Gods, Genes and Climate bibliography




Bibliographies that reference all the sources an author has used can be very helpful. An extensive bibliography is something I look for before purchasing a book, because it suggests the contents is not just pure speculation. But long lists of sources leave you with the problem of finding out which are worthwhile. In this area of ‘mysteries’ there is so much re-hashing of other peoples’ work that it can be hard to get to anything that is real factual truth or solid research.

So in this bibliography I am mainly mentioning sources that do have checkable facts and/or original ideas and research. But I am also including a few that speculate, sometimes wildly, but which mention things you may not have come across that are worth a look.

Those who approach this area as leisure reading are unlikely to have the time to follow-up copious sources, but want instead books that are relatively easy to read, that will add to their knowledge without presenting huge depths of scholarship or undue speculation. This is what I am trying to provide you with here, a reading list of books I hope you will enjoy. With some of the reasons why I consider them to be worth reading.

You will find various other books by many of these authors, singly and writing together, through which you can follow how thinking in this area has developed since the early 70s. These are sometimes 'pot-boilers', written for the income they generated and re-hashing ideas drawn from others, with some new slant. They can be a good read if you have the time and want to explore specific aspects of our history.

The books are listed in alphabetical order of the author's surname. First author or editor where there is more than one author. Date is date of first publication.

Gods of the New Millennium. Alan Alford. 1996.
A compendium of the evidence for technologically advanced beings on Earth. It is a bit of a shock in pulling this book off my shelf, to realise that he was pulling all this evidence together 20 years ago, yet it continues to be denied by scientists and it is still academic suicide for scientists to actively investigate how the stonework in South America was created.

When the Gods Came Down. Alan Alford. 2000.
Alford explores the roots of religion. He makes much of happenings in the heavens and comets, and how these might have been the roots behind the ancient myths and legends that underpinned the religious thought of Egypt and other ancient civilisations. Some of his speculations go too far for me but I think his book contains some interesting pointers to things worthy of a closer look.

Ancient Traces, Michael Baigent. 1998.
A collection of examples suggesting humans developed earlier than was conventionally understood at the time, and exploring various mysteries of the past. Contains a useful analysis of the face of the Sphinx indicating it was not originally constructed with the face of Khafre.

Keeper of Genesis, Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock. 1996.
Bauval and Hancock start from Robert Schock and Anthony West's views on the date when the Sphinx was built, based on the levels of erosion on it's sides. They go on to consider the astronomical alignment of the Sphinx and how that relates to Egyptian mythology and stories of origins.

The Spaceships of Ezekiel. J F Blumrich. 1974.
Working at the time as Chief of the systems layout branch of NASA, Blumrich set out to debunk the idea that Ezekiel saw actual spaceships but ended up coming to the opposite conclusion. Considering how ancient people would describe high technology machines and systems led Blumrich to some very innovative ideas that he considered technologically very competent, but requiring technology a bit beyond what we are currently capable of.

Gobekli Tepe, Genesis of the Gods. Andrew Collins, 2014.
An excellent description of Gobekli Tepe and of the comet iconography found there that indicates how important a comet was to the presumably religious practices the Gobekli Tepe constructions were used for. He goes on to speculate about the garden of Eden and its location.

Forbidden Archeology, Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson. 1993
This is a 900-page source work looking at fossils and stone tools. Published in 1993 it made the case for humans and other hominins making and using stone tools some millions of years before archeologists of the time thought this had started. They also discuss anomalous artefacts that have been found in places that indicate they are millions of years old. This is more a book to use as a reference than to consider a good read.

In Search of Ancient Gods. Eric Von Daniken. 1974.
One of the original books proposing Earth was visited by aliens, that set so many people off on searches. Von Daniken ranges very widely and includes lots of pictures of ancient artefacts that you may not have seen.

Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond. 1998.
As an anthropologist Diamond has studied the development of human societies in differen parts of the world. He provides a brilliant description of how the landmasses and climate of the world, combined with the luck of where evolution of animals happened, has been a central determinant of how world history has developed.

The Giza Power Plant’ Technologies of Ancient Egypt. Christopher Dunn. 1998.
A very detailed investigation of the engineering of the Great Pyramid in Egypt and the machining carried out on the granite box in the kings chamber, using Petrie’s observations as well as more recent observations. He concludes from this that the granite was drilled out with an ultrasound drill. The book goes on to speculate that the pyramid might have been created to be a power source, as speculation you can believe or not as you wish. The engineering and machining perspectives are however hard to deny.

The Atlantis Blueprint. Rand Flem-Ath and Colin Wilson. 2000.
A re-visiting of Hapgood's ideas of crust displacement with particular reference to Atlantis having been in Antarctica. They combine this with explorations around ancient secret knowledge and possible sites around the world that might have been linked as a global network of observatories and mystical sites.

The New Science of Strong Materials, Or Why You Don’t Fall Through The Floor. J E Gordon 1991.
Fascinating if you want to understand the science of strong materials and how things break. Ahead of its time in discussing how perfectly made materials can be exceptionally strong, that we are now seeing in materials such as graphene and carbon tubes.

Graham Hancock.
Special mention for Graham Hancock, as he has done more than anyone else to create a solidly scholarly basis for discussion of the artefacts that undeniably exist, which mainstream archeology ignores or explains in unsatisfactory ways - as the three books below show. These are all essential reading.

Fingerprints of the Gods, Graham Hancock. 1995.
Where Hancock started, looking at the enigmas of Egypt and America.

Underworld, Graham Hancock. 2002.
The book that undeniably makes the case for advanced civilisations prior to the growth of civilisations in the Middle East from 10,000 years ago. He has drawn on the knowledge of geologists to chart the progress of the flooding of lower-lying land from the end of the last glacial maximum 22,000 years ago, which has deprived us of easy access to the archeological remains of these civilisations.

Supernatural, Graham Hancock. 2005.
Hancock explores how human beings describe strange experiences that they have but which they cannot explain. He looks at this across time and right around the world and finds some very intriguing commonalities across time and across geographies. You might think it impossible to link the cave art of 40,000 years ago, with reports of fairies in the middle ages and of abduction by aliens in recent times, to experiences people have in shamanistic worship. To me he makes a pretty convincing case that there is a link. Important to me in making the case for the universality of human spiritual experiences and hence how religions have tended to focus people away from their natural spiritual experiences towards explanations of these mediated through the religion.

Magicians of the Gods, Graham Hancock. 2015.
By far and away the most powerful pulling-together of the evidence for a race of technologically advanced beings on Earth, combined with the detailed evidence of the comet strike on the Laurentide ice sheet. It was this book that finally persuaded me to put pen to paper and create Gods, Genes and Climate, particularly as he pulls back from the logical next step of discussing where this technological race came from and why they disappeared.

The Path of the Pole, Charles Hapgood. 1958.
Before I read this book I considered the idea of Earth crust displacement interesting and maybe possible. After I read the book I was convinced. The quantity and quality of evidence that Hapgood assembles for crust displacement, which Einstein describes in the foreword as "...the extraordinarily rich material that supports his displacement theory." is to me impossible to deny.

Uriel's Machine, The Ancient Origins of Science. Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas. 2000.
An excellent overview of ancient astronomical science that makes it clear that ancient mankind were highly knowledgeable about astronomy and that their societies went to huge lengths and great expense to plot the movements of the heavenly bodies.

Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, Richard Rudgley. 1998.
Rudgley pulls together a huge range of evidence that suggest intelligence far earlier than most archaeologists will accept. He even goes back as far as bones that seem to have been deliberately and intelligently scribed that date to 250,000 years ago. The archeologists who found them also found bones that they reckon are homo-erectus bones. Richard discusses sculpture, early writing, evidence of early medicine from bones and teeth, and development of language. He pushes the existence of intelligent beings back into the period between the first cave art and the early civilisations that have left records, so really begs the question about why there is not more evidence of early civilisations that were the pre-cursors to the civilisations that grew from around 7000 or 8000 years ago.

The Presence of the Past, Rupert Sheldrake. 1988.
Included with reference to how it might be that aliens arriving on Earth might be so similar the the hominins that had developed on Earth to be able to inter-breed, and to why human behaviours established by the gods might still be influencing the behaviour of modern humans. Sheldrake's theories on the interconnection of all things through morphic fields are truly revolutionary and one day will cause science to develop a radically different view of the world we exist in. This is tangential to Gods, Genes and Climate except that it is about core mysteries of who and what we are. The fact that Sheldrake and Lee Smolin are now finding some interesting common ground in exploring the nature of time I find very hopeful. My thoughts on this will need a separate book - watch this space!

Inevitable Surprises, Peter Schwarz. 2003.
This is not a book about mankind's past, but about our future. Peter Schwarz looks at various issues in the world that are staring us in the face but which we as societies we are failing to notice. Hence when they happen governments and organisations express great surprise, whereas had they been more analytical they would have seen the problems coming. One that he discusses is the likelihood of ‘water wars’, with various places in the world currently using water from aquifers at far too high a rate, and arguments happening between countries downstream and those upstream that are using too much water. The virtual disappearance of the Caspian Sea is one major example. What is refreshing and important about this book is his ruthlessly logical deductions from verifiable facts that are staring us in the face, which the vast majority of people are failing to interpret properly.

The Sirius Mystery, Robert Temple. 1976.
Temple, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, discovered from an anthropological study that a tribe in sub-Saharan Africa, the Dogon, have astronomical knowledge that they could not have obtained themselves - the existence of Sirius B. This star, in the Sirius system, is invisible without the use of a high-power telescope, but the religious traditions of the Dogon claim the their great culture-hero and founder of their civilisation came to Earth from Sirius B. They have such a precise knowledge of the Sirius system, which is a double star system, that Temple became convinced that this was prime evidence of beings from another planet having visited Earth in ancient times.

Egyptian Dawn, Robert Temple. 2010.
Robert’s theories about the Giza pyramids I found hard reading but the book does have two key points of interest for me. The first is his work with Ioannis Liritzis on thermoluminescence dating, which if correct dates Egyptian megalithic buildings earlier that archeologists reckon they were built. The second is his analysis that there were two completely different levels of stone technology in Egypt at the time, the very high technology demonstrated in the North, while in the South they were trying to build similar structures but obviously did not have anything like the same technology. He also has some interesting things to say about the extent of the ‘Libyan’ civilisation that existed alongside ancient Egypt, that extended right across the North of Africa to present-day Algeria and Morocco.

Earth in Upheaval, Immanuel Velikovsky. 1956.
Velikovsky's books were instrumental in starting many people on the investigation of those things ignored by scholars. Earth in upheaval was first published in 1956. The very first chapter details the many explorers who described the massive extinctions of mammoths in Siberia and fauna of all kinds in Alaska, the evidence for which has been preserved in the permafrost. This, and similar evidence from elsewhere in the world is very persuasive evidence of combined flooding and freezing. The book goes on to look at cataclysmic geology much more widely and across a much greater timescale, providing lots of evidence that shows the current theory of ice ages is woefully incomplete and cannot explain either the glaciation that has happened at the Equator pr the existence in the polar zones of fossils and coal that can only have formed under tropical conditions. Velikovsky wrote this book to provide evidence for the theories he had developed in his books Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos, that drew on the recorded histories of Egypt and other civilisations. Hence he does not relate the earthly evidence to Earth crust displacement, but to changes in Earth's axis wrought by heavenly collisions. But still fascinating reading in the light of Hapgood's theories, published only a couple of years later.

Gods, Genes and Consciousness, Paul von Ward. 2004.
A book I came across only after I chose the title for Gods, Genes and Climate, but given that his book deals with many of the same ideas the closeness of title is extremely helpful. It is particularly good to see another author making the same connections as to the origins of religion and belief. However he relies pretty heavily on Sitchin's translation of Sumerian tablets and takes the stories pretty much at face value, which I have avoided doing as they could be embroiderings around some central true facts, or even inventions. The book provides useful links if you want to follow this route. He also lumps together with physical contacts between humans and gods the kinds of stories that we would now class as alien abductions or channeling of messages.

The World Without Us. Alan Weisman. 2007.
An excellent description of how rapidly the world would revert to nature, an evidence of mankind would disappear, were humans to be wiped out. Which also illuminates which parts of the evidence of our existence on Earth would not disappear. This is important to Gods, Genes and Climate in assessing why a technologically advanced race has not left similar evidence to that which humans are leaving.

Non-Zero. Robert Wright. 2000.
Wright propounds the theory that human society is on a path of development that does not follow the ‘survival of the fittest’ theory of evolution but instead that the benefits to humans of working together for mutual survival is the driving force. And that this mutual survival has been getting stronger through the different societal forms that have evolved. He makes the case that mankind is on a developmental path of growing collaboration for mutual benefit, despite the regular setbacks.