Chapter Two
Temples of the Stars – The Rise Of The Uru
Ever since the first ancestors of modern humans walked the earth, the heavens have always been a subject of fascination for early Man. Our stone-age ancestors gazed at the stars and wondered what they were; the movements of the Sun and Moon and seasonal climatic changes. Gradually there was born a primitive nature-worship. Our ancestors would have observed how quickly plants grew from the earth after rainfall. In their simplicity, they imagined the earth as a female, the great Earth-Mother, frequently fertilized by the rain [ie semen] of a great Sky-Father, to give birth to all plant, animal and human life. In time, as the importance of sunlight in the cycle of life was realised, the worshippers came to believe these deities had produced a child, the Sun-God.
Our stone-age ancestors observed the rising and setting of the Sun, Moon and Stars, and that they often rose in alignment with certain natural features; a mountain peak, large rock etc. This led to a primitive “star cult”, and the worshippers erected their own stone markers in line with natural features, with which the Sun, Moon or planetary body rose in alignment. Ultimately a more sophisticated megalithic astronomical science was born which aided our stone-age ancestors in their development of agriculture, as well as in their earliest maritime activities.
Traditional history teaches that all these developments were the work of stone-age people of the Old World, from where they were spread through early human migrations out across the earth, However, evidence exists to dispute this outmoded scientific dogma, for I am about to prove that the earliest dawning of the megalithic culture was here in Australia, and that it was the work of the earliest human civilisation on earth which evolved on this continent, being the creation of people who were offspring of the first modern humans [Homo sapiens], who evolved in Australia from populations of Homo erectus that entered this land via a great land-shelf which once connected Australia/New Guinea, and what is now island south-east Asia to the Asian mainland during the last great ice-age.
Conservative Australian scientists continue to speak in terms of our Aboriginal people being the only ‘first’ Australians, and that they arrived on this landmass from south-east Asia around 60,000 years ago. Yet, their folklore speaks of a number of other giant-size and smaller races having preceded them here. In May 1972 my late father, Mr W F [Bill] Gilroy, unearthed the limestone endocast of a robust-looking Homo sapien, from the surface gravels of a creek in the Tarana district. This find was followed by a second endocast found by me in 1973 in the same strata 15m from the first discovery.
This second skull-type, somewhat smaller, was a limestone endocast displaying late Homo erectus features. Endocasting is caused when mud filling the skull mineralizes to form an internal cast of the skull, whose bones fall away to leave the solid rock specimen, in a process that takes at least 250,000 years.
In June 1997 I recovered an even older limestone-mineralised Homo erectus skull-type from beneath a 3m high bank of 100,000 year old conglomerate sediments of a former creek that had flowed into the nearby Cudgegong River outside Mudgee, in the NSW central west in ice-age times. The skull, which came from the base of the 3m strata, was missing its right facial section but still displayed a thick projecting eyebrow ridge. Mud had filled the skull’s interior turning to limestone and the skull cap was missing, but its long, narrow braincase, as apart from the more rounded skulls of modern humans, had no forehead, identifying it as the skull of an archaic Homo erectus.
There are signs that the skull had originally been exposed on the surface for a very long time following an earlier burial, for it bore pit marks caused by long time exposure. Archaic Homo erectus is at least 1 million years in the past, and this skull gives the appearance of being anywhere between 800,000 to around 1 million years old.
This skull-type and a number of others in my possession, greatly impressed Queensland geologist John Wall who wished to ‘borrow’ them for study at Brisbane University. Of course knowing that once in government hands I would never see them again, I declined the request! These skulls demonstrate that, at some time in early Pleistocene [ice-age] times, populations of archaic Homo erectus entered Australia from Asia, to gradually evolve via late Homo erectus into modern humans by around 300,000 years ago – at least 200,000 years before modern humans evolved in Africa.
Thus Australia was the birthplace of the earliest modern humans [Homo sapiens]. I argue that it was populations of these first modern humans who, while others gradually migrated northward out across the earth, remained here to eventually develop the earliest megalithic culture, which was to become the Uruan civilisation.
Our Aboriginal people speak of the Uru as a race of ‘culture heroes’ who inhabited the land in the long-ago Dreamtime and passed on elements of their culture to the tribespeople. These ‘culture heroes’ are variously described as being pale or white-skinned; that they shaped many natural geological features and erected many often truly monolithic rock formations, and worshipped the Sun, Moon and Stars.They gave the Aborigines laws and passed on elements of their religion, such as Sun, Earth-Mother and Sky-Father worship, and taught the Aboriginal warriors the manufacture of the boomerang and the use of the woomera in spear-throwing. Over thirty-six years ago these traditions convinced me, that an advanced megalithic monument-building people had inhabited Australia. Yet when I published my theory in the press, I was immediately attacked by establishment archaeologists and historians, with cries of ‘impossible’ and that I was wasting my time searching for something that was nothing more than an Aboriginal myth!