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traces they left behind still question and challenge us. To find the correct answers to their questions, to meet their challenge, archaeological research institutes should receive adequate funds from their governments, but perhaps also from an international organisation, so that they can systematise and intensify their investigations. It is right and necessary for the industrial nations to invest millions of pounds in research for the future, but should research into our past be treated as the Cinderella of the present for that reason? The day may come when the nations begin an archaeological research race that they all keep a strict military secret. Then a situation will arise of the kind we experienced with the first landing on the moon, but the race that begins then will not be a question of prestige so much as a matter of cashing in. Twelve miles south of the Spanish town of Ronda, in a solitary mountain valley, lies the cave of La Pileta. It can be proved that men lived in this cave from 30,000 to 6,000 B.C. The cave walls are covered with strange stylised signs that are not just senseless scribbles, for they are executed in a masterly fashion and are often repeated. They might be a kind of writing. In the mountains of Ennedi in the southern Sahara, Peter Fuchs found rock engravings of four female figures of a kind found nowhere else in Africa. The bodies of the figures wear clothes and exhibit tattoos similar to those found in the South Pacific. Yet the distance between the southern Sahara and So-called meanders have long been known from many cave drawings in Africa and Europe. They are drawings of mazes and so far no one knows what to make of them. But now these labyrinth symbols have also been found on South American cave walls, especially in the Territorio Nacional de Santa Cruz and the Territorio de Neuguen, Argentine. Was there an exchange of ideas between the artists who created them? How else can the repetition of the same symbols be explained? The Argentinian scholar Juan Moricz has shown that the language of the Magyars was spoken in the ancient kingdom of Quito even before the Spanish conquest. He found the same family names, the same place names and identical burial customs. When the ancient Magyars buried a dead man, they said farewell to him with the words: 'He will disappear into the constellation of the Great Bear.’ And in the South American valleys of Quinche and Cochasqui there are burial mounds which are faithful reproductions of the seven main stars of Ursa Major. A stone 7 1/2 ft high and 33ft in circumference has been lying since prehistoric times on a small hill between Abancay and the River Apurimac, Peru, on the stretch Cuzco-Macchu Picchu. This Piedra de Saihuite bears reliefs which show wonderful terraces, temples and whole blocks of houses, as well as strange ‘drains' and writing that is still undeciphered. Similar reliefs in this area are known by the names Rumihuasi and Intihuasi. Rumihuasi exhibits a model of a temple with a niche 4 ft 7 ins high. In this connection I should like to mention a number of sites where intensive modern research could probably ‘decipher’ many riddles of our past in a way that would benefit technology. The remains of a human settlement whose C-14 dating gave an age of 29,600 years were found on the island of Santa Rosa, California. the Pacific islands is 15,625 miles as the crow flies!