Reappraising our past to repair our present.

There was a front page article in the International Herald Tribune last Friday regarding finds in Northern Spain on cave art discoveries. In the British press it was reported in The Independent, linked here.

For several years, evidence has been mounting that crucially may change many longstanding assumptions about mankind's distant and perhaps much more recent past. If accepted and proven, they will hugely affect how we see ourselves and some earlier civilisations we previously admired, such as the Romans, upon whom the EU has so regrettably modelled itself.

As a navigator by training, only fairly recently arrived in South West France and having been investigating these matters from a Devon-born seafarer's viewpoint on the maritime connections between the peoples occupying the coastlines and immediate hinterlands of Western Europe and its immediate Atlantic islands' coastlines, I have now reached the point of compiling a mass of papers, files and internet links into book form for publication.

Blogging will therefore be more restricted in the coming months, although I will be following the crisis in the EU as it unfolds and reporting as mounting amazement occasionally compels me so to do, as unhappily this mess will deeply impact all our lives.

A note on the book project, it will be in English and French, for those are the languages mainly used today in the regions of interest. Richard the Lionheart (Cœur de Lion,) on his crusade to the Holy Land  (possibly driven by urges related to the population movements illustrated in the map above) actually spoke neither of these, reportedly using mainly oc and some il; merely one small insight into some of the fascinating detail, which thanks to the internet, I have been able to explore from the small rural village that is now my home, which sits on the line that once defined the border between these two tongues and reportedly many more, a cross roads of civilisations and possibly key to a quite different past than that we have been taught. An illusory past that seems to have driven us in a direction that may now be seen as perhaps to be driving us towards chaos!