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Hi to everyone. I've been reading the site the last two months and have been entertained, not just by the topics, but the many interesting posters that come here. In another topic, I saw mention of the book "Forbidden Archaeology" by Michael Cremo.
In this topic, I would like to take a look, both critically and favorably at the examples cited in the book and see if the human race is possibly much older than we give it credit for, and, if so, what happened to all of that history.
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Here is a sample chapter for those who have not read this book, which, incidentally, is about nine hundred pages long:
Forbidden Archeology The Hidden History of the Human Race by Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson Sample Chapter
INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In 1979, researchers at the Laetoli, Tanzania, site in East Africa discovered footprints in volcanic ash deposits over 3.6 million years old. Mary Leakey and others said the prints were indistinguishable from those of modern humans. To these scientists, this meant only that the human ancestors of 3.6 million years ago had remarkably modern feet. But according to other scientists, such as physical anthropologist R. H. Tuttle of the University of Chicago, fossil bones of the known australopithecines of 3.6 million years ago show they had feet that were distinctly apelike. Hence they were incompatible with the Laetoli prints. In an article in the March 1990 issue of Natural History, Tuttle confessed that "we are left with somewhat of a mystery." It seems permissible, therefore, to consider a possibility neither Tuttle nor Leakey mentioned--that creatures with anatomically modern human bodies to match their anatomically modern human feet existed some 3.6 million years ago in East Africa. Perhaps, as suggested in the illustration on the opposite page, they coexisted with more apelike creatures. As intriguing as this archeological possibility may be, current ideas about human evolution forbid it.
Knowledgeable persons will warn against positing the existence of anatomically modern humans millions of years ago on the slim basis of the Laetoli footprints. But there is further evidence. Over the past few decades, scientists in Africa have uncovered fossil bones that look remarkably human. In 1965, Bryan Patterson and W. W. Howells found a surprisingly modern humerus (upper arm bone) at Kanapoi, Kenya. Scientists judged the humerus to be over 4 million years old. Henry M. McHenry and Robert S. Corruccini of the University of California said the Kanapoi humerus was "barely distinguishable from modern Homo." Similarly, Richard Leakey said the ER 1481 femur (thighbone) from Lake Turkana, Kenya, found in 1972, was indistinguishable from that of modern humans. Scientists normally assign the ER 1481 femur, which is about 2 million years old, to prehuman Homo habilis. But since the ER 1481 femur was found by itself, one cannot rule out the possibility that the rest of the skeleton was also anatomically modern. Interestingly enough, in 1913 the German scientist Hans Reck found at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, a complete anatomically modern human skeleton in strata over 1 million years old, inspiring decades of controversy.
Here again, some will caution us not to set a few isolated and controversial examples against the overwhelming amount of noncontroversial evidence showing that anatomically modern humans evolved from more apelike creatures fairly recently--about 100,000 years ago, in Africa, and, in the view of some, in other parts of the world as well.
But it turns out we have not exhausted our resources with the Laetoli footprints, the Kanapoi humerus, and the ER 1481 femur. Over he past eight years, Richard Thompson and I, with the assistance of our researcher Stephen Bernath, have amassed an extensive body of evidence that calls into question current theories of human evolution. Some of this evidence, like the Laetoli footprints, is fairly recent. But much of it was reported by scientists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And as you can see, our discussion of this evidence fills up quite a large book.
Without even looking at this older body of evidence, some will assume that there must be something wrong with it--that it was properly disposed of by scientists long ago, for very good reasons. Richard and I have looked rather deeply into that possibility. We have concluded, however, that the quality of this controversial evidence is no better or worse than the supposedly noncontroversial evidence usually cited in favor of current views about human evolution.
But Forbidden Archeology is more than a well-documented catalog of unusual facts. It is also a sociological, philosophical, and historical critique of the scientific method, as applied to the question of human origins and antiquity.
We are not sociologists, but our approach in some ways resembles that taken by practitioners of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), such as Steve Woolgar, Trevor Pinch, Michael Mulkay, Harry Collins, Bruno Latour, and Michael Lynch.
Each of these scholars has a unique perspective on SSK, but they would all probably agree with the following programmatic statement. Scientists' conclusions do not identically correspond to states and processes of an objective natural reality. Instead, such conclusions reflect the real social processes of scientists as much as, more than, or even rather than what goes on in nature.
The critical approach we take in Forbidden Archeology also resembles that taken by philosophers of science such as Paul Feyerabend, who holds that science has attained too privileged a position in the intellectual field, and by historians of science such as J. S. Rudwick, who has explored in detail the nature of scientific controversy. As does Rudwick in The Great Devonian Controversy, we use narrative to present our material, which encompasses not one controversy but many controversies--controversies long resolved, controversies as yet unresolved, and controversies now in the making. This has necessitated extensive quoting from primary and secondary sources, and giving rather detailed accounts of the twists and turns of complex paleoanthropological debates.
For those working in disciplines connected with human origins and antiquity, Forbidden Archeology provides a well- documented compendium of reports absent from many current references and not otherwise easily obtainable.
One of the last authors to discuss the kind of reports found in Forbidden Archeology was Marcellin Boule. In his book Fossil Men (1957), Boule gave a decidedly negative review. But upon examining the original reports, we found Boule's total skepticism unjustified. In Forbidden Archeology, we provide primary source material that will allow modern readers to form their own opinions about the evidence Boule dismissed. We also introduce a great many cases that Boule neglected to mention.
From the evidence we have gathered, we conclude, sometimes in language devoid of ritual tentativeness, that the now-dominant assumptions about human origins are in need of drastic revision. We also find that a process of knowledge filtration has left current workers with a radically incomplete collection of facts.
We anticipate that many workers will take Forbidden Archeology as an invitation to productive discourse on (1) the nature and treatment of evidence in the field of human origins and (2) the conclusions that can most reasonably drawn from this evidence.
In the first chapter of Part I of Forbidden Archeology, we survey the history and current state of scientific ideas about human evolution. We also discuss some of the epistemological principles we employ in our study of this field. Principally, we are concerned with a double standard in the treatment of evidence.
We identify two main bodies of evidence. The first is a body of controversial evidence (A), which shows the existence of anatomically modern humans in the uncomfortably distant past. The second is a body of evidence (B), which can be interpreted as supporting the currently dominant views that anatomically modern humans evolved fairly recently, about 100,000 years ago in Africa, and perhaps elsewhere.
We also identify standards employed in the evaluation of paleoanthropological evidence. After detailed study, we found that if these standards are applied equally to A and B, then we must accept both A and B or reject both A and B. If we accept both A and B, then we have evidence placing anatomically modern humans millions of years ago, coexisting with more apelike hominids. If we reject both A and B, then we deprive ourselves of the evidential foundation for making any pronouncements whatsoever about human origins and antiquity.
Historically, a significant number of professional scientists once accepted the evidence in category A. But a more influential group of scientists, who applied standards of evidence more strictly to A than to B, later caused A to be rejected and B to be preserved. This differential application of standards for the acceptance and rejection of evidence constitutes a knowledge filter that obscures the real picture of human origins and antiquity.
In the main body of Part I (Chapters 2-6), we look closely at the vast amount of controversial evidence that contradicts current ideas about human evolution. We recount in detail how this evidence has been systematically suppressed, ignored, or forgotten, even though it is qualitatively (and quantitatively) equivalent to evidence favoring currently accepted views on human origins. When we speak of suppression of evidence, we are not referring to scientific conspirators carrying out a satanic plot to deceive the public. Instead, we are talking about an ongoing social process of knowledge filtration that appears quite innocuous but has a substantial cumulative effect. Certain categories of evidence simply disappear from view, in our opinion unjustifiably.
Chapter 2 deals with anomalously old bones and shells showing cut marks and signs of intentional breakage. To this day, scientists regard such bones and shells as an important category of evidence, and many archeological sites have been established on this kind of evidence alone.
In the decades after Darwin introduced his theory, numerous scientists discovered incised and broken animal bones and shells suggesting that tool-using humans or human precursors existed in the Pliocene (2-5 million years ago), the Miocene (5-25 million years ago), and even earlier. In analyzing cut and broken bones and shells, the discoverers carefully considered and ruled out alternative explanations--such as the action of animals or geological pressure--before concluding that humans were responsible. In some cases, stone tools were found along with the cut and broken bones or shells.
A particularly striking example in this category is a shell displaying a crude yet recognizably human face carved on its outer surface. Reported by geologist H. Stopes to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1881, this shell, from the Pliocene Red Crag formation in England, is over 2 million years old. According to standard views, humans capable of this level of artistry did not arrive in Europe until about 30,000 or 40,000 years ago. Furthermore, they supposedly did not arise in their African homeland until about 100,000 years ago.
Concerning evidence of the kind reported by Stopes, Armand de Quatre***es wrote in his book Hommes Fossiles et Hommes Sauvages (1884): "The objections made to the existence of man in the Pliocene and Miocene seem to habitually be more related to theoretical considerations than direct observation."
The most rudimentary stone tools, the eoliths ("dawn stones") are the subject of Chapter 3. These imlements, found in unexpectedly old geological contexts, inspired protracted debate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
For some, eoliths were not always easily recognizable as tools. Eoliths were not shaped into symmetrical implemental forms. Instead, an edge of a natural stone flake was chipped to make it suitable for a particular task, such as scraping, cutting, or chopping. Often, the working edge bore signs of use.
Critics said eoliths resulted from natural forces, like tumbling in stream beds. But defenders of eoliths offered convincing counterarguments that natural forces could not have made unidirectional chipping on just one side of a working edge.
In the late nineteenth century, Benjamin Harrison, an amateur archeologist, found eoliths on the Kent Plateau in southeastern England. Geological evidence suggests that the eoliths were manufactured in the Middle or Late Pliocene, about 2-4 million ago. Among the supporters of Harrison's eoliths were Alfred Russell Wallace, cofounder with Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection; Sir John Prestwich, one of England's most eminent geologists; and Ray E. Lankester, a director of the British Museum (Natural History).
Although Harrision found most of his eoliths in surface deposits of Pliocene gravel, he also found many below ground level during an excavation financed and directed by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In addition to eoliths, Harrison found at various places on the Kent Plateau more advanced stone tools (paleoliths) of similar Pliocene antiquity.
In the early part of the twentieth century, J. Reid Moir, a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and president of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, found eoliths (and more advanced stone tools) in England's Red Crag formation. The tools were about 2.0-2.5 million years old. Some of Moir's tools were discovered in the detritus beds beneath the Red Crag and could be anywhere from 2.5 to 55 million years old.
Moir's finds won support from one of the most vocal critics of eoliths, Henri Breuil, then regarded as one of the world's preeminent authorities on stone tools. Another supporter was paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. And in 1923, an international commission of scientists journeyed to England to investigate Moir's principal discoveries and pronounced them genuine.
But in 1939, A. S. Barnes published an influential paper, in which he analyzed the eoliths found by Moir and others in terms of the angle of flaking observed on them. Barnes claimed his method could distinguish human flaking from flaking by natural causes. On this basis, he dismissed all the eoliths he studied, including Moir's, as the product of natural forces. Since then, scientists have used Barnes's method to deny the human manufacture of other stone tool industries. But in recent years, authorities on stone tools such as George F. Carter, Leland W. Patterson, and A. L. Bryan have disputed Barnes's methodology and its blanket application. This suggests the need for a reexamination of the European eoliths.
Significantly, early stone tools from Africa, such as those from the lower levels of Olduvai Gorge, appear identical to the rejected European eoliths. Yet they are accepted by the scientific community without question. This is probably because they fall within, and help support, the conventional spatio- temporal framework of human evolution.
But other Eolithic industries of unexpected antiquity continue to encounter strong opposition. For example, in the 1950s, Louis Leakey found stone tools over 200,000 years old at Calico in southern California. According to standard views, humans did not enter the subarctic regions of the New World until about 12,000 years ago. Mainstream scientists responded to Calico with predictable claims that the objects found there were natural products or that they were not really 200,000 years old. But there is sufficient reason to conclude that the Calico finds are genuinely old human artifcts. Although most of the Calico implements are crude, some, including a beaked graver, are more advanced.
In Chapter 4, we discuss a category of implements that we call crude paleoliths. In the case of eoliths, chipping is confined to the working edge of a naturally broken piece of stone. But the makers of the crude paleoliths deliberately struck flakes from stone cores and then shaped them into more recognizable types of tools. In some cases, the cores themselves were shaped into tools. As we have seen, crude paleoliths also turn up along with eoliths. But at the sites discussed in Chapter 4, the paleoliths are more dominant in the assemblages.
In the category of crude paleoliths, we include Miocene tools (5-25 million years old) found in the late nineteenth century by Carlos Ribeiro, head of the Geological Survey of Portugal. At an international conference of archeologists and anthropologists held in Lisbon, a committee of scientists investigated one of the sites where Ribeiro had found implements. One of the scientists found a stone tool even more advanced than the better of Ribeiro's specimens. Comparable to accepted Late Pleistocene tools of the Mousterian type, it was firmly embedded in a Miocene conglomerate, in circumstances confirming its Miocene antiquity.
Crude paleoliths were also found in Miocene formations at Thenay, France. S. Laing, an English science writer, noted: "On the whole, the evidence for these Miocene implements seems to be very conclusive, and the objections to have hardly any other ground than the reluctance to admit the great antiquity of man."
Scientists also found crude paleoliths of Miocene age at Aurillac, France. And at Boncelles, Belgium, A. Rutot uncovered an extensive collection of paleoliths of Oligocene age (25 to 38 million years old).
In Chapter 5, we examine very advanced stone implements found in unexpectedly old geological contexts. Whereas the implements discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 could conceivably be the work of human precursors such as Homo erectus or Homo habilis, given current estimates of their capabilities, the implements of Chapter 5 are unquestionably the work of anatomically modern humans.
Florentino Ameghino, a respected Argentine paleontologist, found stone tools, signs of fire, broken mammal bones, and a human vertebra in a Pliocene formation at Monte Hermoso, Argentina. Ameghino made numerous similar discoveries in Argentina, attracting the attention of scientists around the world. Despite Ameghino's unique theories about a South American origin for the hominids, his actual discoveries are still worth considering.
In 1912, Ales Hrdlicka, of the Smithsonian Institution, published a lengthy, but not very reasonable, attack on Ameghino's work. Hrdlicka asserted that all of Ameghino's finds were from recent Indian settlements.
In response, Carlos Ameghino, brother of Florentino Ameghino, carried out new investigations at Miramar, on the Argentine coast south of Buenos Aires. There he found a series of stone implements, including bolas, and signs of fire. A commission of geologists confirmed the implements' position in the Chapadmalalan formation, which modern geologists say is 3-5 million years old. Carlos Ameghino also found at Miramar a stone arrowhead firmly embedded in the femur of a Pliocene species of Toxodon, an extinct South American mammal.
Ethnographer Eric Boman disputed Carlos Ameghino's discoveries but also unintentionally helped confirm them. In 1920, Carlos Ameghino's collector, Lorenzo Parodi, found a stone implement in the Pliocene seaside barranca (cliff) at Miramar and left it in place. Boman was one of several scientists invited by Ameghino to witness the implement's extraction. After the implement (a bola stone) was photographed and removed, another discovery was made. "At my direction," wrote Boman, "Parodi continued to attack the barranca with a pick at the same point where the bola stone was discovered, when suddenly and unexpectedly, there appeared a second stone ball. . . . It is more like grinding stone than a bola." Boman found yet another implement 200 yards away. Confounded, Boman could only hint in his written report that the implements had been planted by Parodi. While this might conceivably have been true of the first implement, it is hard to explain the other two in this way. In any case, Boman produced no evidence whatsoever that Parodi, a longtime employee of the Buenos Aires Museum of Natural History, had ever behaved fraudulently.
The kinds of implements found by Carlos Ameghino at Miramar (arrowheads and bolas) are usually considered the work of Homo sapiens sapiens. Taken at face value, the Miramar finds therefore demonstrate the presence of anatomically modern humans in South America over 3 million years ago. Interestingly enough, in 1921 M. A. Vignati discovered in the Late Pliocene Chapadmalalan formation at Miramar a fully human fossil jaw fragment.
In the early 1950s, Thomas E. Lee of the National Museum of Canada found advanced stone tools in glacial deposits at Sheguiandah, on Manitoulin Island in northern Lake Huron. Geologist John Sanford of Wayne State University argued that the oldest Sheguiandah tools were at least 65,000 years old and might be as much as 125,000 years old. For those adhering to standard views on North American prehistory, such ages were unacceptable.
Thomas E. Lee complained: "The site's discoverer [Lee] was hounded from his Civil Service position into prolonged unemployment; publication outlets were cut off; the evidence was misrepresented by several prominent authors . . . ; the tons of artifacts vanished into storage bins of the National Museum of Canada; for refusing to fire the discoverer, the Director of the National Museum, who had proposed having a monograph on the site published, was himself fired and driven into exile; official positions of prestige and power were exercised in an effort to gain control over just six Sheguiandah specimens that had not gone under cover; and the site has been turned into a tourist resort. . . . Sheguiandah would have forced embarrassing admissions that the Brahmins did not know everything. It would have forced the rewriting of almost every book in the business. It had to be killed. It was killed."
The treatment received by Lee is not an isolated case. In the 1960s, anthropologists uncovered advanced stone tools at Hueyatlaco, Mexico. Geologist Virginia Steen-McIntyre and other members of a U.S. Geological Survey team obtained an age of about 250,000 years for the sites implement-bearing layers. This challenged not only standard views of New World anthropology but also the whole standard picture of human origins. Humans capable of making the kind of tools found at Hueyatlaco are not thought to have come into existence until around 100,000 years ago in Africa.
Virginia Steen-McIntyre experienced difficulty in getting her dating study on Hueyatlaco published. "The problem as I see it is much bigger than Hueyatlaco," she wrote to Estella Leopold, associate editor of Quaternary Research. "It concerns the manipulation of scientific thought through the suppression of 'Enigmatic Data,' data that challenges the prevailing mode of thinking. Hueyatlaco certainly does that! Not being an anthropologist, I didn't realize the full significance of our dates back in 1973, nor how deeply woven into our thought the current theory of human evolution has become. Our work at Hueyatlaco has been rejected by most archaeologists because it contradicts that theory, period."
This pattern of data suppression has a long history. In 1880, J. D. Whitney, the state geologist of California, published a lengthy review of advanced stone tools found in California gold mines. The implements, including spear points and stone mortars and pestles, were found deep in mine shafts, underneath thick, undisturbed layers of lava, in formations that geologists now say are from 9 million to over 55 million years old. W. H. Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution, one of the most vocal nineteenth- century critics of the California finds, wrote: "Perhaps if Professor Whitney had fully appreciated the story of human evoution as it is understood today, he would have hesitated to announce the conclusions formulated [that humans existed in very ancient times in North America], notwithstanding the imposing array of testimony with which he was confronted." In other words, if the facts do not agree with the favored theory, then such facts, even an imposing array of them, must be discarded.
In Chapter 6, we review discoveries of anomalously old skeletal remains of the anatomically modern human type. Perhaps the most interesting case is that of Castenedolo, Italy, where in the 1880s, G. Ragazzoni, a geologist, found fossil bones of several Homo sapiens sapiens individuals in layers of Pliocene sediment 3 to 4 million years old. Critics typically respond that the bones must have been placed into these Pliocene layers fairly recently by human burial. But Ragazzoni was alert to this possibility and carefully inspected the overlying layers. He found them undisturbed, with absolutely no sign of burial.
Modern scientists have used radiometric and chemical tests to attach recent ages to the Castenedolo bones and other anomalously old human skeletal remains. But, as we show in Appendix 1, these tests can be quite unreliable. The carbon 14 test is especially unreliable when applied to bones (such as the Castenedolo bones) that have lain in museums for decades. Under these circumstances, bones are exposed to contamination that could cause the carbon 14 test to yield abnormally young dates. Rigorous purification techniques are required to remove such contamination. Scientists did not employ these techniques in the 1969 carbon 14 testing of some of the Castenedolo bones, which yielded an age of less than a thousand years.
Although the carbon 14 date for the Castenedolo material is suspect, it must still be considered as relevant evidence. But it should be weighed along with the other evidence, including the original stratigraphic observations of Ragazzoni, a professional geologist. In this case, the stratigraphic evidence appears to be more conclusive.
Opposition, on theoretical grounds, to a human presence in the Pliocene is not a new phenomenon. Speaking of the Castenedolo finds and others of similar antiquity, the Italian scientist G. Sergi wrote in 1884: "By means of a despotic scientific prejudice, call it what you will, every discovery of human remains in the Pliocene has been discredited."
A good example of such prejudice is provided by R. A. S. Macalister, who in 1921 wrote about the Castenedolo finds in a textbook on archeology: "There must be something wrong somewhere." Noting that the Castenedolo bones were anatomically modern, Macalister concluded: "If they really belonged to the stratum in which they were found, this would imply an extraordinarily long standstill for evolution. It is much more likely that there is something amiss with the observations." He further stated: "The acceptance of a Pliocene date for the Castenedolo skeletons would create so many insoluble problems that we can hardly hesitate in choosing between the alternatives of adopting or rejecting their authenticity." This supports the primary point we are trying to make in Forbidden Archeology, namely, that there exists in the scientific community a knowledge filter that screens out unwelcome evidence. This process of knowledge filtration has been going on for well over a century and continues right up to the present day.
Our discussion of anomalously old human skeletal remains brings us to the end of Part I, our catalog of controversial evidence. In Part II of Forbidden Archeology, we survey the body of accepted evidence that is generally used to support the now-dominant ideas about human evolution.
Chapter 7 focuses on the discovery of Pithecanthropus erectus by Eugene Dubois in Java during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Historically, the Java man discovery marks a turning point. Until then, there was no clear picture of human evolution to be upheld and defended. Therefore, a good number of scientists, most of them evolutionists, were actively considering a substantial body of evidene (cataloged in Part I) indicating that anatomically modern humans existed in the Pliocene and earlier. With the discovery of Java man, now classified as Homo erectus, the long-awaited missing link turned up in the Middle Pleistocene. As the Java man find won acceptance among evolutionists, the body of evidence for a human presence in more ancient times gradually slid into disrepute.
This evidence was not conclusively invalidated. Instead, at a certain point, scientists stopped talking and writing about it. It was incompatible with the idea that apelike Java man was a genuine human ancestor.
As an example of how the Java man discovery was used to suppress evidence for a human presence in the Pliocene and earlier, the following statement made by W. H. Holmes about the California finds reported by J. D. Whitney is instructive. After asserting that Whitney's evidence "stands absolutely alone," Holmes complained that "it implies a human race older by at least one-half than Pithecanthropus erectus, which may be regarded as an incipient form of human creature only." Therefore, despite the good quality of Whitney's evidence, it had to be dismissed.
Interestingly enough, modern researchers have reinterpreted the original Java Homo erectus fossils. The famous bones reported by Dubois were a skullcap and femur. Although the two bones were found over 45 feet apart, in a deposit filled with bones of many other species, Dubois said they belonged to the same individual. But in 1973, M. H. Day and T. I. Molleson determined that the femur found by Dubois is different from other Homo erectus femurs and is in fact indistinguishable from anatomically modern human femurs. This caused Day and Molleson to propose that the femur was not connected with the Java man skull.
As far as we can see, this means that we now have an anatomically modern human femur and a Homo erectus skull in a Middle Pleistocene stratum that is considered to be 800,000 years old. This provides further evidence that anatomically modern humans coexisted with more apelike creatures in unexpectedly remote times. According to standard views, anatomically modern humans arose just 100,000 years ago in Africa. Of course, one can always propose that the anatomically modern human femur somehow got buried quite recently into the Middle Pleistocene beds at Trinil. But the same could also be said of the skull.
In Chapter 7, we also consider the many Java Homo erectus discoveries reported by G. H. R. von Koenigswald and other researchers. Almost all of these bones were surface finds, the true age of which is doubtful. Nevertheless, scientists have assigned them Middle and Early Pleistocene dates obtained by the potassium-argon method. The potassium-argon method is used to date layers of volcanic material, not bones. Because the Java Homo erectus fossils were found on the surface and not below the intact volcanic layers, it is misleading to assign them potassium-argon dates obtained from the volcanic layers.
The infamous Piltdown hoax is the subject of Chapter 8. Early in this century, Charles Dawson, an amateur collector, found pieces of a human skull near Piltdown. Subsequently, scientists such as Sir Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin participated with Dawson in excavations that uncovered an apelike jaw, along with several mammalian fossils of appropriate antiquity. Dawson and Woodward, believing the combination of humanlike skull and apelike jaw represented a human ancestor from the Early Pleistocene or Late Pliocene, announced their discovery to the scientific world. For the next four decades, Piltdown man was accepted as a genuine discovery and was integrated into the human evolutionary lineage.
In the 1950s, J. S. Weiner, K. P. Oakley, and other British scientists exposed Piltdown man as an exceedingly clever hoax, carried out by someone with great scientific expertise. Some blamed Dawson or Teilhard de Chardin, but others have accused Sir Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum, Sir Arthur Keith of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal Collee of Surgeons, William Sollas of the geology department at Cambridge, and Sir Grafton Eliot Smith, a famous anatomist.
J. S. Weiner himself noted: "Behind it all we sense, therefore, a strong and impelling motive. . . . There could have been a mad desire to assist the doctrine of human evolution by furnishing the 'requisite' 'missing link'. . . . Piltdown might have offered irresistible attraction to some fanatical biologist."
Piltdown is significant in that it shows that there are instances of deliberate fraud in paleoanthropology, in addition to the general process of knowledge filtration.
Finally, there is substantial, though not incontrovertible, evidence that the Piltdown skull, at least, was a genuine fossil. The Piltdown gravels in which it was found are now thought to be 75,000 to 125,000 years old. An anatomically modern human skull of this age in England would be considered anomalous.
Chapter 9 takes us to China, where in 1929 Davidson Black reported the discovery of Peking man fossils at Zhoukoudian (formerly Choukoutien). Now classified as Homo erectus, the Peking man specimens were lost to science during the Second World War. Traditionally, Peking man has been depicted as a cave dweller who had mastered the arts of stone tool manufacturing, hunting, and building fires. But a certain number of influential researchers regarded this view as mistaken. They saw Peking man as the prey of a more advanced hominid, whose skeletal remains have not yet been discovered.
In 1983, Wu Rukang and Lin Shenglong published an article in Scientific American purporting to show an evolutionary increase in brain size during the 230,000 years of the Homo erectus occupation of the Zhoukoudian cave. But we show that this proposal was based on a misleading statistical presentation of the cranial evidence.
In addition to the famous Peking man discoveries, many more hominid finds have been made in China. These include, say Chinese workers, australopithecines, various grades of Homo erectus, Neanderthaloids, early Homo sapiens, and anatomically modern Homo sapiens. The dating of these hominids is problematic. They occur at sites along with fossils of mammals broadly characteristic of the Pleistocene. In reading various reports, we noticed that scientists routinely used the morphology of the hominid remains to date these sites more precisely.
For example, at Tongzi, South China, Homo sapiens fossils were found along with mammalian fossils. Qiu Zhonglang said: "The fauna suggests a Middle-Upper Pleistocene range, but the archeological [i.e., human] evidence is consistent with an Upper Pleistocene age." Qiu, using what we call morphological dating, therefore assigned the site, and hence the human fossils, to the Upper Pleistocene. A more reasonable conclusion would be that the Homo sapiens fossils could be as old as the Middle Pleistocene. Indeed, our examination of the Tongzi faunal evidence shows mammalian species that became extinct at the end of the Middle Pleistocene. This indicates that the Tongzi site, and the Homo sapiens fossils, are at least 100,000 years old. Additional faunal evidence suggests a maximum age of about 600,000 years.
The practice of morphological dating substantially distorts the hominid fossil record. In effect, scientists simply arrange the hominid fossils according to a favored evolutionary sequence, although the accompanying faunal evidence does not dictate this. If one considers the true probable date ranges for the Chinese hominids, one finds that various grades of Homo erectus and various grades of early Homo sapiens (including Neanderthaloids) may have coexisted with anatomically modern Homo sapiens in the middle Middle Pleistocene, during the time of the Zhoukoudian Homo erectus occupation.
In Chapter 10, we consider the possible coexistence of primitive hominids and anatomically modern humans not only in the distant past but in the present. Over the past century, scientists have accumulated evidence suggesting that humanlike ceatures resembling Gigantopithecus, Australopithecus, Homo erectus, and the Neanderthals are living in various wilderness areas of the world. In North America, these creatures are known as Sasquatch. In Central Asia, they are called Almas. In Africa, China, Southeast Asia, Central America, and South America, they are known by other names. Some researchers use the general term "wildmen" to include them all. Scientists and physicians have reported seeing live wildmen, dead wildmen, and footprints. They have also catalogued thousands of reports from ordinary people who have seen wildmen, as well as similar reports from historical records.
Myra Shackley, a British anthropologist, wrote to us: "Opinions vary, but I guess the commonest would be that there is indeed sufficient evidence to suggest at least the possibility of the existence of various unclassified manlike creatures, but that in the present state of our knowledge it is impossible to comment on their significance in any more detail. The position is further complicated by misquotes, hoaxing, and lunatic fringe activities, but a surprising number of hard core anthropologists seem to be of the opinion that the matter is very worthwhile investigating."
Chapter 11 takes us to Africa. We describe in detail the cases mentioned in the first part of this introduction (Reck's skeleton, the Laetoli footprints, etc.). These provide evidence for anatomically modern humans in the Early Pleistocene and Late Pliocene.
We also examine the status of Australopithecus. Most anthropologists say Australopithecus was a human ancestor with an apelike head, a humanlike body, and a humanlike bipedal stance and gait. But other researchers make a convincing case for a radically different view of Australopithecus. Physical anthropologist C. E. Oxnard wrote in his book Uniqueness and Diversity in Human Evolution (1975): "Pending further evidence we are left with the vision of intermediately sized animals, at home in the trees, capable of climbing, performing degrees of acrobatics, and perhaps of arm suspension." In a 1975 article in Nature, Oxnard found the australopithecines to be anatomically similar to orangutans and said "it is rather unlikely that any of the Australopithecines . . . can have any direct phylogenetic link with the genus Homo."
Oxnard's view is not new. Earlier in this century, when the first australopithecines were discovered, many anthropologists, such as Sir Arthur Keith, declined to characterize them as human ancestors. But they were later overruled. In his book The Order of Man (1984), Oxnard noted: "In the uproar, at the time, as to whether or not these creatures were near ape or human, the opinion that they were human won the day. This may well have resulted not only in the defeat of the contrary opinion but also the burying of that part of the evidence upon which the contrary opinion was based. If this is so, it should be possible to unearth this other part of the evidence." And that, in a more general way, is what we have done in Forbidden Archeology. We have unearthed buried evidence, evidence which supports a view of human origins and antiquity quite different from that currently held.
In Appendix 1, we review chemical and radiometric dating techniques and their application to human fossil remains, including some of those discussed in Chapter 6. In Appendix 2, we provide a limited selection of evidence for ancient humans displaying a level of culture beyond that indicated by the stone tools discussed in Chapters 3-5. And in Appendix 3, we provide a table listing almost all of the discoveries contained in Forbidden Archeology.
Some might question why we would put together a book like Forbidden Archeology, unless we had some underlying purpose. Indeed, there is some underlying purpose.
Richard Thompson and I are members of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, a branch of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness that studies the relationship between modern science and the world view expressed in the Vedc literature. This institute was founded by our spiritual master, His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, who encouraged us to critically examine the prevailing account of human origins and the methods by which it was established. From the Vedic literature, we derive the idea that the human race is of great antiquity. To conduct systematic research into the existing scientific literature on human antiquity, we expressed the Vedic idea in the form of a theory that various humanlike and apelike beings have coexisted for a long time.
That our theoretical outlook is derived from the Vedic literature should not disqualify it. Theory selection can come from many sources--a private inspiration, previous theories, a suggestion from a friend, a movie, and so on. What really matters is not a theory's source but its ability to account for observations.
Our research program led to results we did not anticipate, and hence a book much larger than originally envisioned. Because of this, we have not been able to develop in this volume our ideas about an alternative to current theories of human origins. We are therefore planning a second volume relating our extensive research results in this area to our Vedic source material.
Given their underlying purpose, Forbidden Archeology and its forthcoming companion volume may therefore be of interest to cultural and cognitive anthropologists, scholars of religion, and others concerned with the interactions of cultures in time and space.
At this point, I would like to say something about my collaboration with Richard Thompson. Richard is a scientist by training, a mathematician who has published refereed articles and books in the fields of mathematical biology, remote sensing from satellites, geology, and physics. I am not a scientist by training. Since 1977, I have been a writer and editor for books and magazines published by the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust.
In 1984, Richard asked his assistant Stephen Bernath to begin collecting material on human origins and antiquity. In 1986, Richard asked me to take that material and organize it into a book.
As I reviewed the material provided to me by Stephen, I was struck by the very small number of reports from 1859, when Darwin published The Origin of Species, until 1894, when Dubois published his report on Java man. Curious about this, I asked Stephen to obtain some anthropology books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In these books, including an early edition of Boule's Fossil Men, I found highly negative reviews of numerous reports from the period in question. By tracing out footnotes, we dug up a few samples of these reports. Most of them, by nineteenth-century scientists, described incised bones, stone tools, and anatomically modern skeletal remains encountered in unexpectedly old geological contexts. The reports were of high quality, answering many possible objections. This encouraged me to make a more systematic search. Digging up this buried literary evidence required another three years. Stephen Bernath and I obtained rare conference volumes and journals from around the world, and together we translated the material into English. The results of this labor provided the basis for Chapters 2-6 in Forbidden Archeology.
After I reviewed the material Stephen gave me about the Peking man discoveries, I decided we should also look at recent hominid finds in China. While going through dozens of technical books and papers, I noticed the phenomenon of morphological dating. And when I reviewed our African material, I encountered hints of the dissenting view regarding Australopithecus. My curiosity about these two areas also led to a fruitful extension of our original research program.
Writing the manuscript from the assembled material took another couple of years. Throughout the entire period of research and writing, I had almost daily discussions with Richard about the significance of the material and how best to present it. Richard himself contributed most of Appendix 1, the discussion of the uranium series dating of the Hueyatlac tools in Chapter 5, and the discussion of epistemological considerations in Chapter 1. The remainder of the book was written by me, although I relied heavily on research reports supplied by Stephen Bernath for Chapter 7 and the first part of Chapter 9, as well as Appendix 2. Stephen obtained much of the material in Appendix 2 from Ron Calais, who kindly sent us many Xeroxes of original reports from his archives.
In this second printing of the first edition of Forbidden Archeology, we have corrected several small errors in the original text, mostly typographical. The account of a wildman sighting by Anthony B. Wooldridge, originally included in Chapter 10, has been deleted because we have since learned that the author has retracted his statements.
Richard and I are grateful to our Bhaktivedanta Institute colleagues and the other reviewers who read all or part of the manuscript of Forbidden Archeology. We have incorporated many, but not all, of their suggestions. Full responsibility for the content and manner of presentation lies with us.
Virginia Steen-McIntyre was kind enough to supply us with her correspondence on the dating of the Hueyatlaco, Mexico, site. We also had useful discussions about stone tools with Ruth D. Simpson of the San Bernardino County Museum and about shark teeth marks on bone with Thomas A. Demere of the San Diego Natural History Museum.
I am indebted to my friend Pierce Julius Flynn for the continuing interest he has displayed in the writing and publication of Forbidden Archeology. It is through him that I have learned much of what I know about current developments in the social sciences, particularly semiotics, the sociology of knowledge, and postmodern anthropology.
This book could not have been completed without the varied services of Christopher Beetle, a computer science graduate of Brown University, who came to the Bhaktivedanta Institute in San Diego in 1988. He typeset almost all of the book, going through several revisions. He also made most of the tables, processed most of the illustrations, and served as a proofreader. He made many helpful suggestions on the text and illustrations, and he also helped arranged the printing.
For overseeing the design and layout, Richard and I thank Robert Wintermute. The illustrations opposite the first page of the introduction and in Figure 11.11 are the much-appreciated work of Miles Triplett. The cover painting is by Hans Olson. David Smith, Sigalit Binyaminy, Susan Fritz, Barbara Cantatore, and Michael Best also helped in the production of this book.
Richard and I would especially like to thank the international trustees of the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, past and present, for their generous support for the research, writing, and publication of this book. Michael Crabtree also contributed toward the printing cost of this book.
Finally, we encourage readers to bring to our attention any additional evidence that may be of interest, especially for inclusion in future editions of this book. We are also available for interviews and speaking engagements. Correspondence may be addressed to us at the Bhaktivedanta Institute, P. O. Box 1920, Alachua, FL 32616-1920.
One often wonders what would happen if evidences of human existence were found in the geologic column much earlier than the period in which humans are assumed to have existed. Would it not cause a revolution? Apparently not. Instead, it would probably be explained away, or ignored. There are already many evidences of human existence much earlier in the geologic column than the period in which humans are thought to have existed, and yet these evidences have been ignored or explained away. The following charts are taken from Cremo, Michael A & Thompson, Richard L., Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race (Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing Inc., Los Angeles, Revised Ed.1996.), hardback, 914 pages, ISBN 0-89213-294-9. To interpret the information in these charts, you need to know that "neoliths" and "paleoliths" are tools and artifacts assumed to have been made by humans at various stages of human history. Although the authors of this book are not Christian and are not committed to a recent creation, this book has a wealth of information about evidences for human existence all through the geologic column. The book covers anomalous human fossils from the pre-Cambrian to the late tertiary. The following charts are only a portion of those found in it. According to conventional thinking, humans did not exist until much later than the assumed times of these fossils.
A Forbidden Archaeology Report from Michael A. Cremo
On March 1, 2000 the New Scientist web site carried a report on a discovery of evidence for a hominid habitation site at Chichibu, Japan. At a hillside at Chichibu, north of Tokyo, Japanese archaeologists reported finding the remains of what the report called "the world's oldest artificial structure." The evidence for the structure took the form of ten post holes drilled into solid rock. The ten holes were arranged in two roughly pentagonal shapes, indicating that poles inserted into the holes formed the superstructures of two huts. Stone tools were also found at the site, which was given an age of 500,000 years.
The making of artificial shelters is something usually considered characteristic of anatomically modern humans. But because anatomically modern humans are thought not to have existed 500,000 years ago (the oldest skeletal evidence for humans of our type goes back about 100,000 years), archaeologists attributed the huts to the apeman Homo erectus. Chris Stringer, of the human origins group at the Natural History Museum in London, England, said, "it is the first good evidence from 500,000 years ago of a hut structure made by these people [i.e., Homo erectus]."
Other archaeologists shared Stringer's sense of surprise that Homo erectus could have achieved this level of culture. "If you have post holes, this is a rather exceptional situation in terms of what we know about hominid archaeology," says John Rick, an anthropologist at Stanford University. "Half a million years ago, we don't have any concept of what our ancestors were capable of doing at all."
But this sense of surprise may be based on incomplete knowledge of the history of our human species. In my book Forbidden Archeology, I have documented evidence for an anatomically modern human presence in Asia at the time represented by the newly discovered Chichibu site in Japan. For example, in 1958 workers found human bones in the Liujiang cave in southern China. In 1985, two prominent Chinese scientists, Han Defen and Xu Chunhua, identified the bones as belonging to the anatomically modern human species Homo sapiens sapiens. On this basis, they assigned the bones a fairly recent date. But the human bones were found in the same layers as bones of fossil animals from the Middle Pleistocene period, which extends from 100,000 to 1 million years ago. From elsewhere in the world, there is abundant evidence that anatomically modern humans were present at 500,000 years ago and earlier. The anatomically modern human skeleton found by German scientist Hans Reck at Olduvai Gorge in 1913 was solidly embedded in Upper Bed II, which is over 1 million years old. An anatomically modern human skull was found at a depth of over 45 feet, in Buenos Aires, in layers also over 1 million years old. This discovery was reported by the Argentine geologist Florentino Ameghino in 1909. These are just two of the many cases that could be cited.
So it is not necessary for archeologists to elevate Homo erectus to human status when they find evidence for huts in Japan at 500,000 years. If we consider all the available evidence, the Chichibu discoveries are best interpreted as evidence for anatomically modern humans in Japan at 500,000 years ago.
Surat, India - A month ago in mid-January, marine scientists in India announced they had sonar images of square and rectangular shapes about 130 feet down off the northwestern coast of India in the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay). Not only are their sonar shapes with 90-degree angles, the Indian Minister of Science and Technology ordered that the site be dredged. What was found has surprised archaeologists around the world and was the subject of a private meeting two weeks ago attended by the Indian Minister in charge of investigating the underwater site about thirty miles off the coast from Surat.
An American who traveled to that private meeting was Michael Cremo, researcher in the history of archaeology for the Bhakti Vedanta Institute in India and author of the book Forbidden Archaeology. I talked with him today in India about the dredging operation, what the ocean engineers found and the implications of first carbon dating of artifacts at more than 9,000 years.
Michael Cremo, Researcher of Ancient Archaeology and Author, Forbidden Archaeology:
"Within the past few months, the engineers began some dredging operations there and they pulled up human fossil bones, fossil wood, stone tools, pieces of pottery and many other things that indicated that it indeed was a human habitation site that they had. And they were able to do more intensive sonar work there and were able to identify more structures. They appeared to have been laid out on the bank of a river that had been flowing from the Indian subcontinent out into that area.
According to the news releases, they have done a radiocarbon testing on a piece of wood from the underwater site that is now yielding an age of 9,500 years which would place it near the end of the last Ice Age.
Yes, those are the indications that are coming. There were actually two radiocarbon dates: one about 7500 years old and another about 9500 years old. The 9500 year old one seems to be the strongest one. That's the one they are going with. This was announced by Minister Joshi (Murli Manohar Joshi is Indian Minister for Ocean Technology) at this meeting I attended in Hyderabad, India. He said there is going to be more work going on. It's difficult because it's very difficult to see down there. There is a very swift current. So, it's going to have to be a pretty massive effort, but he said the government of India is willing to put the resources behind it to do whatever it takes to further confirm these discoveries.
I also spoke in Hyderabad with an independent archaeologist not connected with the Indian government, but who has a deep interest in these discoveries and he says they are still going to have to send divers down there. Up to this point, they have not sent divers down. The information they have is based on the sonar readings and the dredging they have done. Eventually, they are going to have to find a way to get people down there to take a closer look at this. I think this effort is going to go on.
Now, another American archaeologist, Richard Meadows of Harvard University, is proposing there should be an international effort here. On the surface that sounds like a good idea, but it also may be an effort of American archaeologists and others to control the project. I don't think they want to see a civilization being as old as it appears to be according to these new finds at 9500 years ago. So, I would hope the Indian archaeologists and government would be very cautious about letting outsiders in there who might have a different agenda and who might try to control what gets let out about this very important discovery. It could be quite revolutionary.
Cultural Background of People At Underwater Site?
Even if we don't know what the cultural background of the people is, if it does happen to be a city that is 9500 years old, that is older than the Sumerian civilization by several thousand years. It is older than the Egyptian, older than the Chinese. So it would radically affect our whole picture of the development of urban civilization on this planet.
Now, if it further happens that additional research is able to identify the culture of the people who lived in that city that's now underwater, if it turns out they are a Vedic people - which I think is quite probable given the location of this off the coast of India - I think that would radically change the whole picture of Indian history which has basically been written by western archaeologists.
NASA Images Discover Ancient Bridge Between India & Sri Lanka
Space images taken by NASA reveal a mysterious ancient bridge in the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka. The recently discovered bridge currently named as Adam's Bridge is made of chain of shoals, c.18 mi (30 km) long.
The bridge's unique curvature and composition by age reveals that it is man made. The legends as well as Archeological studies reveal that the first signs of human inhabitants in Sri Lanka date back to the a primitive age, about 1,750,000 years ago and the bridge's age is also almost equivalent.
This information is a crucial aspect for an insight into the ancient epic RAMAYANA, which was supposed to have taken place in treta yuga (more than 1,700,000 years ago)....
"As a reader of Forbidden Archeology, I wanted to say after pages of discussion of evidence on both sides of the Calaveras skull controversy, authors Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson stated: 'Can it really be said with certainty that the Calaveras skull was either genuine or a hoax?'" The answer is clearly "yes" according to the data presented by Taylor et al. (1992) and Dexter (1986) concerning the Calaveras skull, which includes a radiocarbon date of 1,000 B.P. from bones found with it. Boutwell (1911, pp. 55-54) interviewed people associated with the finding of the Calaveras skull and discovered that this skull was locally regarded as a hoax. One of the principal participants in the discovery of the skull even admitted that it was a hoax to him. Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson further stated:
"The evidence is so contradictory and confusing that although the skull could have come from an Indian burial cave we might regard with suspicion anyone who comes forward with any kind of definite conclusion." Forbidden Archaeology forgets that significantly confusing and contradictory evidence is characteristic of hoaxes when a group of people manufacture testimony and evidence to support their hoax, while another group continues to find flaws in the story and contradictions in the fabricated evidence. It significant that Forbidden Archaeology makes no attempts to rebut the arguments of Taylor et al. (1992), Dexter (1986), Sinclair (1908), and the radiocarbon date, but simply ignores them without any given reason. All this book can do is issue a blanket accusation that anybody who comes to a conclusion is "suspicious" as if they are probably the members of some sinister conspiracy to subvert science. The reluctance of Forbidden Archaeology to admit that the Calaveras skull was a hoax is clearly understandable. The presence of such a hoax involving "Tertiary archaeology" indicates that such hoaxes and practical jokes were being played upon geologists and their fellow miners by other miners within the gold fields of Tuolumne and Calaveras Counties. The prevalence of traditional mining-camp jokes is well illustrated by organization of miners such as the Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus (Jackson 1941:351-352; Rather 1980:267-277).
[Return to the MOM page]
References Boutwell, J. M., 1911, The Calaveras Skull. in W. Lindgrens, The Tertiary Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper no. 73, pp. 54-55. Jackson, J. H., 1941, Anyone's Gold, the Story of California Mining Towns. D-Apppleton-Century, New York.
Dexter, R. W., 1986, Historical aspects of the Calaveras skull controversy. American Antiquity. vol. 51, no. 2, pp. 365-369.
Rather, L., 1980, Men Will Be Boys: the Story of E. Clampus Vitus. Rather Press, Oakland.
Taylor, R. E., Louis A. Payen and Peter J. Slota, Jr., 1992, The age of the Calaveras skull: dating the "Piltdown man" of the New World. American Antiquity. vol. 57, pp. 261-269.
Most readers are aware of the clash between a statement in The Urantia Book about the coming of the red man to the Americas about 85,000 years ago and the "Clovis First" view of early American pre-history. The latter view claimed that human penetration of the American continent was blocked by a Canadian ice sheet until 12,000 years ago.
The degree of fanaticism with which the "Clovis First" view was promoted by the "establishment" of American anthropology and archaeology surely came close to promoting "Clovis First" to the "divinely dictated" status of a fundamentalist's bible.
According to a recent review, the publication of the second volume of T. Dillehay's opus magnum, Monte Verde. A Late Pleistocene Settlement in Chile (Smithsonian Institution Press) has now hammered home the last nail in the coffin of the "Clovis First" dogma, at last enabling studies of American pre-history to proceed on a more realistic footing.
The destruction of the "Clovis First" dogma may draw the attention of readers with an interest in anthropology and archaeology to a book, first published in 1993 by Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson, and entitled Forbidden Archaeology, that has painstakingly documented a large volume of early archaeological work in the Americas and the rest of the world, that bore upon the early history of mankind, and suffered suppression in the interests of maintaining "establishment" prejudices.
Amongst the large volume of material in Forbidden Archaeology is an account of work at a site at St. Prest in France that, according to some workers, established beyond doubt the presence of tool-making man in that region around one million or more years ago.
The authors of Forbidden Archaeology draw attention to the phenomenon of suppression of contrary opinion that exists in all areas of science. To a large extent it is generated by a system of refereed publication in which leaders in the appropriate field are appointed as advisors to journal editors for the purpose of guaranteeing the high standards of reputable journals.
Praiseworthy as is this system for maintaining high standards among science journals, the same system can also act as a vehicle of suppression.
For a long time now certain theories have become established dogma such that opposition to them is rarely seen in print. To name a few besides "Clovis First" are the "Big Bang," and the "Out of Africa" view of mankind's beginnings.
Forbidden Archaeology provides Urantia Book readers with an extraordinary listing of forgotten literature references that may throw new light on topics covered in the book. Among these is documentation on Java man, the Tasmanians, and the Foxhall people.
Also documented is evidence of toolmaking as far back as 3 million years ago from Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The Urantia Book discusses the direct lines of evolution to Andon and Fonta. It does not rule out the existence of tool making hominids not on that direct line. Forbidden Archaeology provides a fantastic index to forgotten archaeological literature.
Michael A. Cremos books, "Forbidden Archaeology" and "Forbidden Archaeology's Impact," published in 1993 and 1998, respectively, have had a quiet impact on the closed-minded pre-programmed folks who dared to read them and consider their message.
Cremo believes many museums and departments of archaeology at major Universities, have been hiding fossilized artifacts that tend to challenge the accepted views of history.
It appears that scholars have been so close-minded about protecting accepted social belief systems, they have been bending over backwards for a very long time to make sure that the archaeological record supports the Old Testament story that claims God created man and woman. Notice how some die-hard Christians still close their minds to the concept of human and animal evolution, even though the fossil record supports a story of continual changes within species.
The Luciferian concept, on the other hand, has no problem explaining the bones of giant humanoid figures that have been excavated all over the world. As various alien races either visited this planet, or experimented with human DNA, they created a few two-footed, upright monsters that really walked in the mud with the dinosaurs.
Doug Elwell expounds on the Giants in the Spring, 2003 edition of his Mysterious World web site.
Without attempting to challenge Christian dogma, he describes a pre-Adamic race possibly created by the "fallen angels" before Adam. Argument for this is found in the fossil record. They included the bones of both Neanderthal and erectus humanoids. Elwell suggests that these were "proto humans" that appeared suddenly in the fossil record "almost as if they had been manufactured."
Elwell then theorizes that the various experiments with DNA manipulation of pre-existing animal species led to the homo sapiens, a race of humans that "possessed the specific characteristics that they desired."
The story next suggests that God, or the Hebrew YHWH, created Adam and Eve and placed them in the Garden of Eden to "supplant and eventually destroy" the abhorrent types of experimental humanoids that by this time were "running rampant all over His creation."
The "sin" was not the literal eating of fruit from a tree, but the failure by either Adam or Eve, or both of them to stay in the Garden and remain faithful to each other. The story suggests that they or their children wandered and mixed that perfect DNA with the imperfect DNA, thus spoiling YHWA's plan.
Among the results of the alien experiments were giant humanoid figures who shared the Earth in those early times.
While there is little in the archaeological record, historical material records the discovery of bones of giants throughout the world. Following are excerpts from a few historical documents in Ohio:
"In 1829, when the hotel was built in Chesterville, a mound near by was made to furnish the material for the brick. In digging it away, a large human skeleton was found, but no measurements were made. It is related that the jaw-bone was found to fit easily over that of a citizen of the village, who was remarkable for his large jaw. The local physicians examined the cranium and found it proportionately large, with more teeth than the white race of today: The skeleton was taken to Mansfield, and has been lost sight of entirely." (History of Morrow County and Ohio, 1880)
In digging the cellar of the house, nine human skeletons were found, and, like such specimens from other ancient mounds of the country, they showed that the Mound Builders were men of large stature. The skeletons were not found lying in such a manner as would indicate any arrangement of the bodies on the part of the entombers. In describing the tomb, Mr. Albert Harris said:
"It looked as if the bodies had been dumped into a ditch. Some of them were buried deeper than others, the lower one being about seven feet below the surface. When the skeletons were found."
Mr. Harris was twenty years of age yet he states that he could put one of the skulls over his head, and let it rest upon his shoulders, while wearing a fur cap at the same time. The large size of all the bones was remarked, and the teeth were described as "double all the way round." (The History of Medina County, 1881)
From Ashtabula, Ohio, came the following written description of an ancient four-acre burial ground unearthed at Conneuat in 1844:
"The mounds that were situated in the eastern part of what is now the village of Conneaut and the extensive burying ground near the Presbyterian Church, appear to have had no connection with the burying places of the Indians. They doubtless refer to a more remote period and are the relics of an extinct race, of whom the Indians had no knowledge.
"These mounds were of comparatively small size, and of the same general character of those that are widely scattered over the country. What is most remarkable concerning them is that among the quantity of human bones they contain, there are found specimens belonging to men of large stature, and who must have been nearly allied to a race of giants.
"Skulls were taken from these mounds, the cavities of which were of sufficient capacity to admit the head of an ordinary man, and jaw-bones that might be fitted on over the face with equal facility. The bones of the arms and lower limbs were of the same proportions, exhibiting ocular proof of the degeneracy of the human race since the period in which these men occupied the soil which we now inhabit." (The Conneuat Giants, Harvey Nettleton)
Similar records can be found in local libraries all over the American Midwest.
In his book, The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee, author John Haywood describes "very large" bones in stone graves found in Williamson County, Tennessee, in 1821. In White County, Tennessee, an "ancient fortification" contained skeletons of gigantic stature averaging at least seven feet in length.
The Indiana News on Nov. 10, 1975, reported that a nine-foot, eight-inch long skeleton was removed from a mound near Brewersville, Indiana, in 1879.
Skeletons measuring eight and one-half feet and 10-feet in height and wrapped in a "gum-covered fabric" were uncovered in the Humboldt lake bed near Lovelock, Nevada, in 1931, according to the Review-Miner, a local newspaper published on June 19, 1931.
A false colour image of the oldest zircon ever found Ancient crystal questions Earth's history By BBC News Online science editor Dr David Whitehouse
This is an astounding thing to find from 4.4 billion years ago Professor John Valley
A tiny crystal, little thicker than two human hairs, is the oldest Earth material ever found and it may force a reappraisal of what our planet was like early in its history.
The grain, technically known as a zircon, has been dated to be 100 million years older than any solid sample previously discovered. It casts doubt on the accepted state of the Earth over four billion years ago: a boiling ocean of molten magma, devoid of life. The new picture emerging is of a world cool enough to support water and continents, and possibly the first stirrings of life.
Cool Earth
Zircon is a durable crystal made of silicon, oxygen and zirconium, among other elements. The record-breaking sample was one of a dozen specimens extracted from the Jack Hills section of northwestern Australia. It was dated in two separate studies at 4.4 and 4.3 billion years old.
One of the researchers involved, Professor John Valley, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, said: "This is an astounding thing to find from 4.4 billion years ago. At that time, the Earth's surface should have been a magma ocean. Conventional wisdom could not have predicted a low-temperature environment."
The conditions prevalent at the time the zircon grain formed suggest that the Earth cooled faster than anyone thought.
"Previously, the oldest evidence for liquid water on Earth, considered by most to be a precondition for life, was from a rock estimated to be 3.8 billion years old," said Professor Valley.
Accepted view
Both research teams dated the zircon grains by analyzing their uranium isotopes - types of uranium atoms with different masses.
Uranium decays into lead. By calculating the ratio of uranium to lead, they determined that a dozen of the grains in their possession were very old indeed.
The zircon analysis also involved looking at the ratio of oxygen isotopes. This showed the crystals could only have originated in a wet, low-temperature environment. This does not fit in with the accepted view that shortly after the Earth formed 4.5 to 4.6 billion years ago, the planet was a ball of molten rock.
Scientists had thought that it took several hundred million years for the Earth to cool enough for oceans to condense out of a thick atmosphere.
Catastrophic impacts
Evidence from the Moon also suggests that about 500-600 million years after formation, Earth was subjected to intense bombardment from meteoroids. An intriguing question the new research raises is whether or not life could have arisen so early in the Earth's history. Professor Valley said that the zircon analysis was consistent with the suggested idea that life began but was completely extinguished in catastrophic impacts that melted the Earth's surface.
Both research papers are published in the journal Nature. Commenting on the work, Professor Alex Halliday, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said: "It represents a significant advance in reconstructing Earth's Dark Ages."
Forbidden Archaeology
While the above may be relatively uncontroversial, the use of archaeological evidence is often not so innocent. Over the past two centuries, researchers have found bones and artefacts showing humans like us existed millions of years ago. But scientists have suppressed, ignored, or forgotten these pieces of evidence.
Prejudices based on current scientific theory have acted as what Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson call a knowledge filter. According to Cremo and Thompson, we have thus come to accept a picture of prehistory that is largely incorrect. Forbidden Archaeology is a call for a change in today's rigid scientific mindset. Bringing to light a great number of long hidden artefacts and skeletal remains, Cremo and Thompson challenge us to rethink our understanding of human origins and the accepted methods of science itself. ISBN 0-89213-294-9
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Human lifespan went from 1,000 Years to under 100 By Pravda.ru Jul 6, 2004, 18:27 - [ Discuss this story ]
Before the Flood, czar Alulim ruled for 28,000 years, czar Dumuz - 36,000 years, Ibartrur - 18,000, the chronicles say. Then the czars "weakened" and started living for 1,000 years, in a course of time they lived for only 200 years.
Famous philosopher Blavatskaya quoted church priest Bel Beroze, the author of "History of Cosmogony" that Alapar, the second divine ruler of Babylon, lived for 10,800 years, Alor, the first ruler, lived for 36,000 years. The Asurs people lived for 50,000 - 100,000 years.
Not only Bible states that people were immortal. There is no nation on the Earth which has no legends and stories about immortal people. American Indians, peoples of Europe and Africa, native people of Australia and Oceania have legends of this kind.
Archaeologists dug out skeletons and remains of the people who lived much longer than 100-200 years, but official science ignored these findings, and so called "forbidden archaeology" studies them.
In the Soviet Union a human bone was dug out and researched by the specialist on skull reconstruction Victor Zvyagin. The result of the research was amazing - the ancient person having this bone, lived for 1,500 years!
According to scholar Ivan Filimonenko from Moscow, human life duration has been reduced by radioactive potassium. In ancient times, foodstuff contained 179 times less of radioactive potassium than now. This trend can be seen by researching trees - birch lives up to 250 years (it contains 13.8 percent of potassium oxide), pine-tree - 600 years (6.9 percent), fur-tree - 1200 years (3.2 percent). Using the ratio, one can calculate that human"s life lasted for 12,250 years before the Flood.
Some other causes of reducing human"s life are named as well: no ambrosia (God"s food) in human ration any more, turn to consuming meat and fried food, increasing amount of stress, loss of person"s spiritual ties with space. Currently the human being lives for 70 years on average, and this period is going to be expanded up to 100 years by "modern health care achievements".
May be, at some point we will be able to slow down the processes of ageing. Writer Arthur Clark named 2090 as the date for this. Currently the state of anabiosis is being intensively researched all over the world. The person can be preserved if he/she flies on interstellar missions or is incurable, by putting the person into anabiosis. Some alternatives can be applied to the person as well, such as sopor or deep freezing, in the hope that when the person awakes in future, the medicine for his/her disease will already exist. However, no method of the above three can preserve human body for millions of years.
There is one more option. Toads, amphibious, snakes, crabs and crayfish were found alive in the stones in different areas of the world. In 1856 workers found a prehistoric bat in the big boulder. They split the boulder with explosives. The bat was alive, it screamed, flapped its wings and died. Many other creatures found under similar circumstances, remained alive.
Does this mean that incurable persons can "den up" inside the stone boulder? By the way, the pharaohs from ancient Egypt dreamed about "eternal life" and were constructing huge stone graves-pyramids during all their lifetime.
From the book "Mysteries and Paradoxes of Time" by Vadim Chernobrov
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Athena, there are geneticists today who theorize that within a mere 20 or 30 years it will be possible for human beings, once again, to live to be 1000 years or more. Those scientists are simply researching turning off the aging genes. Of course it’s rather doubtful that such “elective” procedures will be available to anybody but the very rich, which may actually be just history repeating itself. After all, if man was made in the image of his gods, perhaps at one stage in the ancient past mankind reached a stage of technology that was similar to our own today. It’s not impossible that “life extension gene therapies” were made available to the upper crust of a high tech paleoancient civilization. Those who could afford it, would have certainly seemed like “immortal gods” to those who couldn’t, particularly if the immortals survived the floods and axis switches along side of those who survived with regular life spans. After said destructions, those who lived for 1000 years or more seemed to have exerted their authority and control over those who did not, which is certainly suggested in many ancient texts.
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Creationism has been criticized for not making testable predictions. Therefore I will make some predictions based on creationism. If these are refuted, it will not necessarily mean that creationism is false, but that the theory needs revision. If these are confirmed, it will not necessarily mean that creationism is true, but it will tend to support it. First, I assume that in the original creation, organisms were created for a variety of different environments. Since there is a continuum of environments, we should also expect to see a continuum of organisms. However, since there were only a finite number of different kinds of organisms at the creation, this continuum should be composed of a finite set of discrete organisms.
So we should expect to find reptiles and amphibians, each adapted for a different environment. Since there are environments in between, we should also expect to find organisms having some characteristics of reptiles and some characteristics of amphibians. Thus we should expect to find sequences of organisms A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H where A is a reptile and H is an amphibian, and the characteristics of the organisms gradually become more amphibian-like and less reptile-like. However, there will not be any links between A and B, or between B and C, et cetera, because these are a finite set of discrete organisms.
In addition, since these organisms were all created at about the same time, and did not evolve from one another, we should not expect to find any clear ancestor-descendent relationship between different organisms in the fossil record. In fact, it should be very difficult to construct reasonable and convincing phylogenies of organisms. Furthermore, we should not expect living creatures to have a clear hierarchical relationship, in most respects, since they were created for a continuum of environments.
Now, since the basic organisms were created recently, we should expect all of the descendents of a created kind to be very similar. They should generally have the same number of chromosomes, and the same genes at the same locations on corresponding chromosomes. They also should often be able to interbreed, which should make tracing their evolutionary relationships fairly complex. In addition, their nuclear and mitochondrial DNA should be fairly similar. However, between different created kinds, we should generally expect to find greater differences in the nuclear and mitochondrial DNA.
In fact, we should be able to quantify how much genetic diversity there is within a species. The genetic diversity measures the probability that a corresponding base pair of DNA will differ between two randomly chosen individuals. If the genetic diversity is 1/100, this means that two randomly chosen individuals will differ in about 1/100 of their DNA. We predict that the amount of genetic diversity should be consistent with the theory of neutral evolution and an origin about 6,000 years ago. We choose the theory of neutral evolution because one would expect created beings to be optimal in some sense, so that very few mutations would be beneficial. Thus the great majority of mutations should be neutral or slightly harmful.
Thus if we know the rate r of mutation per generation, which is the percent change in DNA per generation, and the generation time g in years, then the genetic (nucleotide) diversity should be about 2(6000/g)r, since there will be 6000/g generations since the creation and each one will tend to contribute 2r to the genetic diversity. Or it could be less, for species originating more recently. This means that for organisms with similar rates of mutation, we should expect the genetic diversity to be inversely proportional to the generation time. It is reasonable to assume, for example, that most of the mammals have similar rates of mutation, since many of the mammals are very similar genetically. This implies that the genetic diversity of mammal species should generally be inversely proportional to their generation times. Similar comments apply to the amount of genetic difference between species that have diverged from a created kind since the creation.
The hypervariable parts of the mitochondrial DNA control regions appear to mutate at a rate of about one percent every 200 to 300 generations in humans, and this seems to be a reasonable figure for any organism having about the same number of cell divisions in the female germ line (24) as man. So for this part of the mitochondrial DNA, we can let r be about 1/20,000, and our above formula gives a genetic diversity of 2(6000/g)(1/20,000) or 0.6/g. Thus with a generation time of 20 years for humans we should expect a diversity of 0.6/20 or 0.03 in the hypervariable regions of the mitochondrial DNA. For organisms with a one year generation time, and about 20 cell divisions in the female germ line, we should expect a diversity of about 60 percent. Of course, as one approaches the limit of 75 percent, these estimates of genetic diversity have to be reduced to some extent, because there will be many repeated mutations at the same base pair.
A similar calculation can be done on the nuclear DNA, assuming that most of it is non-functional. However, this calculation should be based on mutation rates that are directly observed as differences in DNA sequences from one generation to the next, and not based on evolutionary assumptions.
1000 to 10,000 generations old, which is roughly the age of the human population, ...
We review some of this evidence for the youth of the human race, including recent findings concerning mitochondrial DNA mutation rates which give even a much younger age than 1,000 generations. Age estimates are obtained by observing differences between the DNA of different individuals, and are calculated using estimates of mutation rates. Mitochondrial DNA is often used for this; it is separate from the bulk of the human DNA, which is found in the cell nucleus. Mitochondrial DNA has about 16,000 base pairs and mutates, apparently, much faster than the nuclear DNA. Human mitochondrial DNA has been completely mapped, and all the coding regions are known, and the proteins or RNA for which they code. Some of the mitochondrial DNA does not code for anything, and is known as a control region. This region appears to mutate faster than any other region, because the variation among humans is greatest here.
Recently, mitochondrial DNA mutation rates were measured directly (Parsons, Thomas J., et al., A high observed substitution rate in the human mitochondrial DNA control region, Nature Genetics vol. 15, April 1997, pp. 363-367). The mutation rate in a segment of the control region of mitochondrial DNA was directly measured by comparing mitochondrial DNA from siblings and from parents and their offspring. Mitochondrial DNA was found to mutate about 20 times faster than previously thought, at a rate of one mutation (substitution) every 33 generations, approximately. In this section of the control region, which has about 610 base pairs, humans typically differ from one another by about 18 mutations. By simple mathematics, it follows that the human race is about 300 generations old. If one assumes a typical generation is about 20 years, this gives an age of about 6000 years.
This calculation is done in the following way. Let us consider two randomly chosen human beings, assuming all human beings initially have identical mitochondrial DNA. After 33 generations, two such random humans will probably differ by two mutations, since there will be two separate lines of inheritance and probably one mutation along each line. After 66 generations, two randomly chosen humans will differ by about four mutations. After 100 generations, they will differ by about six mutations. After 300 generations, they will differ by about 18 mutations, which is about the observed value.
It will be interesting to see the results of similar studies on other organisms. Probably the only reason that the human race seems so young compared to other species is that it has been studied more. When mutation rates are measured for other species, probably revealing significantly greater rates than in humans, similar young ages will probably be obtained.
In fact, there is already some evidence in this direction, based also on mitochondrial DNA. Since mitochondria are similar in all organisms, it is reasonable to assume that mitochondrial DNA mutates at about the same rate in all organisms. Also, all organisms that are roughly the same size as humans should have roughly the same number of cell divisions per generation in the female line. For humans, this is 24 divisions. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that all organisms whose size is in the range mouse to elephant probably have about the same rate of mitochondrial DNA mutation per generation as humans. One biologist informed me that these assumptions are reasonable.
Now, in a portion of the control region that has about 600 base pairs, human mitochondrial DNA mutates about once every 33 generations. This translates to about one percent divergence between two random individuals every 100 generations. In another portion of the control region, humans appear to mutate a little slower, at about one percent every 150 generations. (This follows because typical humans differ by about 8 mutations in a region of about 400 base pairs that was used to study neanderthal DNA. This amounts to a difference of about two percent.) Therefore, it is also reasonable to suggest that other species in the mouse to elephant range will diverge at about one percent every 100 to 150 generations in the mitocondrial DNA control region.
In this regard, it is interesting to see what the typical differences are between individuals in different species. For example, in the control region, wolves and coyotes differ by about 7.5 percent. (See The Origin of Dogs: Running With the Wolves Science 1997 June 13; 276 (5319):1647 (in Research News) by V. Morell.) By our previous calculations, it would take about 750 to 1000 generations to achieve this divergence. With a generation time of a few years, this would imply a separation time of a few thousand years ago. Wolves differ from each other by about 2 percent in the control region. (See C. Vila, P. Savolainen, J. E. Maldonado, I. R. Amorim, J. E. Rice, R. L. Honeycutt, K. A. Crandall, J. Lundeberg, and R. K. Wayne, "Multiple and Ancient Origins of the Domestic Dog," Science, June 13, 1997, vol. 276, no. 5319, pp. 1687-1689 (in Reports)). This implies an origin about 200-300 generations ago. With a few years generation time, this would be a thousand years or so ago. This low figure might be explained because the whole control region changes somewhat more slowly than the parts considered earlier. The same reference states that dogs also differ by about 2 percent, leading to a similar time of origin. Most dog species differ within themselves by about one percent, implying a more recent origin.
Seven species of diving ducks were studied in (Multiple independent transpositions of mitochondrial DNA control region sequences to the nucleus, PNAS 1996 93: pp. 15239-15243). The control region divergence was less than 17 percent. This translates to 1700 - 2500 generations, which at a few years per generation is also in the several thousands of years range. Closely related species of birds were studied in (The Importance of Recent Ice Ages in Speciation: A Failed Paradigm Science 1997 September 12; 277 (5332): p. 1666 (in Reports), by J. Klicka and R. M. Zink). The difference in total mitochodrial DNA was about 5 percent or less. This probably translates to about 20 percent in the control region, and thus about 2000 to 3000 generations. With 2 or 3 years per generation, this again translates to a separation time of a few thousand years ago.
We can also obtain similar young ages for bacteria and Drosophila based on nuclear DNA mutation rates. The generation time for E. Coli is about 20 minutes, or about 50 generations per day and 15,000 generations per year. In 6,000 years there would be about 100 million generations. The mutation rate per base pair per generation is about 10-9 in bacteria (see Spetner, Not by Chance, Judaica Press, Brooklyn, New York, 1997, page 92). Thus in 100 million generations, there would be about a 10 percent change in the non-functional DNA and a 20 percent difference between two random individuals. The actual difference observed for E. Coli is about 5 percent. (See Moreel, V., "Bacteria Diversify Through Warfare," Science, Volume 278, October 24, 1997, page 575.) This low figure might be explained by a lower mutation rate and by the fact that a considerable portion of the bacterial DNA is functional.
For Drosophila, the generation time is about 2 weeks. This leads to 25 generations per year, and about 150,000 generations in 6,000 years. The mutation rate for Drosophila is about 2 x 10-8 per nucleotide per generation or even twice as high or more, according to (Kondrashev, A.S., 1988, "Deleterious mutations and the origin of sexual reproduction," Nature vol. 336 Dec. 1 pp. 435-440). This rate may also be computed from the fact that Drosophila has about 20,000 genes, each gene has about 1,000 base pairs, and there appears to be about one slightly harmful mutation per zygote per generation in Drosophila. (See James F. Crow, "The high spontaneous mutation rate: Is it a health risk?", Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA Vol. 94, pp. 8380-8386, August 1997.) In 150,000 generations, there would be a change of about 3 x 10-3 in non-functional DNA, and about a .6 percent difference between two random individuals. Since the mutation rate is likely twice as high, this difference could be as high as 1.2 percent. The observed value is about 1.5 percent. The increase could be due to a slightly higher mutation rate, a slightly smaller generation time, mutational hot-spots, differences at the Creation, or an origin slightly longer than 6,000 years ago.
This is undoubtedly just the tip of the iceberg, and many similar results will undoubtedly soon be reported. We hope that these results will cause biologists to give more serious consideration to the possibility that the Biblical record of a recent creation is historically accurate.
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