Randall Carlson rebuilds a lost timeline to illustrate how we might have developed and lost many civilizations in the past. He pitches the idea that the processional Great Year represented by the Zodiac may have been used as a clock to track and record reoccurring patterns of natural disasters.

Over the course of the last 150,000 years of human existence, he proposes, there have been many civilization leveling events in the geological record. Are the myths and legends encoded with wisdom to help navigate the wheel of time? The Egyptians believed that they were founded by survivors of a civilization completely lost. Their kingdom was imagined as a Renaissance of an earlier, even more sophisticated civilization.

Is it possible to know where you are going without knowing where you have been? Without knowing who you really are? Are we making any progress or, like Charlie Gordon in Flowers for Algernon, are we degrading each time we are humbled?