and history of science
*** Rene Larsen, rector of the School of Conservation under the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, on presentation of his evidence at an international cartographers’ conference in Copenhagen.
Fire Photo by Vlad Bagacian from Pexels
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