Sad News: Professor John Evans

The Telegraph, UK

Evans rejected the "diffusionist" theory that such development could not have come about without the influence of hypothetical "invaders" from a supposedly more advanced Orient. Maltese prehistoric culture had flowered, he suggested, out of earlier indigenous cultures without any intervention from outside. His "anti-diffusionist" conclusions were validated by the development of radiocarbon dating, which showed that the Maltese temples predate the Egyptian Pyramids.

John Davies Evans was born on January 22 1925 in Liverpool to Welsh parents. From the Liverpool Institute he won an open scholarship to read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, aged 17. His studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War, during which he served at Bletchley Park as one of the team involved in breaking each day's new Enigma code settings.