FRONTIER SCIENCE/SOCIAL CHANGE

by Paul Von Ward

"Modern Discoveries are Often Rediscoveries"

Modern knowledge and technology are not the products of an inevitable progression of human intellectual and societal development. Many important discoveries claimed during the last few centuries are really only rediscoveries of forgotten human knowledge. Although finely specialized and elaborately developed in many areas, current civilization is not necessarily the most socially and intellectually mature civilization humans have been or are potentially able to create. Our areas of "high development" are results of deliberate choices and leave many areas relatively undeveloped.

The false belief that recent human achievements represent the only possible scenario of conscious evolution lulls us into accepting many unnecessary atrocities. Reviewing the precarious state of our environment, a decreasing quality of life for most humans on the planet, and the lack of appropriate technology for a sustainable economic system, most people conclude we have few options. This is because they do not know that humans in different eras have had access to advanced knowledge and chosen different paths. They, like most intellectuals, feel that we are historically on an always upward path and the achievement of today's industrial society is the best the species can produce.

For example, an eminent cosmologist extrapolating future human development bases it on the belief that "for maybe a hundred thousand years, humans held the Earth was in the center of the universe." He considers, along with most academics, that people living before 500 years ago were not even evolved enough to know the Sun was the center of the solar system. When he assumes that earlier humans could not have possessed such knowledge, he concludes the last five centuries of science and technology are the inevitable triumph of mankind's recent intellectual growth. Such a mistaken reading of the human past ignores the impact of historical choices. He does not understand the powerful vested interests whose choices have shaped current society: only one expression of many potentials.

Regarding the above quotation, Copernicus postulated the Sun was the center of our solar system in 1543, but we now know the Mesopotamians had named all the planets, placing the Sun at their center, earlier than 1,000 BCE. Sumerian tablets, 6,000 years old, have the same information. The Mayans knew of the planets Neptune and Uranus by at least 3,144 BCE and the Sumerians knew their periods of revolution around the Sun. Yet the planets were rediscovered in modern times by William Herschel (Uranus in 1781) and Johann Galle (Neptune in 1846).

Newton articulated his Law of Motion in the same century Copernicus set forth his heliocentric view of the solar system, but just as he was only rediscovering earlier knowledge Newton too was rediscovering the principle recorded in 500 BCE by a Chinese philosopher. In October, 1957 a Soviet satellite obtained the first modern precise measures of distances between points of latitude and longitude. But as Maurice Chatelain pointed out in his book Our Cosmic Ancestors, the ancient Sumerians, Semites, Olmecs, and Mayans all had this information. They based their ordinary units of measurement on those distances at their respective locations on the planet.

Using modern satellite telemetry, we settled on the circumference of the Earth as 40,075 kilometers. How did the ancient ancestors of modern-day Arabs determine it was 40,083 kilometers, as they did?

Three 19th century scientists (Proust, Dalton and Pront) are credited with atomic theory, but the Greek Atomists (Democritus and Leucippus) described the same basic concepts in 400 BCE. Scientists became excited in the past decade about the useful role chaos theory could play in understanding the complexity of large systems. Interestingly enough, the Egyptians more than 5,000 before the present (BP) had an even more comprehensive systems theory in what is now known as the Hermetic (Thoth) Principles.

Millennia-old religious texts and indigenous traditions indicate that all humans (homo sapiens) were descended from essentially one mother and one father, who were in turn created by the "gods." In the 1990's, DNA researchers rediscover this knowledge. Using mitochondrial and nuclear DNA regression scientists find evidence for a common father around 270,000 BP and a common mother 250,000 BP. The ancient idea that at one point (perhaps more than 100,000 years ago) all humans spoke one language and were divided linguistically only relatively recently (15-20,000 years ago) is now re articulated by mainstream linguists.

Thus far we've been talking about evidence of knowledge less then 10,000 year old. However, when ancient Sumerian, Hindu, Maya, and Greek astronomical tables were analyzed by Chatelain (who designed the communications systems for the Apollo lunar landing program in the late '60's and early '70's), he discovered they had a common origin: The exact rotations of all solar bodies in 64,800 BP. It is mind-boggling when we rediscover in our 20th century knowledge that our ancestors had at that time, more than 50,000 years before civilization was essentially forced to start over after the global cataclysm that occurred between 11-12,000 BP.

How does this fact of rediscoveries revise our understanding of ourselves? How could it be that the Antarctica we discovered in 1820 was accurately portrayed on 16th-century maps, based on even older versions? Even more staggering these maps show a continent, with its mountains and rivers, ice free as it could only have existed 20,000 years ago.

These facts and many others like them indicate that during much of so called modern history, many areas of knowledge actually deteriorated. Certain areas have been rediscovered since the European Renaissance. And only selected ones have been fully exploited, due to the intellectual and economic biases of leading institutions.

Why are such facts so important to people concerned about the current course of human development? Because they demonstrate that we humans have a more complex history, and therefore potential, than we have ever imagined. We are not products of a blind evolutionary process that inexorably leads us in one direction. We are conscious beings who have made different choices in the past and can make different ones for our future.

Copyright 1999
Paul Von Ward
All Rights Reserved