Dawn of the Lost Civilisation – Introduction
Extracts from the book: Dawn of the Lost Civilisation
Whilst researching my trilogy, there was a profound recognition that the accepted prehistoric history was not quite as portrayed in the academic history books of our schools and colleges. In fact, the deeper the findings took me, the more amazing the journey became – to find that Stonehenge was indeed five thousand years older than the experts believed was a revelation, but then to discover that it was built by the lost civilisation known to us as Atlantis was an unwelcome surprise beyond belief. For it took the story of our ancient past beyond the realms of archaeology, into the unexplored depths of mythology with the realistic understanding that the academic world would be given a twenty-four carat golden reason to dismiss my claims as ‘fantasy’, not because of the scientific facts I have based the hypothesis upon, but simply by association.
I was therefore left to ponder how to present my findings in a way to not only justify the science of my research but moreover, the enormity of the conclusions. The solution was, therefore, a trilogy of books that would allow me to place all the archaeological evidence, such as the dating of Stonehenge in a single book based on a more scientific format, including clear evidence Followed by this book you are currently reading, which looks at the anthropology of these megalithic builders, traced through the modern method of DNA genealogy, and lastly the final volume written as a comprehensive academic paper with over 125 peer-reviewed references and associated carbon dating to finally prove to the sceptics that ‘rivers were higher in the past’ and lay the foundations to ‘the greatest story ever told’
As an advocate of truth and reason, I fail to see the wisdom in recording history out of its true context. I can only imagine that our current misinterpretations of these poorly rationalised ideas are a result of teachers and university students being coerced to accept traditional theories and models through dogma or the fear of ridicule.
I am reminded of the wise words of Dr Jacob Bronowski who once said, “It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.”
The Stonehenge Enigma questioned our existing conceptions and took a detailed look at the archaeology of Stonehenge and its associated sites such as; Woodhenge, Old Sarum and Avebury. These monuments are linked not only by the age of this ancient society but moreover, by who built them and their exact social purposes. The reasoning for their construction is inevitably linked to my hypothesis – that during the Mesolithic Period (directly after the last ice age), the land was flooded for thousands of years due to the action of the polar ice cap that sat on top of Northern European continent for the previous 100,000 years. This natural compression of the land increased the height of the ground water table – creating the Post Glacial Flooding of the landscape.
This ‘Isostatic’ sinking movement (due to the weight of the ice on the earth’s surface) was compounded by the melting of the two miles of glacier that once sat upon the lands surface. As this ice water melted in the rising heat of the ‘pre-boreal period’, a new era for humankind started to begin as these flood waters covered not only our tiny island but also the lands of Northern Europe and beyond. At the end of the ice-age the sea level was 65m lower than today. A landmass not seen in our times was the centre of this new Mesolithic world, for the North Sea gave way to a land we now call ‘Dogger’ which was a ‘foot bridge’ connecting Britain to its European neighbours within a giant peninsula that protruded into the Atlantic Ocean and incorporated all of Europe.
Through sonar mapping, we can now understand what the landscape actually looked like at the end of the ice age and appreciate that the warmer temperatures assisted the natural growth of foliage and plant life. This allows us to re-evaluate the archaeological evidence in a completely different way as we begin to understand that what we see today with green plains and fields of golden crops, is not as it looked in the past. Where now we see rolling valleys and grassy hills there once was a watery landscape filled with dense sub-tropical trees and islands, much like the Amazon forest.
‘The Stonehenge Enigma’ changed our perception of our history by reinterpreting the scientific excavational evidence from ancient sites, which showed how the ‘Post-Glacial Flooding’ enlarged the rivers of Britain and Europe, influencing the location and design of these ancient sites to facilitate this higher water table, with canals and landing platforms. This unique understanding of the landscape allows us to establish a new discipline within landscape archaeology that can more accurately date the phases of these sites and their function. Now these new dates have been established in the first two parts of the trilogy, then the last part (this book) can concentrate on an even more fascinating aspect of our history, the great historically ‘lost civilisation’ that created our present society.
Stonehenge, as we can now see from archaeological evidence, was first used as a place for treatment for the sick and dying, contained with the monument there was also a site for the dead (like a mortuary in a modern hospital) where the bodies were prepared for the ’last voyage’ to the afterlife. The ‘ditch’ surrounding Stonehenge contains a series of ‘individual pits’ that had small walls in-between and seats cut into the chalk flooring – this ditch was unique in its design and no similar construction has been found anywhere else in the world. Moreover, this has been completely overlooked by most archaeologists, but it was made with a clear purpose in mind – and that was as a bathing pool.
The reason our ancestors chose Salisbury Plain was two-fold. Firstly, at the end of the Ice Age this area was flooded, and the Stonehenge site would have been surrounded from three sides by water making it a magnificent peninsula with easy access for boats. Secondly, the sub-soil was made of chalk. This mineral is porous and allows water to flow naturally through it. Consequently, when the pits/ditch were dug to a certain depth to the groundwater level, they filled with clean water, like a moat.
This naturally filtered water would be good enough to drink, but this water was not for drinking; it was for bathing, with the addition of a bluestone additive, from the Preseli Mountains of Wales some 200 miles to the North West. Evidence suggests our ancestors not only placed some of these large bluestones in the bottom of the ditch, but they also hammered small pieces off the larger megalithic bluestone blocks and placed them in the waters like the ‘bath salts’ we have used for hundreds of years, and even today. This type of traditional bathing was commonly practiced in the past and has been seen in the historic spa city of Bath, which lays just a few miles along the road from Stonehenge. Like bath salts of today, these bluestone rocks contained minerals that dissolved in water to aid recovery. Therefore, what was this ’wonder cure’ of prehistoric times?
The greatest killer of people during this period (apart from child mortality) would be cuts and abrasions and their associated infections. These minor injuries are easily treated with modern ‘antiseptic’ medicines, and in Prehistoric Britain, Stonehenge offered the same through bluestones. These rocks have veins of ’rock salt’ contained within and around the dolomite and rhyolite bluestones, helping to clean the wound. This historical use of spa baths to cure illness continued through to the Roman period and was even practiced up until the Victorian era.
Unfortunately, this treatment was not always the miracle cure hoped for at Stonehenge. Consequently, if the patient failed to recover from their illness and died, they were taken to the centre of the monument (behind a wooden palisade) and laid out on 6 foot stone slabs like a modern-day mortuary. These slabs were positioned in a distinctive ‘crescent moon’ shape which represented our ancestor’s belief that the moon in the sky was where the deceased soul travelled to the afterlife. This is the first indication we find of the philosophy of this society, as clearly their disregarding of the dead body (by allowing it to rot and be picked clean by birds) indicates that they are the original ‘dualists’ and must have believed the body and soul are separate in identities.
have been found throughout Europe built by the lost civilisation – Dawn of the Lost Civilisation – Introduction
The mortuary area in the centre of the monument was screened by a wooden circular palisade affording the dead privacy from the outside world, including the bathers in the outside moat. The corpses were laid out to decompose naturally and were inaccessible to animals except to the carnivorous birds such as eagles, hawks, owls, crows and ravens, which have always had a connection with the spirits from the dead in the form of guides and guardians. These animals are also connected to the afterlife as they inhabited the sky where the spirits were to wander after death. Once the corpse had been completely de-fleshed they were taken to a Long Barrow, probably near a spot of either birth or social habitat where they would be placed inside a chamber with their relatives or a group known to the individual for their last voyage to the afterlife.
The Long Barrow is a very distinctive shape and size, and studying it allows us to understand what kind of ships and boats were used by the living of this society. Long Barrows typically represented a long boat shape with a pointed nose for speed and manoeuvrability and a flat stern which had the chambers contained within it under the decking of the ship – in the case of West Kennett near Avebury; the covering would be of white chalk to give it maximum visibility. The Long Barrow would then be surrounded by rocks to enhance the outline of the boat, and a ditch would be dug that would fill with water to represent the sea. Larger stones would be placed at the Entrance of the Chambers at the back of the boat to stop animals taking the disarticulated bones and to act as a ‘direction indicator’ for the boats using the Long Barrow as a navigational aid.
Here in Northern Europe, this connection to the dead and boats remains prevalent. In most countries they practice these same ancient ‘traditions’. Family and friend’s bodies are still buried in the ground in wooden coffins – which remarkably look like small one-man boats with six sides not four; we give our dead a plaque of stone and make films and TV series of the undead rising from their coffins in the dead of the night by the light of the full moon and in some pre-pagan cultures coins are placed over the eyes of the deceased to pay the ferryman to take the corpse safely to the afterlife.
Another myth the first books of the trilogy dispelled was the inaccurate archaeological use of the term ‘hunter-gatherer’. This term was invented by Victorian archaeologists and anthropologists in an attempt to classify and understand our past by comparing them to the known indigenous primitive peoples of the world. The problem with this concept is clearly irrational, as the ‘hunter gatherer’ peoples of the world are nomadic tribes that walk the land, hunting game and gathering berries and plants – never built stone monuments.
situated on Cleeve Hill, near Cheltenham used by the lost civilisation for Burials – Dawn of the Lost Civilisation – Introduction
These nomadic tribes did not evolve past basic stone tools, unlike the our society over the last eight thousand years, and even when the influence of our progressive society attempted to change their lives, for example by contacting these ‘natural indigenous’ tribes of Africa and South America and trading food for modern metal knives and machetes to replace their ‘traditional’ flint tools, it did not accelerate their culture. It would have been expected that the introduction of this quantum leap technology (that has been available to some of these tribes for hundreds of years) would have enabled them to duplicate the technology independently, but this has not been the case.
The real key to many of our historical mysteries and the true ‘ascent of man’ lie behind the events just before the last ice age. Humankind (Homo Sapien) and to a lesser extent his ancestors prior to him (Homo Erectus and Homo Neanderthal), who hunted and lived for millions of years without change, venturing only short distances to follow food resources. Yet, in the blink of an eye in anthropological time scale, we went from stone age man to rocket man – but the obvious question not answered by the experts is why? What on earth happened around 30,000 BCE and what was this revolutionary event that changed the whole of humanity forever, which allowed us to spread with great speed and diversity throughout the entire world in such a short period of time?
Moreover, to link ‘modern man’ to primitive hunter-gathering societies 10,000 years ago leads us into this great ‘misconception’ of existing academic history, which can be shown in recent findings at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. This is a clear example of how ‘traditional’ archaeology is finding the simple ‘linear history model’ of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers (people with spears in nomadic tribes, dressed in fur going on walkabout) impossible to justify, as these findings proves that this stone settlement was established some 4,000 years before the so-called ‘agricultural revolution’. The buildings show a high greater degree of constructional (stonemasonry) knowledge and skills than any early farming community should have been capable of producing. Moreover, this degree of sophistication would not be equalled or even surpassed until the Roman and Greek empires some eight-and-a-half-thousand years later.
Modern researchers and academics have attempted to rationalised this (Gobekli Tepe) ‘blip’ in their linear history of the world, by suggesting that this is just a freak ‘earlier period’ which they have now called the ‘early Neolithic’, by moving the Anatolia Neolithic timeline to 3,000 years earlier. Consequently, if we accept this kind of ‘logic’ as rational and accurate, then we must view Australia up to the 16th century as ‘Mesolithic’ as aborigines did not develop either farming or metalwork. To manipulate these historical timelines in such a fashion is total nonsense and shows that our antiquity is far from ‘linear’ or straightforward than our history books would suggest.
We have similarly shown that this kind of institutional and stereotypical thinking in our first books of the trilogy, perpetuated the belief that our ancient sites and monuments were built on the same dry grassy plains we see today, which lead historians to come up with (an amusing but ridiculous) hypothesis that fur covered men dragged large stones 200 miles across Salisbury plain from the Preseli Mountains in Wales – which at the time of construction was, in reality, a forest covered with rivers and marshes and therefore, impossible to traverse in such a fashion. This is despite nearly every palynologist, (scientists who studies tree pollen) showing that there is little to no grass pollen found at these sites, but plenty of tree pollen. Still this myth continues and until recently could be seen upon the walls in the underground tunnel that used to go under the old A322 that lays next to the site at Stonehenge – fortunately, this embarrassment has now been backfilled for future archaeologists to amuse themselves, when it is eventually rediscovered.
The lack of open plains also goes a long way to support the argument that these people were not traditional ‘hunter-gatherers’; for not only was this environment a flooded landscape due to the enlarged rivers during the past which forced prehistoric man to move from place to place by boat, but moreover, the dangerous animals, such as bears, wolfs and even wild cats outnumbered the very small human population by about 60 to 1 and so it was foolhardy to roam on land without protection.
Throughout time, many other cultures that lived in this kind of watery environment have adapted successfully by using boats, though these boats are not always the perceived wooden log boats of African or South American descent. The simplest boat to build in Britain due to the abundance of reed is the ‘reed boat’. The only requirement being to gather the natural growing reeds in a bundle and tie them together and ‘lo and behold’, it floats – so why bother to cut down a tree and hollow it out, unless a larger and more sea worthy project is required?
It is so simple to use this building method that even complete islands can be made from reed. These floating artificial islands are generally made of bundled reeds, and the best-known examples are those of the Uros people of Lake Titicaca, Peru, who built their villages upon what are, in effect, huge rafts of bundled totora reeds. The Uros originally created their islands to prevent attacks by their more aggressive neighbours, the Incas and Collas.
Even the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, was surrounded with chinampas, small artificial islands used for agriculture known as “floating gardens.” Floating gardens on a large scale were demonstrated with aquaponics systems in China growing rice, wheat and canna lily on islands, with some installations exceeding 2.5 acres (10,000 m2). However, archaeologists have chosen to ignore these cultures in favour of nomad wanderers, which do not fit either the ancient environment or the creative nature of the culture.
The Post-Glacial Flooding Hypothesis explained in detail why the environment was flooded directly after the last ice age. Many societies currently still use boats throughout the world; these people are not ‘traditional’ academic hunter-gatherers who eat just red meat and berries. This boat civilisations would have had a ‘high-protein diet’ from mainly fish, shell food and fat free meat (reindeer) as well as carbohydrate/plant in-take, which promotes not only an increase in the size of the human brain, thereby increasing the capacity for intelligence, but moreover, increased physical growth and bone size resulting in increased height and strength.
Archaeological artefacts have also shown that this diet enhances the resourcefulness possessed by this lost civilisation, allowing them to develop a host of new skills, including the ability to cut and move massive building stones, engineer and excavate dykes(canals) and even undertake complex social medical procedures such as treating the sick, limb amputations and trepanations (brain surgery).
The ingenuity exhibited by this ancient lost civilisation to build monuments such as Stonehenge, Avebury, Old Sarum and Carnac some 10,000 years ago is undisputed. Recent discovery of the worlds ‘oldest boat yard’ at the bottom of the Solent in Britain, offers evidence of this civilisation being able to ‘plank wood’ (for the construction of wooden boats), during Phase I and Phase II of Stonehenge’s construction – allowing us an obvious method of how these stones were transported. Moreover, with the discovery of wheat found by these wooden planks that have been dated not only from the same Mesolithic period, but more importantly showing that this grain was brought to Britain from Asia Minor (as this wheat grain is not native to Britain), by the same ships made from these planks – instantly changing the historical timeline of Britain.
In conclusion, it is evident that this ‘advanced civilisation’ that lived on the waterways of Britain and Europe in a time known to geologists and archaeologists as the Mesolithic (Holocene) Period from 10,000 BCE to 5,000 BCE, had the ability to build ships and boats and travel far and wide. Moreover, we may be able to find ancient accounts of such a civilisation as according to the famous philosopher Plato, another great boat civilisation which he termed as a ‘great naval power’ was in their ascendancy, during this same period of history.
According to Plato, they lay beyond the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ (the opening to the Atlantic Ocean from the Mediterranean) and travelled to the ‘four corners of the known world’. This ‘great lost civilisation of history’ was known to the ancient Greeks, and many of their fables and stories bore testament to their character and skills. The Greeks believed this society were the forefathers of our civilisation and therefore seen as Gods in ancient times.
Amazingly, if this is true then it was this civilisation, that placed four gigantic metre wide mooring posts on the shorelines of a peninsula which we now call Salisbury plain. These mooring posts, which was the beginning of a construction that was to become the greatest and oldest surviving monument of this civilisation – Stonehenge.
For Plato was referring to this ‘Great Lost Civilisation’ known to the ancient Greeks as Atlantis, which lay in the ‘Atlantis Ocean’ (Atlantic) and through his detailed descriptions fit the landscape and specifications of the lost land of Doggerland that now lays below the North Sea, as we shall show you in absolute detail within this book.
More information can be found at: https://youtu.be/ftJKvrjTYFk
Further Reading
For information about British Prehistory, visit www.prehistoric-britain.co.uk for the most extensive archaeology blogs and investigations collection, including modern LiDAR reports. This site also includes extracts and articles from the Robert John Langdon Trilogy about Britain in the Prehistoric period, including titles such as The Stonehenge Enigma, Dawn of the Lost Civilisation and the ultimate proof of Post Glacial Flooding and the landscape we see today.
Robert John Langdon has also created a YouTube web channel with over 100 investigations and video documentaries to support his classic trilogy (Prehistoric Britain). He has also released a collection of strange coincidences that he calls ‘13 Things that Don’t Make Sense in History’ and his recent discovery of a lost Stone Avenue at Avebury in Wiltshire called ‘Silbury Avenue – the Lost Stone Avenue’.
Langdon has also produced a series of ‘shorts’, which are extracts from his main body of books:
For active discussions on the findings of the TRILOGY and recent LiDAR investigations that are published on our WEBSITE, you can join our and leave a message or join the debate on our Facebook Group.
