Andrew Collins is a well-known writer of speculat­ive theor­ies of human develop­ment and myst­er­ies. In his latest book, he turns to leg­ends of the stars and how cosmic influ­ences may have influenced human evolut­ion.

Cygnus is the Latin for swan. There happ­ens to be a very prom­in­ent con­stell­at­ion called Cygnus which curr­ently sits in the region of the sky not too far from the North Cel­est­ial pole (and actu­ally con­tained the North Cel­est­ial pole some 16,000 years ago). The book exploits the fact that this con­stell­at­ion was known by a number of anci­ent soci­et­ies and that the swan is a prom­in­ent char­ac­ter in many myth­o­log­ies. Well, it can be a swan; but often what we now rem­ember as a swan was orig­in­ally a goose. This bird flies north in the summer – to breed, as we now know, but the anci­ents believed they were taking the souls of the dead to the great axis of creat­ion which turned the heav­ens, and thus a great myth­o­logy arose.

Books of this genre are invariably sub­ject­ive and often simply recount the pro­cess by which the author made his or her dis­cov­er­ies. This book is very much in this format; con­seq­uently, there is a very large amount of mat­er­ial cov­ered. Some of it is really rather good, and Coll­ins does a valu­able job in bring­ing aware­ness of the import­ant newly dis­cov­ered Neo­lithic temple at Göbekli Tepe to a wider public. He then covers a large number of myths of the swan. It will be int­er­est­ing to see what anthro­po­log­ists and folk­lor­ists make of his mat­er­ial, but it is an enjoy­able recount­ing of some import­ant myths. Coll­ins then spec­u­lates as to why Cygnus is so prom­in­ent in world myth­o­logy. To get there, we have a lot of mat­er­ial express­ing Coll­ins’s worldview; in part­i­cular, that mind is uni­versal and can be con­tacted by shaman­istic meth­ods. Actu­ally, I believe some­thing rather sim­i­lar, so I wouldn’t knock this material, but I do wonder why it has to go in here. It is irrel­ev­ant to the latter half of the book and would make a good topic for a book of its own.

What makes this book unique is Coll­ins’s con­tent­ion that human evol­ut­ion was greatly acc­el­er­ated in Neo­lithic times by the input of Cosmic Rays and that the source of these Cosmic Rays can be located in the con­stell­at­ion of Cygnus, spec­if­ic­ally the very bright X-ray source, Cyg X-3.

This sugg­est­ion may be thought utt­erly dis­miss­ible but, by a most curi­ous turn of fate, another team, with impecc­able scient­ific cre­dent­ials, have indep­end­ently sugg­ested the same scen­ario.

Aden and Marj­orie Mein­els, previ­ously of the Kitt Peak Nat­ional Observ­at­ory, also sugg­est a source in Cygnus as the irrad­iat­ing body (these coin­cid­ences are very strik­ing) but theirs is another source, the plan­et­ary nebula aff­ect­ion­ately known as the Cat’s Eye nebula. Coll­ins recounts the story from the beginn­ing and so some of the Mein­elses’s early work is out­lined. The Mein­elses are still work­ing on their hypo­thesis and another paper from them has rec­ently been sub­mitted to a prom­in­ent Brit­ish astro­nom­ical jour­nal.

The problem both groups have is that Cosmic Rays, which are very energ­etic part­icles (mainly protons), are electric­ally charged and there­fore follow mag­netic fields as they wind through inter­stellar space. Con­seq­uently, one cannot assume that a Cosmic Ray app­roach­ing from a part­ic­ular dir­ect­ion orig­in­ally came from that dir­ect­ion. It could have come from any­where.

Having spent some time myself trying to under­stand a part of this myst­ery, I am chary of anyone stat­ing con­clus­ively they have a source, but both groups make this claim. To do so, the Mein­els team ass­umes the Cat’s Eye nebula to be close (closer than many of us would prefer) and that it sent out a jet which swept over the Earth in Palæo­lithic times. This all­ows them to have mag­netic field lines going all the way back to the source, which can then be ident­if­ied.

Collins opts for Cyg X-3 as his pre­ferred source, which req­uires that the supp­os­edly neut­ral part­icles some groups claim to have det­ected come from Cyg X-3. These part­icles, dubbed ‘cyg­nets’ by work­ers in the field, might exist, but might not, as observ­at­ions are at the limits of detect­ion and the results are equi­vocal. There is no con­sensus on the nature of these part­icles and we may have to wait until a new gen­er­at­ion of detect­ors can clearly demon­strate their nature.

This depend­ency on cyg­nets is a major weak­ness in Coll­ins’s argu­ment – one which he will have to work hard on to con­vince others.

Collins thinks that the Cosmic Rays influ­enced early humans, who were able to ident­ify the source deep down in their caves where they pro­duced the mag­nif­ic­ent art­work we can still enjoy today. I wasn’t too sure why exactly they had to be down their caves to make the ident­if­ic­at­ion, but that is what is claimed. In fact, I don’t think the argu­ment Coll­ins gives to enable them to ident­ify the unique nature of Cygnus holds up at all, but the many weak­nesses and gaps in the argu­ment apart, Coll­ins has pointed out an area of re­search which may well prove to be fruit­ful. And if it does turn out to be corr­ect, Coll­ins will des­erve con­grat­ul­at­ions for point­ing this out. Prov­ided you like Coll­ins’s style, the book is inform­at­ive and read­able, but as always, never accept every­thing as gospel.