The Human Cosmos. Jo Marchant

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      LAND

      Just before dawn on 21 December 1967, archaeologist Michael O’Kelly stepped into the darkness of a 5,000-year-old tomb. He clambered through a long, narrow passage towards a burial chamber hidden deep inside the huge mound of stones, and then turned to look back towards the entrance. The visible patch of landscape looked dark and featureless, cut through by a glittering silver river. Flocks of starlings looped across the sky. He checked his watch: two minutes to nine. What happened next would catapult him to fame and change his life for ever.

      O’Kelly had been excavating this site in Newgrange, Ireland, for the past five years. Workmen realised in the seventeenth century that what appeared to be a small, scrub-covered hill was actually built from ancient stones: a passage tomb, of a type common across parts of the British Isles. But this one was huge – an impressive 90 metres in diameter, with a 24-metre-long passage constructed from great stone slabs leading to a cross-shaped chamber with a high, corbelled roof. Inside and out, the walls were alive with art – elaborate chevrons, diamonds, spirals – picked into the rock using flint-tipped chisels.

      Local people said the tomb was a burial place for the legendary Kings of Tara, whom medieval writers said ruled from a hill nearby. During his project to excavate and restore the stones, O’Kelly did find human remains mixed into the earth floor. But radiocarbon dating showed that the tomb was far more ancient than the stories about Tara. It was built around 3200 BC, centuries before even Egypt’s Great Pyramids.

      O’Kelly also noted a curious rectangular opening high above the tomb’s entrance, which he called the ‘roof box’. It was partly blocked by a square chunk of crystallised quartz, which seemed to have worked as a shutter; a second chunk had fallen to the floor. Scratches on the stone of the roof box suggested that these shutters had been repeatedly slid open and closed. The opening was too small and high for people to climb through, so O’Kelly was mystified by its purpose. Perhaps it was a place for offerings, or formed a doorway for the souls of the dead.

      Then he considered a third possibility. Another story told by locals was that at midsummer, the light of the rising sun shone into the tomb, illuminating a distinctive triple-spiral carving at the back of the burial chamber. O’Kelly couldn’t find any witnesses. And he knew that the story was impossible, because the tomb faces southeast, over the valley of the Boyne river, whereas the midsummer sun rises much further north.

      But the stories were persistent, and O’Kelly realised that the tomb’s entrance does point in roughly the right direction to be lit at midwinter, when the sun rises at its furthest point south. So in the early hours of the morning on the winter solstice in December 1967, he drove over a hundred miles through the darkness from his home in Cork to test the idea. When he arrived, the surrounding fields and even the road below were deserted. He entered the tomb feeling utterly alone.

      It was a clear morning, so as he waited in the burial chamber he was hopeful that the sunrise might indeed creep inside. But what actually happened was sudden and dramatic. As the sun’s first rays appeared above the ridge on the river’s far bank, a thin, bright shaft of light burst through the roof box and struck not the entrance passage but the floor at his feet: a direct hit right in the tomb’s heart. The light soon widened to a rich golden beam about 15 centimetres across, until the chamber was so bright he could walk around without a lamp, and see the roof 6 metres above.

      ‘I was literally astounded,’ O’Kelly said later. ‘I expected to hear a voice or perhaps feel a cold hand resting on my shoulder, but there was silence.’ After 17 minutes, the sun passed across the slit and darkness returned. He was deeply moved by the experience, and returned to the tomb every winter for the rest of his life, lying on the soft sandy floor of the burial chamber as the light shaft danced across his face.

      Thanks to O’Kelly’s work, the tomb is now a World Heritage Site, with tens of thousands of people applying each year for the privilege of standing inside when it lights up. And although his discovery was rare and unexpected at the time, we now know that Newgrange is just one of many stone monuments constructed in western Europe during the Neolithic period¹ that were aligned to events in the sky.

      Some are exceptional and dramatic, such as Stonehenge in England, aligned to the midsummer and midwinter solstices; or the stone circle at Callanish in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, which captures the nineteen-year cycle of the moon. But there are many smaller examples, such as the hundreds of simple dolmen tombs in southern Europe, whose entrances face the rising sun.²

      What did these stones mean to their Neolithic builders? Why did people go to such effort to build these monuments, and to relate so many of them to the sky? The answers, as far as we can glean, reveal aspects of human identity and cosmology at a transformative time in our history, perhaps the ultimate transformation, when our species first adopted agriculture.

      The hunter-gatherers of the Palaeolithic had existed as an integral part of the natural world, sharing their environment on equal terms with other species. During the Neolithic revolution, people cut those ties and became farmers, controlling and exploiting the land. This shift in lifestyle and mindset changed humanity for ever, setting a trajectory of technological progress that has ultimately made us capable of reshaping not just landscapes but the entire planet.

      The revolution was about more than forging a new relationship with wheat or fields or sheep. It transformed our wider cosmos; how people viewed the spirit world and the sky. In fact, there’s a case to be made that these new cosmological ideas didn’t simply reflect the shift to farming. They caused it.

      It’s a story that starts not in Ireland but with humanity’s oldest known megalithic monument, built a staggering six millennia earlier than Newgrange, and thousands of miles to the east.

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      In 1994, the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt was searching for a new project. For the past decade he had been helping to excavate a site in southeast Turkey called Nevalı Çori, a hunter-gatherer settlement inhabited in the ninth and early eighth millennia BC, with houses made from limestone blocks held together with mud. The village included a series of mysterious ‘cult buildings’ (constructed on the same site over time), that were sunk a few metres down into the ground. They were shaped like rounded squares, with stone benches around the edges of the interior, interrupted by T-shaped monolithic pillars. Two further T-shaped pillars stood in the centre, decorated with carvings of human arms, like some kind of anthropomorphic beings.

      The site was fascinating, a glimpse into the worldview of a society on the verge of transition: within a few centuries, farming