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Real Audio Player free. Or keep browsing while you listen. Paul
Willis: The achievements of ancient civilisations can seem quite
dazzling, and this has led some people to claim that the
ancients had help from extraterrestrial sources. Dr David
Dearborne is an astronomer and physicist who's worked
extensively on Inca astronomy. So just how good were the ancient
Inca stargazers? David Dearborne: When the Spanish arrived and
started writing down books about these people that they
conquered, trying to understand how they had ruled this area,
they included a great deal of astronomy and they included the
astronomy because there were large rituals that involved people
observing the sun's rise and set between huge markers that were
constructed to mark certain dates. And the Inca were believers
that the sun was their patron or father, and that they were
intermediaries between man and the sun.