British writer and former journalist; author of Fingerprints of the Gods and other books arguing for a lost ice-age civilization.
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Hamlet's MillBookGiorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend
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Here, I think it’s important to pay tribute to the work of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend. Giorgio de Santillana was professor of history of science actually at MIT, where you are based, back in the sixties. And Hertha von Dechend was professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University, and they wrote an immense book in the 1960s called Hamlet’s Mill, and Hamlet’s Mill differs very strongly from established opinion on the issue of the phenomenon of precession.
Lex Fridman Podcast #449, at (00:25:54); transcript published by the host.
And very much the same idea began to be explored a bit earlier by Professor David Lewis-Williams at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, fabulous book called The Mind in the Cave, where he is again arguing that these astonishing similarities in cave art and rock art all around the world can only be properly explained by people in deeply altered states of consciousness attempting to remember, when they return to a normal everyday state of consciousness, attempting to remember their visions and document them on permanent media like the wall of a cave.
Lex Fridman Podcast #449, at (02:08:47); transcript published by the host.
I like to give credit where credit is due, and there are two names that need to be mentioned here. One is the late, great Terence McKenna and his book Food of the Gods, where he proposed the idea very strongly that it was our ancestral encounters with psychedelics that made us fully human.
Lex Fridman Podcast #449, at (02:08:26); transcript published by the host.
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