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Somebody, four and a half thousand years ago, laid out a structure covering thirteen acres and aligned it to true north with an error of around one fifteenth of a degree. Not approximately north. Not north enough for ceremonial purposes. Within a few arcminutes of the actual rotational pole of the planet, using no compass, no telescope and no instrument that has ever been found. The base is levelled across that entire area to within a couple of centimetres. The four sides dif

For most of the last century, the story went like this. Around forty thousand years ago, in the caves of Ice Age Europe, something switched on inside the human mind. Symbolic thought arrived. People began to paint, to carve, to imagine. Archaeologists called it the creative explosion, and it had an address, and the address was France and Spain. It was a marvellous story. It had bulls at Lascaux and lions at Chauvet and a satisfying moment of ignition. It was taught in schools

Ask most people what a great white shark does, and they will describe something that has almost never happened. In a typical year, sharks of every species bite somewhere in the region of sixty to seventy people worldwide without provocation. Of those, fewer than ten die. There are more than five hundred species of shark, and a mere handful appear in that tally at all. In the same year, human beings kill somewhere in the order of eighty to a hundred million sharks. Hold those