2040 Revelations Read Online Free Page A

Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis. She’d become obsessed with this theory after finding an oversized femur bone and subsequently meeting other like-minded archaeologists, mostly amateurs, following the completion of her PhD in her mid-twenties. Sarah, and her group , had gone from country to country following up on leads found on the net and in medieval documents contained within libraries of obscure religious orders with tenuous links to the Catholic Church.
    Trish had always been open to her friend’s ideas on the subject, but had never really believed in the theory like Sarah did. It was interesting, exciting and more than a little mysterious, but to prove it as fact was nigh on impossible. If she needed convincing, and she had an open mind, then sceptics making up the majority of the scientific community would need more than a few scraps to even begin to change their views.
    ‘Five hundred thousand years old,’ Sarah murmured to herself. ‘Do you know what that means?’
    ‘I’m not sure,’ Trish said, trying to keep her tone conservative. The dating was intriguing, but no more than that.
    ‘It means modern humans didn’t cast the pendant we found with the bones,’ Sarah told her, ‘as according to accepted theories, Homo sapiens didn’t even evolve until what? – an absolute maximum of four hundred thousand years ago. The earliest evidence of sophisticated casting equivalent to what we found was made by humans perhaps only four thousand years ago. So who made it, Homo erectus? Possibly, but extremely unlikely since there is no evidence they had the capability to cast anything. Couple this with the massive finger bones we found that indicate the individual’s height was about ten feet and—’
    ‘Come on, Sarah,’ Trish said chidingly, ‘that’s pure conjecture verging on fantasy.’
    ‘All right,’ – Sarah raised her hands to placate her friend – ‘perhaps eight feet. But considering Homo erectus, neanderthalis and sapiens all average roughly five to six feet, then eight is enormous. I have to get to the lab and get them to date the bones.’
    Excited, Sarah jumped up and grabbed her bags, hugged her friend and zoomed off, leaving Trish sitting alone, bemused and left staring at the remains of a piece of chocolate cake discarded and forgotten on a plate.
    Trish picked up Sarah’s unwanted morsel and popped it in her mouth, savouring the rich taste as she chewed. Waste not want not , she thought, unsure if she’d helped her friend or just put her onto another destructive path; she was the one, after all, who’d introduced her to Mark in the first place. Heaving a sigh, she gazed out across the extensive metropolis of London, laid out like a beautifully crafted urban tapestry below, and thought, I love this city .
     

Chapter Two
     
    It was seven o’clock post meridiem by the time Sarah reached the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit. Fortunately, the recently upgraded Research Laboratory for Archaeology was still open as the lights blazed forth from the Dyson Perrins Building where it was housed. Dean, an old flame, would hopefully be working late. He had a soft spot for her and he might push through the bone fragments for analysis. She was lucky; about ten years ago this process had taken a few days or even a couple of weeks, but a new technique pioneered at this very lab had changed all that. Radiocarbon dating could now be carried out in a matter of hours, regardless of the age of the sample or its composition. And if this advance wasn’t enough, another even bigger breakthrough made by the Chinese a few years later, enabled carbon dating’s seventy-five thousand year limit to be extended tenfold. This new process, known as crossmatch radiocarbon dating, utilised big data arrays, stratigraphy, quantum modelling and molecular retracing, which had shepherded in a new era of accurate dating techniques; and Sarah knew if she was ever to make use of them, the time was now.
    As she