He wrote to archaeoastronomer Clive Ruggles saying:
I am writing a brief ‘biographical sketch’ article for the Royal Statistical Society magazine, which they plan to publish shortly, and I thought I should consult you in its preparation.
The article aims to be factual and non-controversial. In about 1,500 words it will summarize the story of Thom’s megalithic work, his ‘findings’ and the response they generated.
He received no response. A follow-up call to Ruggles’ secretary confirmed that he had received the letter. We believe him to be a charming and extremely bright man and do not expect him to reply to unsolicited letters from the public, but Edmund felt this was a disappointing performance in the circumstances. It is clear that the professor would like everyone to regard the case as being closed.
Edmund found Aubrey Burl an excellent letter-writer and unfailingly courteous. One day he had a telephone conversation to follow up some queries about past Megalithic Yard research work. Burl was forthcoming about the work and believes that while regional yardsticks were used (a Perth Yard, a Boyne Yard, etc.) there was no single precise unit. He admired Thom’s prodigious output of surveys but disagrees with his conclusions. Edmund was curious to find out how Burl dealt with statistics. Had he acquired statistical expertise himself? Or had he engaged a statistician to assist him in the work, and if so who? The answer was – neither. Aubrey Burl had led the team and relied on his own measurement, arithmetic, logic and intellectual abilities.
The academic Thom debate seems to have ended in 1999 when Clive Ruggles banged the final nail in the coffin of the Megalithic Yard as an accurate unit. He concluded his judgement by saying ‘for a thorough statistic critique the best source, once again, is Heggie’.1
Edmund’s new step was to approach Douglas Heggie, who is professor of mathematical astronomy at Edinburgh University. This proved to be much more fruitful. Asked, by email, where he stood on the Megalithic Yard, the distinguished professor replied that his main approach had been to question the supposed accuracy of the Megalithic Yard rather than the concept itself, which he said survives in some rather elusive form. However, Professor Heggie was open about the fact that he did not consider himself to be expert in statistical analysis.
Edmund responded by saying that he had taken it that Heggie was the key expert and that he was a little surprised to hear his modesty about his statistical expertise. Heggie confirmed that there was nothing particularly expert about his discussion of the Megalithic Yard. What he had sought to do in his book, Megalithic Science, was to marshal the kinds of suspicions that any scientist would consider when faced with apparently strong statistical evidence for a new hypothesis.
Douglas Heggie has been totally honest and, of course, has acted entirely properly. But this does splendidly illustrate the way that the processes used within academia can create a situation where everyone cites everyone else in criticizing an unwanted theory. Follow the audit trail back far enough and there is some good quality debate but nothing that could be said to prove Thom wrong.
This is the root of the problem.
Aubrey Burl had once declined even to look at our findings on the basis that ‘because we had started with an error (the Megalithic Yard) all our further work was nothing more than a compounded error’. If, as they say, all progress is due to the unreasonable man, then we could also observe that all progress can be halted by the man who believes that he knows too much to need mere evidence.
We cannot stress how incredibly difficult it is to gain an intellectual foothold with new ideas, even when they do not challenge any generally accepted facts. But what we have challenged – head on – is the veracity of certain embedded ideas of what the Neolithic peoples of northwestern Europe could and could not have achieved. To suggest that they understood complex matters such as the spherical nature and dimensions of the Earth, Moon and Sun is written off as wrong, without the tedious necessity of considering new evidence – especially when that evidence requires some new skills for many archaeologists.
Edmund is not easily put off his mission and he continued to try and find a way to bring our discovery of a beautifully integrated system of measurement from deep prehistory to the attention of an intelligent, numerate audience. As a next stage he sent a letter to New Scientist magazine. This excellent weekly publication had run a cover feature in its 31 January 2009 issue under the title ‘Six mysteries of the solar system’. This prompted Edmund to write them a letter entitled ‘Earth Symmetries and Mysterious Mnemonics’. The letter, shown below, introduced the magical 366 system in a way that let the concept stand by virtue of its own remarkable qualities.
Dear Sir,
Every schoolboy knows that the Earth goes round the Sun at 1/10,000 the speed of light.
There are six less-well-known mnemonics concerning Earth, Moon and Sun. The mnemonics depend on two integers M and N, and a unit of length L.
Earth’s polar circumference is M2N units
The Moon’s polar circumference is 100 MN units
The Sun’s circumference is 40,000 MN units
You could work out M very quickly. It is 366. (The ratio of the size of the Earth to the Moon is 366:100. Given that the Earth makes that number of sidereal spins in a year (to the nearest integer) you might think that is a nice number. Or days in a leap year.
N times the unit of length is not a very pretty number but if we – quite arbitrarily – take N as 360 it gives the unit of length as 2.722 ft.
Obviously 360 is a very friendly number formed by the first three primes 2 × 2 × 2 × 3 × 3 × 5
So far so good, but nothing very remarkable given the ratio of Earth, Moon and Sun is 366:100:40,000
One thing that is rather nice is that the unit of 2.722 ft is not just any old number. If you stick 2.722 ft into Google it will tell you it is a unit called the Megalithic Yard. It was ‘discovered’ 40 years ago by Prof. Alexander Thom. He was unaware that the Earth and Moon could be divided up so neatly (into ‘pigs’ like an orange) using his unit.
We have a set of mnemonics for someone who is capable of remembering the number 2.722 feet, but this is nothing very scientific or spectacular.
The next three mnemonics are however a bit of a surprise to some people.
Every 10,000 days the Moon turns M times in relation to the stars.
If a temperature scale is defined with water’s freezing point as zero and boiling point as M°, absolute zero is minus 1,000°.
The mass of the Earth is MN X 1020 imperial pounds.
Mighty odd.
Using data overleaf you can check these on a calculator. These three are each accurate to within much better than one part in a thousand.
It is all a bit weird.
New Scientist gets a thousand letters a week from all over the world, and publishes fewer than ten and they did not publish this one – it seems probable that no one got around to reading it carefully as it looks very odd at first.
However, Edmund had more success with Significance magazine, which is published on behalf the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Its circulation of 6,000 reaches those people in Britain who are most interested in statistics and the analysis and interpretation of data. It seemed a good prospect for Edmund’s campaign.
The editor of Significance sees a lot of fringe material and was initially sceptical. But when given a calculator and guided through the improbable properties of the Megalithic Yard, he said that he would ‘have to think about it in his bath’. He did so, and a week later he agreed to publish something. At the time of writing he is trying to work out with Edmund how best to arrange and present the story of Thom and his Megalithic Yard and the neatly nailed-down coffin in which they rest.
What better group of readers to judge whether the Knight and Butler Symmetries deserve recognition? The Symmetries may not be explicable, they may be weird, but statisticians are well placed to judge if they are a series of freakish coincidences or an inconvenient fact. Call us optimists, but
we think that Thom’s work will eventually be rehabilitated – and our own work absorbed into accepted knowledge.
A Second Engineer
Chris, who is a regular reader of New Scientist, came across a particularly interesting letter to the publication reproduced in June 2008. The letter penned by James Russell of County Antrim in Northern Ireland referred to an article the previous month:
You quote Colin Renfrew’s ‘sapient paradox’ that while the human brain has changed little genetically in 60,000 years, behaviour changed suddenly 10,000 years ago. Renfrew will no doubt be basing his view of human behaviour on an archaeological doctrine that if no evidence exists on land, then none exists.
I put it to him that it is no coincidence that 10,000 years ago is also when the last ice age ended and sea level underwent its last major change. Any evidence of structures, however substantial, built in northern Europe before then would have been scraped into the sea by the ice; and any less than 60 metres above the then sea level would now be under water. Had there been an interglacial Stonehenge, there would be no evidence of it now.
An archaeologist in 10,000 years’ time, examining a map of the UK above the present 60-metre contour, would conclude that we had no major towns, no nuclear or thermal power stations, no long-span bridges, no parliament, no politicians … in fact, that we were hill farmers with a sideline in electricity from windmills. The paradox disappears if human behaviour did develop gradually over 60,000 years, but all evidence of this development is now erased.
Here was a kindred spirit. Here was someone who was using his common sense and was not afraid to challenge even archaeologists of quality and standing such as Colin Renfrew. Chris attempted to find out more about James Russell and see if he could make contact with him.
Chris found a man by the right name in the right location and sent an email to see if he was the author of the New Scientist letter. A reply came back straight away:
Dear Chris,
You’ve got the right James Russell, I am a civil engineer working in the piling business, so the Earth and its strata are of interest to me. I see the materials laid down over thousands of years every day and have to decide on its qualities as foundation material.
The letter in New Scientist was edited due to space limitations on their letters page, and may have come across more blunt than was intended. The missing paragraphs explained the logic of my argument.
‘During the last ice age (10,000 yrs B.P.) human activity would have been on lands much nearer the equator. The British Isles and northern Europe were under ice and the sea level was 200 ft lower than today. Temperature falls by 3 degrees every 1,000 ft elevation, rainfall erodes mountains and rivers carry nutrients to river valleys and coastal areas. In coastal areas, river valleys and flood plains, crops thrive due to fertility, moisture and heat, wildlife prospers. Humans would have led easy lives near sea level, with good supplies of plant and animal food.
‘Had civilizations developed during this glacial period they could not have been on what is now the British Isles due to the ice, they are bound to have been nearer the equator, and, as a consequence of the above argument, near the then sea level. Even today our major cities, most of our infrastructure and the lifeblood of our civilization – our electricity generating plants, are situated near sea level…’ Hence the reference in the letter to the power plants and infrastructure.
The point of my letter was that Colin Renfrew had made the perfectly reasonable logical deduction that there is always a steady development process, and that this could also apply to the functioning of the human brain, and consequently the development of civilizations. My impression of the article was, he appeared to argue that the sudden appearance of cities and complex civilizations should have been preceded by examples of progressive development, which have not been found. He then proceeded to rubbish his own correct intuitive idea, by saying that there were no artefacts to support his hypothesis. My suggestion was, to consider that due to climate change the artefacts, perhaps as big as cities, could well be under the sea.
I am off to work now, but I leave you with the thought that archaeologists will find very few artefacts dating back more than 10,000 years until they put on their scuba gear. Even then, those artefacts will have been disturbed by wave action as the sea rose, or by trawler fishing, or buried by deposits on the ocean floor.
It turned out that Jim Russell is a chartered civil engineer who understands issues about the nature of the Earth’s surface, having patents for piling equipment. Chris responded by explaining our area of interest, and adding that we have always found engineers to be intelligent (in the rich sense of the word) and open-minded. The email we received in reply was extremely encouraging:
Your observation that a civil engineer would be open to evidence and discussion I consider to be bang on target. Engineers in general are educated to observe the situation, process the information and propose the best idea, generally without a predetermined bias toward a solution.
I developed and patented a piling and a pile-testing system which the established contractors said would never work, and have had 25 very successful years doing subcontracts and testing piles for those same people.
I am certainly willing to converse on your subject. Perhaps a fresh mind with a different background may make an observation or suggest a different approach to your work which would be beneficial.
This was welcome news and the next part of Jim’s email demonstrated that he was a free spirit, unbent by the niceties of scientific convention. He was asking all kinds of ‘unreasonable’ questions:
I watched part of a programme on the Greenland ice sheet cores a few nights ago, that, and the deep sea mud cores seem to be the only deposits which would span ice ages uninterrupted. Techniques for air analysis are remarkable. Would there be any telltale changes in air quality from human activity? In the mud samples is there any indication in the pollen count from agriculture or plant breeding or unexplained intercontinental transfer of human food crops? Has anybody looked?
All areas of the continental shelves below today’s sea levels would have been in the tidal zone for some time as the sea gradually rose, and subject to wave destruction. Present-day sea defences built with modern materials are often destroyed in a few years by wave action. What chance is there of very ancient structures surviving? There may be a few places in the world where tectonic plate movements submerged civilizations in a short enough timeframe for the wave action not to have been totally destructive. A journalist by the name of Graham Hancock has been working in this area, and has some interesting observations. Once again, as he is not establishment his ideas are overlooked, I believe they need serious consideration.
Chris replied that Graham Hancock was a friend whose ideas were becoming more important to us as time went on. Having dinner with Graham many years ago Chris (as a scuba-diving instructor himself) had offered to train Graham prior to his underwater investigations of possible ruins off the coast of Japan and in the Indian Ocean. We will return to the subject of Graham Hancock’s theories a little later in this book. We sent Jim a briefing of our key findings regarding the Megalithic Yard, pendulums and Neolithic astronomy. He replied that he had never heard of the Megalithic Yard, but it was clear that his engineer’s brain was having no difficulty in understanding the issues involved.
With any length of pendulum and any unit of measurement, a few bits of wood, a few lengths of string, a bit of patience and fairly good eyesight, a megalithic engineer could easily have approximated the circumference of the Earth. If I can demonstrate that it works, it moves your proposal of their knowledge of Earth circumference from ‘impossible’ to ‘possible’, it will then be up to you to take it through ‘probable’ and on to ‘definite’.
If I wanted to study the movement of the planets and stars without modern instruments I would need a fixed point from which to make measurements. I would need middle-distant reference points to check the star and planet movements against an artifici
al horizon. Ideally I would be within shouting distance of my assistant placing the reference points 360 (or 366) degrees around my reference point (right a bit, left a bit, SPOT ON).
The points would be on a similar scale to the object star so I could detect tiny variations, maybe illuminated by candles placed in marks.
Ideally my eye would be at the same level as the circle of reference points on the Artificial Horizon (A.H.) …
Jim’s intellectual identification of the need for an artificial horizon was very important indeed – because we had not told him about henges. And we have long argued that most, if not all henges were created as artificial horizons! Just like Alexander Thom, here we had an engineer who had sufficient empathy with this Neolithic problem to reconstruct the same solution some 5,500 years later. He even went on to describe the size and usage of the henge in human terms:
It would function by me sitting at the centre and observing the stars and planets as they appeared above in the east and set below my A.H. in the west. I could mark the A.H. and record and variations. I could count the swings of my pendulum between the rising and setting of known fixed stars and the wandering ones, and eventually plot and understand their movements across the sky.
Next Jim began to ‘predict’ the move from henges with wooden poles to stone or megalithic structures – exactly as it happened in prehistory.
A wooden structure might ‘do me my day’ but if observations were to continue beyond one or two lifetimes the wooden structure would move through shrinkage and rot and become useless as a reference point.
My descendants would have to think again, massive stone would be the only material to scaffold an A.H. which would look over the vegetation and be stable enough to observe down through the generations. My descendants would be confident many generations of observers could stand or sit at the centre with the fixed point really rigid on a stone tripod and the A.H. would be as rigid as possible. My wooden (easy to mark) A.H. could sit on the stone scaffold; if it rotted they could make a small copy segment and replace the A.H. reference ring only.
Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery Page 10