This should be an interesting book. After all, Graham Hancock has written some deeply-researched bestsellers, including, Fingerprints of the Gods and Keepers of Genesis. It’s subtitled, Meetings With the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, suggesting a wide-ranging survey of “the” supernatural in the manner of Lyall Watson’s Supernature, or Colin Wilson’s The Occult.

Inexplicably, Hancock concerns himself mostly with that most tiresome of subjects, paleolithic cave paintings, a topic rendered tedious by the fact that even its greatest exponents have ceased drawing inferences from their rapidly-accumulating data mountains.

Hancock appears to have been dealt a body blow by a BBC investigation of his researches into a shadowy worldwide civilization he was convinced thrived around 10,000 years ago and which subsequently shaped the world as we know it. This was (presumably) Atlantis, and all data seemed to point to it.

The BBC checked it out and found most of it wanting. The hapless author was subjected to a remorseless grilling on the prestigious TV programme, Horizon. Not surprisingly, his sturdy defence wilted during the course of the show.

Now he’s back, determined it seems to prove his credentials as not only an accumulator of scientific data, but as an inference-creator of genius. Alas, he merely rediscovers Jung’s “collective unconscious”, largely through subjecting himself to harrowing episodes of drug-taking from shamans around the world. Interesting enough, but it’s been done better by others.

His conclusions: Could the “supernaturals” first depicted in the painted caves be the ancient teachers of mankind? (Oh, yawn).

He then discovers I.D. (Intelligent Design), a hot topic in the U.S.: “Could it be that human evolution is not just the ‘blind’, ‘meaningless’ process that Darwin identified, but something else, more purposive and intelligent, that we have barely even begun to understand?”

A below-par Graham Hancock, who should have spent more time in Zen monasteries instead of filling his body with toxic doses of poisons and listening to scientists who don’t even recognize the supernatural, so avoid the obvious conclusions of the data they study. These people refuse to make inferences because such conclusions would blow apart their tidy, material worldview from which they make a comfortable living from taxpayers who pay them millions to travel the world contributing nothing of note to it.

To be fair to Hancock, he has a go at some conclusions, but when you miss the point, you end up in an entirely different universe.