THE HUMAN COSMOS

A tour of the heavens that centers not so much on outer space as what it does to our inner beings.

For generations, prehistorians have considered the animals painted in ocher and charcoal on the ceilings of caves such as Lascaux to be ritual objects of a kind. But what if they’re really star charts? One scholar calculated the ephemera of 20,000 years ago and then mapped it onto a work of rock art called Bull No. 18. As science journalist Marchant writes, “he found that when the bull was created, the Pleiades were slightly higher above the bull’s back and that Aldebaran (the bull’s eye) was more clearly framed by the Hyades—an even closer match to the painting than they are today.” There’s nothing overly New Age–y about the thought that “Lascaux Cave is as much about cosmology as it is about biology.” Chronicling the history of the Hill of Tara (present-day Ireland), built long before the Great Pyramids, Marchant, who has a doctorate in genetics and medical microbiology, notes the work of a scientist who tried to work out how the ancient monument was oriented toward the sky. Readers will share his sense of wonder at a direct landing of sunlight “right in the tomb’s heart…until the chamber was so bright he could walk around without a lamp, and see the roof twenty feet above.” It’s a short hop from archaeoastronomy to current teleological notions of the “meaning” of the universe. As Marchant writes, “science is based on the idea of studying a purely physical, material reality. Subjective experience is stripped out so we can seek what’s really out there rather than in our imaginations. That has led inexorably to a worldview in which the physical universe is all that exists.” But is there more? That chapter has yet to be written.

Readers interested in the cognitive aspects of cosmology will enjoy Marchant’s explorations.