Ligabue Magazine 38

18.00

First semester 2001
Year XX

At the dawn of Biblical history, the chosen tribe of Israel consisted of only a few thousand people. The Lord kept a watchful eye on each individual and spoke out to warn or protect. The situation was a little different from today, when while Jews and Palestinians are at each other’s throats, he seems to look elsewhere. Or perhaps in his inscrutable designs in that corner of the world violence must always be punished with violence.

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In the period we are concerned with here, some Jews in the small tribe were inclined to succumb to the temptations of the Evil One: they included the “sons of God”, the descendants of Seth, and the “daughters of men”, the descendants of Cain. Moreover, there were also the so-called “giants of the Earth”, whose origin is unknown. They were heroes whose success exceeded the limits of divine law. The Lord, however, lost his patience, as we can read in the Holy Book of Genesis (6, 5-7): “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth.” Therefore, after saving Noah, he let rain fall for forty days and forty nights and (Genesis 7.22) “all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. And the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days.”

The Biblical, Assyrian-Babylonian, Indian and Chinese stories of the Flood (or “Universal Deluge”), one of the great myths of humanity, is still shrouded in mystery despite the efforts of geologists and their most recent research providing some essential information about how, where and when. With his usual scientific rigour, Viviano Domenici supplies us with some truly surprising information. The great flood drowning all living creatures – except those who sought refuge on the Ark – took place around 7,500 years ago. More or less the day before yesterday on the time-scale of the planet.

Considering we know something of the culture of men from around 4000 years BC, it’s even surprising that we have never found an eye-witness to the cataclysm, since there is always some survivor who lives to tell the tale. The level of the Aegean Sea had continually been losing until it eventually began to flow into what was the “Black Lake” beyond the Bosporus. The water pouring into the lake had four hundred times the power of the Niagara Falls. Recently, an explorer found the remains of a building on the bed of the Black Sea… at this point, however, I will leave our readers the pleasure of savouring Viviano Domenici’s revelations on page 68

But now let’s go back several million years. Imagine taking the palaeontologist and archaeologist Giancarlo Ligabue to the edge of a desert he doesn’t know. You’ll see him scouring the landscape and then pointing like a setter to something normal people simply don’t see. If there is a dinosaur fossil in the desert, even only a single rib, you can be sure he’ll find it. He has discovered dinosaurs in Africa, America and Asia, and if there are no fossils, he will find trails or eggs. Our researcher is to dinosaurs what trained dogs in Piedmont are to truffles. He sniffs them out. His whole nervous system goes on alert, and like a water-diviner armed with geological charts he simply says: “dig here”. And he never gets it wrong, as we know from his accounts published in this magazine. But he doesn’t stop at dinosaurs. He has also found prehistoric fossil animals which, when crushed and mixed with water or alcohol, become an important medicine in the Chinese pharmacopoeia, a suggestively named panacea called dragon’s teeth. The properties of this medicine are described by Dr Ligabue on page 142. 134.

It took his flair to unearth dragon’s teeth in an old Chinese drugstore and then discover that this placebo sometimes uses up to l,500 natural elements: from fossils of Hipparion (a small horse from two million years ago) or a hominid called Sinanthropus pekinensis (Peking man) and an enormous primate named Gigantopithecus blacki after the palaeontologist Davidson Black. You don’t believe that these dragon’s teeth are prodigious?

Well, the Swedish geologist G. Anderson claims that by mixing dragon ‘s teeth in a cup of tea he obtained a universal remedy for malaria, female afflictions, liver disorders, heart diseases and even anxiety – obviously not only a bane of modern times. I don’t know whether Giancarlo Ligabue packs some dragon’s tooth into his bags before setting off to face the dangers of exploration, but I personally have unbounded faith in Chinese medicine, and especially acupuncture, which has cured my headaches and insomnia. According to a semi-serious joke, formalists are people who explain to others what they haven’t understood themselves. This could couldn’t be farther from the truth as regards the writer and explorer Maurizio Leigheb, who carefully applies the golden rules of American journalism: if he writes Garibaldi, he will first check an encyclopaedia to be sure the Christian name is Giuseppe. For twenty-five years, beginning in 1969, he explored and photographed the islands in the Indonesian and Melanesian archipelagos.

Our readers who remember his articles in this review, the most recent being about the Matiz, the Jaguar men of the Amazon, will also enjoy his description on page 38 of the Danakil, a fiery desert. It would certainly have made a fitting setting for one of the lowest circles in Dante’s Inferno. A hundred and twenty metres below sea level, this depression is covered by a layer of salt 800 metres thick. It is where the Afar Iive- or rather survive – in what may be considered the cradle of humankind. Here the bones of our earliest forefathers have been found, while in colonial days the desert claimed the lives of adventurous Italian explorers. Maurizio Leigbeb’s account is both fascinating and dramatic. When it comes to cultural curiosity, another man with unrivalled knowledge is Guido Carlo Pigliasco. With the aid of his naturally computerised mind – he moves with the same ease in the islands of the Pacific as in his own back garden – he offers us a view of the Lapita culture, a complex found in Fiji and named after a beach on the island of Konà in New Caledonia. Although still relatively unknown, the Lapita culture is a key piece in the mosaic of human history.

I suggest reading this article very carefully, otherwise your pirogue may well run aground! Unfortunately, I don’t have enough space left to do justice to the Peruvian archaeologist Federico Kauffmann Doig. The great value of his work has been acknowledged with an award called “Amauta”, or “Wise Man” in the Inca tongue. Doig is the director of the Peruvian Museum of Art and the Institute of Amazon Archaeology, Peru, and a member of the scientific committee of the Ligabue Study and Research Centre. His article on page 124, the “Lagoon of Mummies” offers a fascinating description of a faraway world and its mysteries. Lastly, I should like to draw your attention to the pages of photographs chosen by the editorial staff. They are not only stunning and evocative but reveal the craft of expert photographers who know how to see and translate into images what we often fail to see.

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