In my opinion if there is one problem in our world today it is over specialisation. Of course if you are a brain surgeon or even a very particular sort of engineer, it is necessary for you to know everything about your specific subject and skill. But such a high degree of specialisation can be a real impediment to a historian, and especially a historian dealing with the period we generally refer to as prehistoric. In this field there is a definite advantage to having a wide-ranging remit and an open mind. With little if any written evidence at our disposal we need to find small clues concerning the lives of our prehistoric ancestors wherever they appear. In the end it is a combination of archaeology, language, surviving customs, myths and even folklore that opens the door on such a remote period.

Sylvain Tristan is a researcher who is open-minded but never gullible, probing but flexible and thanks to his rare combination of skills, together with dogged determination and tremendous enthusiasm, I believe his book ‘The Golden Lines’ has added much to the reservoir of knowledge regarding the Megalithic peoples of Western Europe.

Like me, Sylvain has come to believe that the people who pulled, pushed and bullied those massive stones into place in France, Britain and other areas of Western Europe, had a profound understanding of the nature of the planet on which they lived and though this sounds unlikely for a Stone Age culture, more and more evidence is coming to light regarding their true mathematical capabilities. In the end the history books will have to be re-written, with much less emphasis on the brilliance of the Ancient Greeks, or even the cultures who supplied their mathematical skills – the Egyptians and Sumerians. It is becoming ever more evident that the mathematical accomplishments of the Megalithic people, as much as four thousand or more years ago, eclipsed anything that would be seen again in the world until the age of enlightenment.

What is more Sylvain shows that rather than representing some strange intellectual backwater, the acquired knowledge of the Far West of Europe almost certainly had much to do with the development and skills of those cultures we think of as being pivotal to the rise of humanity.

With the evidence so carefully collected and collated by Sylvain Tristan, working hand in hand with revolutionaries such as Xavier Guichard and Alexander Thom, the very maps of at least France and Britain take on a newer and more profound significance. The lines I called ‘the Salt lines’ and which Sylvain refers to as ‘the Golden Lines’ are the living proof on the landscape of a genius that once flowered here.

What follows in this book is a ‘must’ for anyone who suspects that history is not what we have been taught. Stand by to be astounded.