Greetings to everyone at the Official GrahamHancock.com forums. Graham has now introduced me as the site's Author of the Month for new book The Cygnus Key: The Denisovan Legacy, Gobekli Tepe and the Birth of Egypt. Among the many topics its covers is the potential impact on modern human civilization of the Denisovans. They, of course, are the extinct archaic human population that existed between around 800,000 years ago and 40,000 years ago, and whose presence was confirmed in 2010 with the DNA sequencing of a finger bone found at a site named the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia. Here also three molars, two of enormous size, have been confirmed as belonging to Denisovan individuals. Perhaps even more staggering is knowledge that the Denisovans would appear to have achieved an advanced level of human behavior. This includes the creation of the beautiful Denisovan bracelet, which is now accepted to be as much as 60,000-70,000 years old.

There is good circumstantial evidence also that the Altaic Denisovans wore tailored clothing, developed highly advanced stone tool kits, fashioned musical instruments, and perhaps even domesticated and rode horses. That a form of archaic human achieved such a sophisticated level of development before their final disappearance sometime around 40,000 years ago leads us to ponder on the impact of the Denisovans on modern human civilization. It is a matter that becomes especially relevant when we start to find that some of the most advanced modern human societies existed within the catchment area of the Altaic Denisovans between 30,000-20,000 years ago.

Sites like Mal'ta on a branch of the Angara River, west of Lake Baikal, have produced evidence of swan-related cosmological ideas as well as portable objects of extreme interest. They include the so-called Malta plate, which has a series of spirals made up of peck marks that display numerations reflecting not only solar and lunar calendrical information, but also tantalising evidence of long-term eclipse cycles such as the 54-year Triple Saros period. This, along with the continued existence in the Altai region of an archaic calendar system revolving around 72- and 432-year cycles has led me to conclude that this advanced knowledge of celestial time derived either from Denisovans or Denisovan hybrid groups that survived through till the age of the Mal'ta community around 24,000 years. Moreover, that the swan, as a primary symbol of cosmological ideals, was seen to be associated with cyclic time among these earliest communities (as it is in Vedic tradition), the reason the book is titled The Cygnus Key.

Yet all this depends on how we perceive the importance of the Denisovans, and how and why exactly they might have become motivated to create such complex systems reflected even today in the presence in ancient texts and sacred architecture of the importance of key numbers such as 54, 72, 108, 216 and 432. Is our obsession with cyclic procession a legacy of the Denisovans and their hybrid descendants? If so, then what else might they have gifted modern human society? I will try and answer any questions that might arise in this respect. This is also a subject where new information is being introduced all the time, so any help in piecing together the greater picture is going to benefit us all.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05-Jul-18 21:11 by Andrew Collins Author.