The Long Ascent, Volume 3

Book excerpt: Can Eden, the flood, and the Tower of Babel be real events that historians have simply renamed? Could Finnish and Norse, Hindu, Greek and Egyptian myth all be recording this same real history? Did Noah’s generation surpass the agricultural, nuclear, and biotech technology of the twenty-first century? How did the ancients cut the multi-ton stones of the Egyptian pyramids and Incan walls, or melt Scottish forts? Did ancient China and Sumer know about the twin helix of DNA? Were successful human breeding experiments the origin of giants, while monsters like Grendel were the result of failures? What disaster occurred to them that caused the forgetting of all this knowledge? We know that comets captured by the sun’s gravity break up into boulder streams that periodically intersect the Earth’s orbit. Plato and the rabbis told us that repeating cosmic disasters have erased most of our history, leaving us only myth and Genesis. This book weaves the modern scientific evidence from Greenland ice cores, Mediterranean bathymetry, NASA archaeology, and human genetics with the linguistic insights of the Hebrew of Genesis 1–11 into a compelling narrative that we are only the second-most advanced civilization on planet Earth. For now.