Much of science seems to me to revolve around the smallest fragments of evidence, spinning ludicrous stories from them. The archaeologist who finds a lump of bone and invents a family connection between baboons and humans, is no different from the medicine man who terrifies his tribe by proclaiming that thunderstorms prove the gods are angry.
I cannot understand why most archaeologists ignore the biggest question about humans: if we have been around, with our clever hands and powerful brains, for 200,000 years, why didn't we invent civilisation until the time of Moses?
In other words, how could we spend 98 per cent of our history in idleness, and then cram so many empires and great religions and earth-shattering discoveries into the final two per cent?
Human beings have no doubt always been ferociously intelligent, wildly ambitious, amazingly inventive, astonishingly versatile. It's impossible for me to believe that nothing of note, except a few cave paintings, was created by our race throughout almost all its history.
There must have been many Michelangelos, many Einsteins, many Caesars - long, long before the civilisations we know about. The true task of archaeology should be to dig these stories out. Because if humans really did invent civilisation in the times of Moses, then there's only one sane conclusion to be drawn: humans were not around for long before Moses.
And that theory, oddly enough, is the one you'll find in the Bible. Visit Uri at www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com