"I think," he says, "that the whole of Europe, indeed the whole of Indo-Europe, is based on latitude. That's the reason white-Anglo-Saxon Protestants are in charge of the world, it's a latitudinal thing. But it's practical to have a Scando-Germanic domination and I use that term really specifically. Are you with me?"
Not really. Not at all, in fact. Cope - who's performing at Scotland's annual Burns an' a' That! festival, hence my question - has reached over and grabbed the wheel of this interview and I don't know where it's headed.
You could blame it on the drugs. Cope used to take a lot of LSD (and he's recently embarked on more "experimentation", for research purposes, of which more later). But if his brain was so fried, then how has he managed to write two acclaimed books on prehistoric sites?
Never heard of him.