Giants may indeed have once walked the Earth. Researchers in South Africa claim that a lost civilisation of people taller and more highly developed than homo sapiens lived there until about 11,000BC, and then moved north and established advanced societies in North Africa and Europe, before dying out.

    This challenges the long-held belief that civilisation began in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers at about 6,000BC.

    Meanwhile, studies by the South African author, publisher and TV producer Michael Tellinger (pictured), and others, suggest that countless ancient circular stone structures throughout Southern Africa are the remains of a vanished civilization which could date back more than 200,000 years.

    Michael says they will “force a complete re-think about civilisation and human origins”.

    It is thought that the tall species, known as the Boskop people, evolved in Southern Africa alongside homo sapiens. They were between 5ft 10in and 6ft tall, with a narrow face, small teeth and a pre-frontal cortex a third larger than modern man, suggesting highly developed mathematical, artistic, ethical and moral attributes. Their height makes them giants for their time.

    The name Boskop comes from the area near Potchefstroom where, in 1913, the palaeontologist Frederick FitzSimons discovered a large humanoid skull. Subsequently, similar skulls were discovered by others. Archaeologists have been at a loss to offer a realistic explanation of the implied properties of the skulls, which fail to fit in with accepted theories of evolution.

    The discoveries were largely ignored until two neuroscientists, Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, of the Brain Engineering Laboratory at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA, suggested in their 2008 book, Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence, that the Boskop species possessed a large forebrain, indicating a high IQ.

    Soon after 11,000BC, tying in with latest Earth catastrophe theory, it is suggested a flood destroyed the Boskop civilisation, and survivors fled to the north where they established the first Middle Eastern civilisations.

    Best known of the South African stone circles, Adam’s Calendar (pictured right), at Mpumalanga, was investigated by Michael Tellinger and pilot and explorer Johan Heine for their book Adam’s Calendar (2008) and they found that it dates back at least 75,000 years. The site is on the same longitude as Great Zimbabwe and the Great Pyramid, and is said to have been aligned with the rise of Orion’s Belt 75,000 years ago. Until recently, such features were regarded simply as cattle kraal, and considered to be of little historic value.    

    But it is now claimed that tools, artifacts and petroglyphs indicate that the Sumerians, and later the Egyptians, received much knowledge and imagery from this lost culture, for which there is evidence that it mined gold, diamonds and haematite. Michael has suggested that homo sapiens was used as slave labour in these deep-mining operations.

    “These discoveries are so staggering that they will not be easily digested by the mainstream historical and archaeological fraternity,” said Michael. “It will require a complete paradigm shift in how we view our human history. We are dealing with the oldest structures ever built by humans on Earth.”

    The size of the Boskop brain suggested they were much more intelligent than homo sapiens, said Michael, and this possibly caused their demise, for reasons not yet understood. “I trust we will recover many more Boskop skulls once we really start looking,” he added. “The MaKomati Foundation [formed in 2003 to protect and promote the ancient ruins of Mpumalanga] is ready to do a number of groundbreaking archaeological digs at some of these sites: ruins, terraces, mines, leaching tanks, roads and more.

    "We are about to take core samples to examine at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, but we need to raise funds to do all this. That is an important part of the message we need to get out there – to mobilise funds for these first ever digs at these sites.”

    See also Ancient Civilisations page and the Resources page for links.

This is the most important book in the world right now. I can't imagine one that could be more so. Chill: A reassessment of global warming theory (Clairview, £14.99) by the ecological scientist Peter Taylor (pictured), will open your eyes to the truth about the Earth's climate, which is cooling, not warming.
    Global warming and climate change are inventions of science, not its discoveries. Climate change has become merely a slogan, ostensibly meaningful, but in true scientific terms, quite vacuous.
    Man-made global warming is a fabrication, an illusion brought about by flawed science. It has become a pervasive belief because it works very well for many powerful people. It is not a conspiracy, but more a mass delusion coupled to a massive collusion of interests.
    Meticulously argued in a pellucid and persuasive prose that carries the reader forward in rapt anticipation, Peter's book (not financed by any organisation) is a devastating critique of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and must be the first critical survey of the science and politics behind the issue to be made by a committed environmentalist. For this, he cannot be congratulated enough.
    The IPCC claims a consensus of the world's experts, but Peter proves this consensus is false and, in fact, never existed. There is only one basic piece of work to underpin the physics of carbon dioxide's ability to heat the atmosphere, and that is merely an assumption made by one member of the original small group of scientists that made global warming an international issue as long ago as 1988. Right from the start, that assumption was challenged as unsound, but dissent was marginalised. Politics had invaded science on a grand scale.
    Future projections of global warming are critically flawed because they rely on a virtual reality computer model of the global environment that fails to incorporate long and short-term natural cycles. Peter says he was motivated to review the science because "the proposed cure is likely to be worse than the disease", and was deeply shocked to find that the predictive models had such a flimsy base.
    The planet is now cooling, and so all the efforts to control carbon emissions are pointless and will make no difference to the situation. Instead, the billions being wasted in this direction should be spent on making ourselves resilient to the effects of global cooling which will cause food shortages just when food stocks are low and the population is increasing - another billion in the next 15 years. We could be facing a significant period of cooling comparable in severity to the "Little Ice Age" of 1400-1700.
    Peter says: "We are not ready for global cooling. Our eye has been distracted by the virtual reality of computer simulation and an almost religious zeal to create a low-carbon economy. Food and health will be the real issues of the next decade, coupled with rising fuel prices and a crippled economy. This means that instead of ploughing vast sums into ineffective and very expensive barrages and turbine arrays, we need to be rebuilding our communities, refurbishing housing, establishing resilient local food supplies and making all our support systems robust to the future." 
    Ample evidence for the operation of natural factors in the satellite record and in oceanographical data was available to the IPCC but it chose to downplay them. Late 20th century "global warming" was mainly due to a decrease in cloud cover and increased solar heating of the upper oceans, a phase which changed in 2001, since when there has been increased cloud - reflecting the sun's heat back into space - and no additional warming of the oceans. Already, summer ice in the Arctic is recovering.
    Another factor in the cooling is the current "quiet sun" and the absence of sunspots, which has confounded NASA predictions. A large body of peer-reviewed evidence links ocean temperatures with the sun's magnetic cycle.
    The general thrust of Peter's thesis is now shared by many scientists worldwide - thousands disagree with the IPCC view. One petition in the USA already has more than 30,000 signatures from scientists who object to the IPCC's approach. But can the runaway global warming bandwagon be stopped? Governments and top scientists will want to save face, which is at best inhumane and at worst a form of abject cowardice.
    Thankfully, at street level, polls show very few believe the scary climate story. In the US, Canada and the UK, most do not trust the science, the campaigners or their governments, believing it's all a scam (which it is). A small, if deluded cabal has used its position and all manner of collusion to foster what Peter calls "this colossal erroneous child of our times".