Contents Updated: Thursday, August 05, 1999
Davy Jones' Locker is the legendary repository of everything lost at sea—full of priceless treasures amidst the wrecks of laden merchantmen, cluttered with the jetsam of men desperate to gain a minute's respite on a doomed vessel, strewn with the broken flagships of defeated fleets, and haunted by the bones of sailors crushed in the embrace of the covetous sea.
To be in Davy Jones' Locker is not only to be lost geographically, it is to be forgotten too. The sinking of the Titanic was sensational, yet no one knew the huge vessel's resting place until seventy years later when salvagers finally located the wreck. Five hundred years before, the Mary Rose, pride of the British fleet, unfurled her sails off Spithead only to capsize in shallow water within sight of multitudes on shore cheering the ship on its way to the wars with France. Bulging with sailors and marines the ship, turning too quickly, keeled over and sank, its gun ports, open for the occasion, admitting the callous sea. Though thousands witnessed the tragedy, the site was lost until underwater archaeologists rediscovered it only a few years ago.
This is not a book about accidents at sea. These maritime incidents serve simply to draw a parallel between the ocean and time. Both are guardians of countless secrets. If Davy Jones' Locker beneath the seas is full of forgotten treasure then time's locker must be a trove beyond our conception. For 500 years a shallow estuary concealed the Mary Rose, a wonder of its day. What greater secrets are hidden in time's vast domain? Let us take three successively longer jumps back in time to see what scholars can reveal of the dark recesses of the past.
What could we know of an intelligent race of beings that briefly inhabited the world 65 million years ago? Time has not revealed much of them—not sufficient, at any rate, to be recognized by our experts. Yet I shall argue that such a race did inhabit the earth, that it evolved to a similar level of technology to our own and that, as we threaten to do, it destroyed itself in an orgy of selfish and thoughtless excesses that carried into oblivion the last of its own and many other species of the day, including every other remaining dinosaur.
Anthropologists used to think that mankind made discoveries once and then they spread to other peoples and places. Now we know otherwise. Discoveries were made more than once and the centers of ancient civilization were not always the centers of diffusion of skills. Cities in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) are now known to be older than those in the cradle of civilization in Mesopotamia; mining of coal and ores for smelting occurred in widely separated prehistoric industrial sites often in areas thought to have been primitive by comparison with the known centers of learning; stone temples built on the Island of Malta predated the pyramids of the mighty Pharaohs; people did not first successfully cultivate wheat in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East—people on the banks of the river Rhine considered barbarians had succeeded before the Egyptians and Mesopotamians. Agriculture was invented more than once.
If discoveries have been made by different people in different places at different times, could they have been made earlier still, in previous geological epochs, perhaps? We must concede that they could have—perhaps must have!—provided that sufficiently intelligent creatures existed to make the discoveries. But could technological intelligence have arisen in an earlier geological epoch? In the age of the dinosaurs, for example? There's the rub.
Stephen Jay Gould, a noted celebrity in the field of evolution, says most paleontologists regard the development of human-like life anywhere else, even where conditions are similar, as deterministic. In other words, just because it happened in our case does not mean it will happen for others. They maintain the development of consciousness and intelligence is a quirky evolutionary accident, a product of one particular lineage. Gould concludes: Conscious intelligence has emerged only once on earth and presents no real prospects for re-emergence should we choose to use our gift of destruction.
This argument makes mankind unique. It puts us where medieval churchmen placed us—in the center of the universe—and where post-Darwinian Victorians considered us to be—at the apex of evolution. The paleontologists anthropocentric preconceptions preclude them from asking questions such as Could the mass extinction of the dinosaurs be self-inflicted? or Has intelligence arisen before mankind?
Sir Peter Medawar has noted that scientists tend not to ask themselves questions until they can see the rudiments of an answer in their minds. In this case the rudiments even of the question did not arise. Men believed mankind to be the pinnacle of creation, indeed created in God's own image. No other animal could have that divine image, no other animal could occupy that unique position, since otherwise man would simply be another beast, another of God's experiments in creation. These questions have not been asked because the answer might be the wrong one. To avoid wrong answers you do not ask questions like these!