Table of Contents

Introduction

1 Lucy vs. Flat Face: The Leakeys’ Secret War Against Australopithecus

2 The China Connection: Conspiracy, Archeology, and the Rockefeller Foundation

3 Bear Foot in the Park at Vertesszölös, Hungary: Some Mysterious Footprints

4 In the Depths of Antiquity: Fraud and Suppression Of Information in Archeology

5 The Godzilla Artifacts Of Boncelles, Belgium

6 With Apologies to Columbus: A Report on the ISAC Annual Conference

7 Czech Please! The Forbidden Archeologist In Prague

8 Christian Creationism, Krishna Creationism, and the Origin of the Human Species

9 The Sunken City in the Gulf of Cambay, India: Will It Sink The Aryan Invasion Hypothesis?

10 Toumai: One Hominid Revolution Too Many

11 Adventures in the Ukraine   

12 Investigations into the Antiquity of the Ranganatha Temple In South India

13 The Forbidden Archeologist Goes to Russia

14 Beyond Stones and Bones: Alfred Russel Wallace And the Spirit World

15 Having a Ball in Bulgaria

16 At the World Archeological Congress

17 Extraterrestrial Archeology Goes Mainstream

18 A Trip to Bali 

19 Encountering New Realities in Montreal

20 Morphing My Genetic Fields in Montreal

21 Moving in the Right Circles At the Glastonbury Symposium

22 In Memory of Dr. John Mack

23 A Tour of Brazil

24 The Flores Island Hominin: Old Hobbits Are Hard to Break

25 California Dreaming: The State Highway 54 Mastodon Blues

26 Folk Archeological Traditions in India

27 Your Man in Beijing

28 Fancy Footwork in Mexico

29 Reck’s Skeleton: The First Olduvai Gorge Discovery

30 Doing Forbidden Archeology

31 Sterkfontein: The Cradle Of Humanity or Cradle of Lies?

32 Forbidden Archeology And Education Policy

33 Lucy’s Baby: Not My Ancestor

34 Forbidden Paleontology

35 Evidence for Extreme Human Antiquity in Greece

36 The Nampa Image

37 Kanapoi Humorous

38 Habs and Habs Nots

39 The Forbidden Zone: Archeology and Archeologists In Planet of the Apes

40 Platypus Carvings Of Extreme Antiquity

41 Who’s Anatomically Modern?

42 First Europeans

43 High-Tech Microfossils And Other News from Russia

44 Was Lothal a Vedic City? The Evidence from Vastu

45 Why Only Stone Tools?

46 Bolivian Footprints From the Deep Past

47 Happy Birthday, Charlie

48 Kenya Believe It? Scientists Misinterpret New Footprint Evidence

49 Nature’s IQ

Introduction

In the year 2001, at the invitation of editor Doug Kenyon, I began writing a regular column, titled “The Forbidden Archeologist,” for Atlantis Rising magazine. I’ve decided to publish these columns, through 2009, in this book. The columns as they appear in this book are not exactly in the order in which they were originally published. I have made some adjustments so as to conform to the order of events as they happened in my life. The titles and texts of the articles are as they appeared in the original manuscripts I submitted for publication.

The topics of my articles in Atlantis Rising reflect my various interests, as recorded in my books Forbidden Archeology and Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory. The main topic is archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity. Today, most scientists believe that human beings like us first appeared on earth between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. But the ancient Sanskrit writings of India, and the writings of other ancient wisdom traditions, tell us that humans like us have existed for many millions of years, going back to the very beginnings of life on earth. Therefore, many of my Atlantis Rising columns are about this evidence. They also record my experiences in presenting this evidence at major international scientific conferences, such as the meetings of the World Archeological Congress, the European Association of Archeologists, and the International Congress for History of Science.
The columns also record my experiences in presenting this evidence at alternative science and new age conferences, and my experiences in  presenting this evidence to students at university lectures and to the general public on publicity tours around the world. I also have an interest in UFOs, extraterrestrial archeology, and crop circles, and these interests are reflected in some of my columns.

The evidence that I write about, especially the archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity, is not very well known in mainstream scientific circles or among the general public, because of a process of knowledge filtration. Evidence that supports the mainstream theories of human origins and antiquity passes through this filter very easily. Therefore students will read about it in their textbooks, people will hear scientists talking about it on television, and if they go to the local museum they will see it on display. But evidence that radically contradicts the mainstream theories is filtered out, so we do not hear very much about it. I explore this knowledge filtration process is many of my columns.

The archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity contradicts the Darwinian theory of evolution. I believe that alternatives to the theory of evolution should be presented in the science curriculum in the public tax-supported education systems. It is
true that today the vast majority of scientists accept the theory of evolution, but it is also true that there is a small minority of scientists who do not accept the theory of evolution. This minority, which includes me, is presenting alternative points of view. At the present moment, these alternatives are completely excluded from the science curriculum. I think this needs to change. Biology textbooks in the public education system should devote the vast majority of their pages to the theory of evolution, but they should also devote a small minority of their pages to a neutral, objective presentation of the principal alternatives to the theory of evolution. And then let students make up their own minds on the question of the origin of species.

In my book Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory, I present my own alternative, based on my studies in the ancient Sanskrit writings of India, the Vedas. Basically, I propose that we did not evolve up from matter; rather we have devolved or come down from pure consciousness. Human beings are not just combinations of the ordinary material elements. Instead we are a combination of matter, mind, and consciousness. By mind and consciousness, I do not mean temporary byproducts of bioelectrical activity in the brain, I mean real things, with their own independent existence. There is scientific evidence for a subtle mind element, associated with the human organism, that can act in ways that we cannot explain by our current laws of physics. There is also a conscious self that can exist apart from the material body, apart from the mind. In many of my Altantis Rising columns I discuss things that relate to my human devolution theory.

Another topic of interest to me is Indian archeology. According to a great many Western and Indian archeologists and historians, the Vedic culture was not native to India. Supposedly, it was introduced into India by invading or migrating waves of immigrants, about 3,500 years ago. According to an alternative point of view, held by scholars like me, Vedic culture was native to India, and has existed there continuously for vast periods of time. So some of my columns deal with this topic. A related topic is the history of archeology in India. Most archeologists say that archeology began in India with the arrival of European travelers, who began writing about ruined temples and other monuments in the seventeenth century. But there is evidence that India had its own archeological tradition, even before this. I discuss this evidence in some of my columns.

In these columns, I have also tried to give my readers some glimpses of my personal life as a forbidden archeologist. I tell what it is like meeting different kinds of audiences, traveling to different countries. I also share some things about my association with the Krishna consciousness movement, my personal meditation practices (I meditate each day on the Hare Krishna mantra), and my vegetarian diet (I avoid meat, fish, and eggs).

I am not a professional archeologist, with a Ph.D. in archeology. But I do present my work at mainstream archeological conferences and in mainstream archeological publications. I am much like many of the gentlemen scientists of the nineteenth century. Charles Darwin, for example, was not a professional biologist. He did not have a Ph.D. in biology, nor was he a biology professor at a university. He was a country gentleman who pursued his interests on his own, without taking a salary for it. His university studies were in preparation for a career as a clergyman.

Finally, I want to thank Doug Kenyon for giving me complete freedom to say whatever I like in my Atlantis Rising columns, without any editorial censorship. Thanks also to my research assistant Lori Erbs, and to my publisher Alister Taylor, of Torchlight Publishing, and his staff, including especially Chris Glenn.

Michael A. Cremo

1
Lucy vs. Flat Face:
The Leakeys’ Secret War Against Australopithecus

The world is still abuzz with talk of the new hominid discovered by Meave Leakey in Africa. Leakey and her colleagues found a nearly complete skull of the creature in August of 1999, near Lake Turkana, in Kenya. According to a report published in Nature on March 22, 2001, the creature is 3.5 million years old, roughly the same age as Australopithecus afarensis. The most famous member of the A. afarensis family is Lucy, discovered in Ethiopia in the 1970s by Don Johanson, and long trumpeted as a direct human ancestor. But that distinction is now in danger of being lost to an upstart. Instead of identifying her find as a new member of the genus Australopithecus, Meave Leakey stirred up the hominid world by creating a new genus and species for it: Kenyanthropus platyops. One feature that especially distinguished the new hominid from Australopithecus, according to Leakey, was its flat facial profile (hence the species name platyops, which means “flat face”). The upshot? If scientists now ask the question, “Will the real human ancestor please stand up?” they can no longer be sure that it will be Lucy. They now have to consider the possibility that it will turn out to be Flat Face, which would be quite a shock, because up to now, everyone has thought the human ancestor from this time period (three to four million years ago) was sure to be a member of the Australopithecus family.

But K. platyops is not just the new hominid kid on the block, who turned up out of nowhere. Actually, the announcement of K. platyops by Meave Leakey is just the latest shot in a war against Australopithecus that has been waged by generations of the Lea-
key family since the early part of the twentieth century. I haven’t seen this history of this paleoanthropological warfare mentioned in any of the recent spate of articles about K. platyops (that’s why I call the Leakeys’ campaign a secret war), but your forbidden archeologist does know a few things about it.

As early as the 1930s, Louis Leakey had been arguing that Homo erectus couldn’t have been a human ancestor, and later, in the 1950s, when Australopithecus became firmly accepted as a hu-
man ancestor, he also objected to this. He wrote in 1971, summarizing his long-held view: “For too long scientists have been confused by earlier theories and in particular by those which derived Homo sapiens from classical forms of Neanderthal man, which in turn was supposed to have been derived from Homo erectus, that in turn was said to have been originated in the australopithecines.” Leakey based his objections on skeletal features, particularly those of the skull. For example, he pointed on that the
Miocene African apes, from which the hominid line is thought to have begun, do not have strongly pronounced brow ridges. Neither do modern humans. But the australopithecines, Homo erectus, and the Neanderthals do have large protruding brow ridges.
Leakey therefore proposed that the latter were a side branch from the main line of human evolution, which led from the Miocene apes, through some other kind of hominid, up to Homo sapiens.
In the 1960s Louis Leakey announced the discovery of Homo habilis. This creature had small brow ridges, like the Miocene apes and modern humans. Louis Leakey believed Homo habilis knocked Australopithecus out of the human lineage.

But most scientists working on human origins simply fitted Homo habilis into the standard picture, with the lineage going like this: Australopithecus, H. habilis, H. erectus, H. sapiens. Some scientists included the Neanderthals in the lineage, putting them between H. erectus and H. sapiens, while others put them on a side branch leading to extinction.

Richard Leakey followed his father in declaring Australopithecus not a human ancestor. In a National Geographic article published in 1973, Leakey said, “Probably a relative rather than a direct forbear of mankind, apelike Australopithecus existed for at least 2 million years before it reached an evolutionary dead end.” In the same article, Richard Leakey wrote about the ER 1470 skull, which his group had discovered at Lake Turkana. He considered it to be about 3 million years old, contemporary with Australopithecus and much more humanlike. He classed it as Homo habilis. Later, however, the ER 1470 skull proved to be only about 2 million years old. For most scientists, this kept Australopithecus in the picture as the human ancestor.

When Don Johanson made his first discoveries of hominid bones that he would later attribute to Australopithecus afarensis, he invited Richard Leakey and his wife Meave to have a look at them. The Leakeys called them early Homo, and Johanson at first accepted this. The bones were judged to be about 3.4 million years old, older than the oldest australopithecine bones found up to that point. Of course, this fit well with the Leakeys’ idea that Australopithecus was not a human ancestor. Later Johanson discovered more bones in the same part of Ethiopia. He created a new species, Australopithecus afarensis, to which he attributed the new bones, along with the ones he and the Leakeys had first said were Homo. In the new species, Johanson also included some jaw bones that Mary Leakey, the wife of Louis Leakey, and mother of Richard Leakey, had discovered at Laetoli, in Tanzania. Mary Leakey had judged the jaw bones, which were about 3.7 million years old, to be early Homo. Of course, this fit with the ideas of  her husband Louis Leakey, knocking out Australopithecus as a human ancestor. But now Johanson “hijacked” Mary Leakey’s early Homo jaws for his new species of Australopithecus. And since then Australopithecus has remained firmly entrenched as the earliest human ancestor.

But the Leakey’s campaign did not stop, although it went through a long period of dormancy. Louis and Mary Leakey are both deceased, and Richard Leakey has largely retired from paleo-anthropology, occupying himself with environmental affairs in
Kenya. So Richard’s wife Meave has moved into the front lines of the ancient battle, waged for decades by her in-laws. She searched for years before she found anything that would help the old family cause. It’s interesting that today’s media seem quite unaware of the long history that lies behind her announcement of Kenyanthropus platyops.

Although Meave Leakey is speaking cautiously, she has created a new genus for her creature, calling it Kenyanthropus rather than Australopithecus. The name is significant. Anthropus means “human” whereas pithecus means “ape” (Australo means “southern,” alluding to the South African locale of the original Australopithecus discovery). So Meave Leakey is obviously putting K. platyops in the human line, implying that Australopithecus is nothing more than an extinct ape, unrelated to humans. Leakey has also suggested that Kenyanthropus platyops may be linked to later fossils currently called Homo rudolfensis. Indeed she has said that Homorudolfensis, about 2 million years old, should be reclassified as a later representative of Kenyanthropus. Interestingly enough, the type specimen of Homo rudolfensis, the ER 1470 skull (originally classified Homo habilis), was discovered by her husband, Richard Leakey. Although Meave Leakey is saying further research needs to be done, it appears pretty clear to me that she is positioning K. platyops in such a way as to permanently remove the Australopithecines from the line of human ancestry, a goal of the Leakeys since the middle of the last century. The new line of human evolution would apparently lead from Kenyanthropus platyops at 3.4 million years through Kenyanthropus “rudolfensis” at 1.9 million years to Homo sapiens. Of course, my reply is that neither Kenyanthropus nor Australopithecus are human ancestors because there is evidence that anatomically modern humans existed alongside them and before them.

Indeed, some of this evidence was discovered by the Leakeys themselves! For example, Mary Leakey in 1974 discovered at Laetoli dozens of footprints, which she characterized as indistinguishable from modern human footprints. She found them in layers of solidified volcanic ash 3.7 million years old. In 1973, Richard Leakey reported the discovery of a femur (ER 1481) at Lake Turkana. He characterized it as indistinguishable from the femur of a modern human, and it was dated at about 1.9 million years. (Mary and Richard Leakey, influenced by their commitment to the theory of evolution, did not think their discoveries belonged to modern humans, even though that is the most straightforward interpretation.) In the 1930s, Louis Leakey endorsed Hans Reck’s discovery of an anatomically modern human skeleton in Upper Bed II of Olduvai Gorge, in layers over 1 million years old.

Put this evidence from the Leakeys together with numerous other examples of evidence for extreme human antiquity documented in Forbidden Archeology and Flat Face and Lucy both fail as human ancestors. Who will be the next human ancestor? Let’s wait and see. It seems like once or twice a year, someone comes up with another one.

2
The China Connection:
Conspiracy, Archeology, and the Rockefeller Foundation

Conspiracy literature has a bad reputation in mainstream scientific circles. Therefore my book  Forbidden Archeology is sometimes placed in that category by mainstream scientists hoping to discredit it.

However, in my introduction to Forbidden Archeology, I wrote, “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.”

But in addition to such social knowledge filtering there are some genuinely conspiratorial events in the history of archeology, events involving hidden agendas. I happened upon one such case in my research into the Beijing man discoveries, made in China during the early part of the twentieth century. The ramifications of the Rockefeller Foundation’s funding of archeological research in China extend far beyond China and archeology. Although the events described are somewhat distant from the present day, I feel they are especially revelatory, because of their excellent documentation, about things that may still be going on.

Davidson Black graduated from the University of Toronto medical school in 1906. His studies in human anatomy led to an interest in human evolution. Like many scientists of that time, Black believed that the center of human origins lay in China, not Africa. In 1919, Black took a position at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Beijing Union Medical College in China. 

At the Beijing Union Medical College, Black did everything possible to minimize his medical duties so he could concentrate on his real interest—paleoanthropology. In November 1921, he went on a brief expedition to a site in northern China, and other expeditions followed. Black’s superiors were not pleased.

In 1926, Black heard about some discoveries of two hominid teeth at Zhoukoudian, near Beijing, and decided to make new excavations there. He requested funds from the Rockefeller Foundation and received them. This response showed a marked change in the attitude.

By spring 1927, work was underway at Zhoukoudian. At the end of the first season’s digging, a single hominid tooth was uncovered. On the basis of this tooth, and the two previously discovered Black decided to announce a new kind of fossil hominid. He called it Sinanthropus, China man. Black traveled around the world to promote him.

On returning to China, Black kept in close touch with the excavations at Zhoukoudian. During the last days of the 1928 digging season, a piece of lower jaw bone was found.

Now a financial problem loomed. The Rockefeller Foundation grant that supported the digging would run out in April of 1929. So in January, Black wrote the directors, asking them to support the Zhoukoudian excavations by creating a Cenozoic Re-
search Laboratory (the Cenozoic includes the most recent geological periods). In April, Black received the funds he desired.

Why had the Rockefeller Foundation so changed its attitude toward Black and his work? This question bears looking into, because the financial contribution of foundations would turn out to be vital to human evolution research carried out by scientists like Black. Foundation support would also prove important in broadcasting the news of the finds and their significance to the waiting world.

As Warren Weaver, a scientist and Rockefeller Foundation official, said (1967, p. 82): “In a perfect world an idea could be born, nourished, developed and made known to everyone, criticized and perfected, and put to good use without the crude fact of financial support ever entering into the process. Seldom, if ever, in the practical world in which we live, does this occur. The influence of money on ideas can be powerful.”

For Weaver, biological questions were of the highest importance. Writing in 1967, Weaver stated: “It seemed clear in 1932 . . . that the biological and medical sciences were ready for a friendly invasion by the physical sciences. . . . The tools are now available for discovering . . . how man’s central nervous system really operates,   how he thinks, learns, remembers, and forgets. . . . Only thus may we gain information about our behavior of the sort that can lead to wise and beneficial control” (W. Weaver 1967, p. 203).

It thus becomes clear that at the same time the Rockefeller Foundation was channeling funds into human evolution research in China, it was in the process of developing an elaborate plan to fund biological research with a view to developing methods to effectively control human behavior. Black’s research into Beijing man must be seen within this context in order to be properly understood.

All this is quite remarkable, when one considers that John D. Rockefeller’s charity was initially directed toward Baptist churches and missions. Later, under the leadership of Rockefeller’s son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the focus changed. The Foundation concentrated its attention on secular programs in public health, medicine, agriculture, and education, distancing itself from the Baptist Church. The younger Rockefeller began to staff his foundation with scientists.

In 1928, the Rockefeller Foundation underwent changes to reflect the growing importance of scientific research. The Foundation was organized into five divisions—international health, medical sciences, natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities (Fosdick 1952, pp. 137–138). Each division was run by a highly competent academic and technical staff, who advised the trustees of the Foundation where to give their money.

The change reached right to the top, with Dr. Max Mason, a scientist himself, taking over as president. Mason, a mathematical physicist, was formerly president of the University of Chicago. According to Fosdick (1952, p. 142), Mason “emphasized the structural unity involved in the new orientation of program. It was not to be five programs, each represented by a division of the Foundation; it was to be essentially one program, directed to the general problem of human behavior, with the aim of control through understanding.”

The Foundation scientists outlined a coordinated program, approved by the Foundation trustees, to attain this goal. Some commentators make light of research into the reproductive habits of earthworms and other apparently obscure research projects. But these have their purpose. According to Weaver: “Before we can be wise about so complex a subject as the behavior of a man, we obviously have to gain a tremendous amount of information and insight about living organisms in general, necessarily starting with the simpler forms of life. Experimental biology is the means for such exploration. It furnishes the basis necessary for progress in solving the sequence of problems which begins with the strictly biological and moves through the mental to the social” (Fosdick 1952, p. 158). Here once more, the intent to use science for perfecting methods of social control (and who would the controllers be but the scientists?) is stated explicitly.

With the financial backing of the Rockefeller Foundation for the Cenozoic Research Laboratory secure, Black resumed his travels for the purpose of promoting Beijing man.

Black then returned to China, where work was proceeding slowly at Zhoukoudian, with no new major Sinanthropus finds reported. But then on the first of December, at the very end of the season, W. C. Pei made an historic find. Pei later wrote: “At about four o’clock next afternoon I encountered the almost complete skull of Sinanthropus” (Hood 1964, p. 104). By early 1930, Black had published two preliminary papers on the skull and set about publicizing the find around the world.

In September of 1930, Sir Grafton Elliot Smith arrived in Beijing to inspect the site of the discovery and examine the fossils. During Smith’s stay, Black primed him for a propaganda blitz on behalf of Beijing man. Smith then departed, and apparently did his job well. In December, Black wrote an extremely candid letter to Dr. Henry Houghton, director of the Beijing medical school, who was vacationing in America: “If I blushed every time I thought of the cold-blooded advertising campaign I thought of and G. E. S. has carried through, I’d be permanently purple” (Hood 1964, p. 115). Black’s newly-won fame also insured continued access to Rockefeller Foundation funds and more publicity for the Darwinian theory of human evolution.

Black’s Beijing man research thus took its place within the larger framework of the explicitly stated goal of the Rockefeller Foundation, which reflected the implicit goal of big science—control, by scientists, of human behavior. This control has economic, social, and political dimensions which cannot be ignored by those of us who are to be (and more than likely already are) the objects of such supervision. And Darwinism is part of that system of control.

References Cited

Fosdick, R. D. (1952)

The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation. New York, Harper

 Hood, D. (1964)

Davidson Black. Toronto, University of Toronto

Weaver, W. (1967) 

U. S. Philanthropic Foundations. New York, Harper & Row

3
Bear Foot in the Park at Vertesszölös, Hungary:
Some Mysterious Footprints

I’ve had some interesting times during my visits to Hungary. The Hungarian edition of my book The Hidden History of the Human Race, was a bestseller there when it first came out. I’ve appeared numerous times on national television and radio, and have debated the nation’s leading anthropologists and archeologists in packed university auditoriums. Once, after I gave a very well received lecture to a large and enthusiastic audience of university students, many of whom purchased copies of my book, orthodox scientists hunted down the professor who had arranged for me to speak and tried, without success, to get him removed from his position. This professor later told me that scientists at a conference in Budapest were so disturbed by my activities, they decided I should not be allowed to speak any more at Hungarian universities.

But my latest visit was not marked by such public controversy. I was on a bit of a spiritual retreat. I stayed in an ashram owned by the Hungarian branch of the International Society for Krishna Conciousness, of which I have been a member since I became a disciple of the Society’s founder Shrila A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami about thirty years ago. Actually it was his teachings from the ancient Sanskrit writings of India that first got me interested in investigating evidence for extreme human antiquity. So, during my
Hungarian retreat I could not help doing a little archeological sightseeing.

Around noon on April 15, 2001, I walked on to the Vertesszölös archeological site in Hungary.  The weather was perfect—warm and sunny. The site, in the countryside west of Budapest, has been turned into an outdoor museum park, with some of
the original excavations preserved in glass-windowed buildings for viewing by visitors. Amusingly, restrooms for men and women are identified not by printed signs but by the sculpted heads of an imaginary Vertesszölös apeman and apewoman respectively.

I briefly discuss the Vertesszölös site in my book Forbidden Archeology (p. 474). The site was excavated by the Hungarian archeologist László Vértes in the 1960s. The most important discovery made at Vertesszölös was a human occipital bone (from the rear part of the skull). The exact spot of the find is today marked by a bronze plaque on a hillside. Some children’s teeth were also found.

There is some debate about the exact nature of this skull fragment. Some wish to identify it with the apeman Homo erectus.
But others have identified it as modern. In his book The Ascent of Man, David Pilbeam said: “The occipital bone does not resemble that of H. erectus, or even archaic man, but instead that of earliest modern man. Such forms are dated elsewhere no older than 100,000 years.”

Andor Thoma, in Vertesszölös Site, Man, and Culture, edited by V. Dobosi and M. Kretzoi (1990), said the capacity of the Vertesszölös skull was “fairly close to the modern average” and that “it considerably surpassed its presently-known contemporaries in this respect.” He concluded: “In terms of anatomy and metrical proportions Vertesszölös man is modern.” In a detailed statistical study of shape, he found the Vertesszölös skull was closest to the Skhul V skull from a cave in Israel. The Skhul V skull is considered by most physical anthropologists to be about 90,000 years old and anatomically modern. It is considered to be among the earliest anatomically modern human skeletal remains. One hundred thousand years is the age currently favored for the very first anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens). Thoma’s measurements showed the Vertesszölös skull to be very, very different from those of Homo erectus. 

My judgement, in line with Pilbeam’s, is that the skull fragment is probably that of an anatomically modern human. This is unusual because the age of the site, given in literature that I picked up at the site, is 500,000 years. I believe it is principally because of the age of the site that the Vertesszölös hominid is generally attributed to Homo erectus, rather than Homo sapiens sapiens.

Another sign that the Vertesszölös hominid was probably Homo sapiens rather that Homo erectus is the presence of evidence for campfires. The deliberate building of campfires is an activity that most researchers do not attribute to Homo erectus.
Many stone tools and broken animal bones were also found at Vertesszölös.

At the site, the original discoverer, Vértes, found (in addition to the skull fragment, stone tools, broken animal bones, and signs of fire) some human footprints. A large stretch of rock containing the human footprints, along with over a hundred animal tracks, is now preserved within a building. The human tracks can be seen through viewing windows, but only at a distance. A guide to the site written by Vértes and Dobosi says about the tracks, “Among the animals passing by (bison, bear, rhinoceros, stag), man must also have been a visitor; his crusted footprints to be seen here are the earliest in the world.”

Vértes considered the footprints to be modern in appearance. Of course, if, as the skull fragment indicates, Vertesszölös man was fully human, footprints like those of modern man are to be expected. But if he is to be called Homo erectus, as most scientists do call him, fully modern feet might not be expected. Of course, it is somewhat difficult to tell what Homo erectus feet should be like, because we don’t have any complete Homo erectus foot skeletons for comparison. The footbones from the almost complete skeleton of the famous KNM-WT 15000 Homo erectus boy were missing. We do have some Neanderthal foot skeletons. They differ from modern feet in having very wide flat toes, according to Eric Trinkaus. So one might expect that Homo erectus feet would differ to an even greater extent. Perhaps this is why scientists such as M. Kretzoi have recently started to say that the Vertesszölös footprints are not human in appearance (Dobosi and Kretzoi 1990). Instead, they say they are the footprints of a bear.

Of course, there are bear footprints at the human footprint site. There are twenty-one such prints, but they are of a fairly big species of bear, Ursus deningeri. The three human footprints are smaller and not as broad. Those who did not want to see them as human, therefore had to attribute them to another kind of bear, Ursus stehlini, which is smaller than Ursus deningeri. Kretzoi had to comment on the mysterious “rarity of the small bear species” at the site. Bears get blamed for lots of mysteries. Many Bigfoot tracks and sightings are blamed on bears.

But even Kretzkoi admits that one of the “bear” footprints “bears an especially close similarity to a human footprint,” and he also admits, despite his own conclusion that the prints are bear prints, that “the possibility of ‘human footprints’ cannot totally be excluded.” Furthermore, at the site itself, the footprints are still identified as human, and have been identified as human ever since László Vértes found them in the 1960s. Indeed, one of the justifications that Vértes gave for spending money to construct the building protecting the footprint locality is that among the animal footprints were human footprints. Today, one can see, in a window of the building covering the tracks, a cast of a modern human footprint, with a piece of colored string leading from this cast
down about ten yards to one of the apparently human footprints on the rock.

My visit to the Vertesszölös site was a preliminary one. In the future, I would like to get permission to enter the building and look more closely at the footprints identified by Vértes as human. Ideally, I would like to obtain photographs and casts of the prints, for comparison with other known footprints, such as the anatomically modern footprints found in South Africa in 1998 in sandstone by a beach sixty miles north of Cape Town. They were judged to be 117,000 years old. I would also like to compare them to the footprint found at the Terra Amata site in France, where there is good evidence that anatomically modern humans were existing around 400,000 years ago (although the site is generally attributed to Homo erectus). Actually, there are even more sites in Europe that are assigned to Homo erectus, even though the actual evidence suggests the presence of Homo sapiens sapiens. Among them is the Schöningen site in northern Germany, where advanced throwing spears, shaped exactly like modern javelins, were found in layers of brown coal about 430,000 years old. Normally, such spears are attributed only to anatomically modern humans, but because of the age of the site, they have been attributed to a variety of Homo erectus.

Strolling around the Vertesszölös site on a beautiful spring day, I got the impression that here was one more case of the knowledge filtration process in operation. Evidence for the extreme antiquity of the modern human species was being presented to the public as evidence for Homo erectus.

4
In the Depths of Antiquity:
Fraud and Suppression Of Information in Archeology

In Forbidden Archeology I documented many cases of fraud and suppression of information in archeology. Of course, this is just what you would expect to find in a book with a title like that, coming from someone like me—a renegade and an outsider. You can therefore imagine my pleasant surprise to find acknowledgment of such things in a recent editorial in the pages of Antiquity, one of the literary pillars of the archeological establishment.

You can find this extremely frank editorial, by editor Simon Stoddard and deputy editor Caroline Malone, in the June 2001 issue of Antiquity. I’ve met both Simon and Caroline at various archaeological conferences where I’ve spoken, such as the World Archeological Congress. There I’ve seen them in the publication display areas, standing at a table humbly promoting their journal, like junior staff. I’ve chatted with each of them a bit on such occasions. Of course, they are both professional archeologists, and I heard Stoddard present a paper at one conference, about settlement patterns in Greco-Roman Sicily.

It happens I have my own little history with Antiquity. In 1993, when Forbidden Archeology first appeared, Cyprian Broodbank described it in Antiquity’s new book section like this: “All the reasons and evidence why modern humans are not rather recent but most ancient, a very large, very odd compilation of every anomaly in a very pink jacket.” I included Broodbank’s remarks in Forbidden Archeology’s Impact, which also drew a notice in Antiquity’s new book section, this time (March 1999) from Nicholas James: “Antiquity’s receptiveness to alternative archaeologies has been rewarded with mention in Cremo’s review of the world’s responses to his previous opus. Part of our comment is even quoted on the dust-jacket, along with those of Richard Leaky [sic] and—Oyez!—Graham Hancock. Drawing the tome open, we find our whole review faithfully reproduced.” And now here’s the Broodbank review again—in Atlantis Rising!

But let’s return to the matter at hand. In their June 2001 editorial, Stoddard and Malone first note that the Taliban in Afghanistan, who recently destroyed large stone statues of the Buddha in the Bamihan valley, are not the only iconoclasts in the history of archeology. They note that the early Christians destroyed quite a bit of Greek and Roman statuary and architecture. Stoddard and Malone then move on to what they call “a distinctly archaelogical iconoclasm. . . . the non-publication of fieldwork.” Archeologists have a habit of digging things up, and then delaying, sometimes for decades, any publications about them. Therefore, as far as the world of archeology is concerned, the things that were dug up don’t exist—because the circumstances of their discovery have not been officially reported to colleagues. So, in this sense, nonpublication is a kind of destruction of archeological evidence. During the time of nonpublication, archeologists often deny their colleagues access to the artifacts that have been recovered. One critic noted that 80 percent of all Italian archeological material has not been published.

That’s interesting. But there’s more. Stoddard and Malone go on to speak of “another dimension of archeological iconoclasm . . . that of falsification,” thus entering deeply into my territory, the territory of forbidden archeology. They note that archeologists are under such pressure to produce spectacular results that they sometimes cheat: “We personally remember meeting a brilliant colleague who over-extended the distribution of Mycenaean sherds in Tuscany by creative re-use of sherds from a museum store.” In other words, their brilliant colleague took Mycenaean potsherds from a museum’s storage rooms, and planted them in sites in Tuscany, claiming that he found them there. His cheating was exposed when suspicious colleagues took the pieces he claimed to have discovered in the field and fitted their edges to the edges of pieces he left in the museum. Stoddard and Malone, observing that their brilliant colleague’s cheating would not have been detected simply by study of his published work, remind us: “Archeological research is ultimately based on trust . . . a trust that what we publish is a truthful account.” Such trust is often misplaced, it seems.

Stoddard and Malone included in their editorial some thoughts on contemporary archeological fraud written by archeologist Paul Bahn. He found the case of senior Japanese archeologist Shinichi Fujimara especially troubling. Late last year, Fujimara was videotaped planting artifacts at a site in Japan, and photographs from the tape were published on the front page of a leading national newspaper (Manichi Shimbun). Fujimara, deputy director of the Tohoku Palaeolithic Institute, admitted planting 61 of 65 artifacts found at the Kamitakamori site and all 29 artifacts found at the Soshinfudozaka site. Bahn had included artifacts from the Kamitakamori site in an archeology textbook he coauthored with Colin Renfrew.

In addition to deliberate faking of discoveries, Bahn (p. 237) listed several other kinds of dishonesty prevalent in archeology, including : (1) “the distortion or extremely partisan selection of evidence;” (2) “exaggerated claims;” (3) “the prevention of colleagues’ access to objects or data;” (4) “the prevention of publication by critics or opponents, together with blockage of their representation in the media;” (5) “ferocious and bullying reactions to the slightest criticism, especially aimed at intimidating younger colleagues.” And the list goes on.

Bahn states (p. 238): “In archaeology as a whole the above types of dishonesty have flourished for the simple reason that nobody is willing or able to expose the culprits publicly, although there are frequent mutterings in conference corridors or behind closed doors. Even here, I am unable to name names, since it would expose both me and this journal to litigation—although I could cite specific examples for all of the above.” Bahn says that the dishonesty goes on because “no one, least of all the media, checks the facts; or simply because most people find it hard to believe that scholars could lie and cheat so brazenly.”

Maybe we should start a legal defense fund for Antiquity so that Stoddard and Malone could allow Bahn to name the names in a future issue?

Anyway, none of this fraudulent behavior among archeologists is surprising to students of forbidden archeology, least of all to me. (And I have named a few names in my day.) The case of Virginia Steen-McIntyre is instructive. She and her colleagues, using a variety of techniques, obtained an age of about 250,000 to 300,000 years for the Hueyatlaco site in Mexico, where stone tools of a type made only by anatomically modern humans were uncovered by archeologists. The archeologists, committed to a recent origin of modern humans (100,000 years) and an even more recent entry of modern humans into the Americas (25,000 years), refused to accept the dates. And when Virginia Steen-McIntyre refused to accept their denial, she was subjected to the kind of pressures that Bahn lists above, ending a promising career. I myself have had some personal experience of these things. When working with producer Bill Cote on the NBC television special The Mysterious Origins of Man, I found we were blocked from seeing the anomalous artifacts from the California gold mines, which were being kept out of sight in the storage rooms of a museum controlled by the University of California at Berkeley. We also found that orthodox scientists, led by UC Berkeley paleontologist Jere Lipps, engaged in an organized effort to stop NBC from broadcasting the program. When that failed, another paleontologist, Allison R. Palmer of the Institute for Cambrian Studies, tried to get the Federal Communications Commission to punish NBC for having shown this program, which directly contradicted the sacrosanct Darwinian account of human origins.

But there is a more fundamental issue at stake. In my studies of Vedic epistemology, I have learned that all varieties of material knowledge are infected by four defects. These are (1) karana-apatava, imperfect senses; (2) bhrama, mistakes; (3) pramada, illusion; and (4) vipralipsa, cheating. If you look carefully enough, you will find abundant examples of each in every field of material knowledge, including archeology. This certainly calls into question the conclusions arrived at by such systems of knowledge, especially when compared to the process of acquiring knowledge through other methods, such as accepting knowledge from divinely inspired records of ancient wisdom traditions. In my own work, I have relied on accounts of extreme human antiquity found in the ancient Sanskrit writings of India to guide my research into the history of modern archeology. The Babylonian king lists, Chinese emperor lists, Egyptian pharoah lists, and Mayan calendars may also be added to the list of ancient wisdom sources that can help guide researchers into the history of humans beings on our planet (and other planets). 

5
The Godzilla Artifacts Of Boncelles, Belgium

In the fall of last year (2000), I received an invitation to present a paper at a symposium on the history of archeology at the XXIVth Congress of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, to be held in September 2001 in Liege, Belgium. I accepted the invitation and decided it would be most appropriate that the topic of the paper be the discoveries of the nineteenth-century Belgian geologist Aime Louis Rutot at Boncelles, a small town about ten kilometers south of Liège.

In 1906, Émile de Munck, a collector of archeological materials, explored a sandpit near Boncelles, and found some crude flint implements in an Oligocene stratum, about thirty million years old. De Munck reported his initial discoveries to Rutot, who was conservator of the Royal Belgian Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels. Rutot and de Munck collected additional artifacts from Boncelles, and in 1907 Rutot wrote up the discoveries in a report titled “A Grave Problem.”  The extreme antiquity of the Boncelles artifacts did represent a grave problem for archeologists of the early twentieth century. But not for me. My work as an historian of archeology is influenced by the historical texts of ancient India, the Puranas, which tell of a human presence on this planet going back hundreds of millions of years, to the very beginnings of the earth’s history.

Although I am guided in my historical research by my Puranic theoretical perspective, it is not that I uncritically accept every archeological discovery that happens to be consistent with Puranic accounts of extreme human antiquity. My procedure is to con-
sult primary published works, and to also, whenever possible, visit the sites, examine the collections of artifacts, and research the archives, for correspondence, field notes, and maps. Then I make my judgment.

On July 19, 2001, I showed up at the archeology section of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, accompanied by a photographer assistant. The Institute is located right alongside the museum of natural history where Rutot worked. I began my work by looking through Rutot’s correspondence.  Rutot’s report on Boncelles, although controversial, received support from several authorities, whose letters to Rutot contained: (1) favorable responses to his report, (2) requests for specimens to display in museums, (3) discussions related to Rutot’s upcoming presentations at scientific conferences, and (4) promises to assist in raising money for future excavations at Boncelles.

The next day, Friday, I mentioned to some of the archeologists in the Institute that over the weekend I intended to search for the site at Boncelles. The archeologists were discouraging, telling me that the area had been extensively developed with factories and shopping centers, and that the site would  most probably have been eradicated. Nevertheless, I was determined to give it a try.

In his report, Rutot said that the place where the tools were found was “a sandpit situated alongside the main road from Tilft to Boncelles, about 500 meters before arriving at the crossroads, at the place called Les Gonhir.” Through friends in Antwerp, I
found a young man who was willing to spend a Saturday driving me and my assistant. We arrived in Boncelles in the late morning, and located the Tilft road. We found a crossroads and stopped nearby. Fortunately, we spotted an elderly farmer walking up the road. From him, we learned that the very place we were standing was still called Les Gonhir. We asked about the sandpit. He indicated that there was indeed a sandpit up the road a few hundred meters. Following a map he drew for us, we found the old sandpit. A nearly vertical exposure about fifteen to twenty meters high extended for about two hundred meters. I compared the layers visible in the exposure to the drawing of the strata in Rutot’s report, and it was clear to me that we were seeing the exact same layers.

On returning to the museum the next week, I once again met the chief of the section. Together we went into the storage rooms and pulled out several trays of Rutot’s Boncelles artifacts, loaded them into a trolley, and wheeled the trolley back into the archeology lab. My assistant and I began going through the trays of artifacts, thousands altogether. One of my goals was to match some of them to the illustrations in Rutot’s report. Somehow or other, I was able to match about a dozen of them. I don’t know
how I did it—maybe by  some latent psychic abilities?

One of the staff archeologists happened to come out from his office to the lab, so I showed him how I had matched some of the artifacts to the illustrations. I then mentioned that I had found the sandpit at Boncelles. (A few days previously, he had told me I would never find it.) He asked, “Did you find any artifacts?” It was not a question to be answered yes or no, but an ironic comment on the supposed falsity of the whole phenomenon of Rutot. The attitude that underlies such joking is part of the phenomenon of suppression of uncomfortable evidence. The discomfort is removed by the attitude of not taking the evidence seriously.

If the Boncelles implements had been found in an Early Pleistocene context instead of an Oligocene context, it is likely that they would still be mentioned in any contemporary discussion about the earliest occupation of Europe. However, given that most contemporary archeologists accept practically without question that the very first hominids came into existence only about five to six million years ago, it is no wonder that such archeologists will find it necessary to debunk a collection of artifacts from 30 million years ago in the Oligocene. And it is natural that the pressure to debunk would be most strongly felt by Belgian archeologists who have to deal with the fact that Rutot was a prominent figure in the history of Belgian archeology, and that his collections are still taking up space in the storage rooms of their main museum of natural history, where he was once conservator.

There could be two grounds for rejecting Rutot’s discoveries: the provenance (geological context) of the finds and their artifactual nature. But the provenance of the artifacts seems solid. We are not talking about surface finds, but about artifacts recovered from deep in a deposit of flint resting on Devonian sandstone beneath fifteen to twenty meters of Oligocene sand deposits. Given the noncontroversial provenance of the Boncelles industry, Belgian archeologists have rejected it by challenging its artifactual nature. My sense is that the debunkings of Rutot’s Boncelles collection have been seen as necessary, and have been all too readily accepted by those who have a strong interest in doing so.

Rutot was himself prepared for challenges to the artifactual nature of the Boncelles collection. Among the Boncelles artifacts, Rutot found scrapers, awls, cutters, choppers, and anvils. He pointed out that although the artifacts were of a simple kind, they clearly displayed chipping to improve gripping with the hand, chipping to make the working edges more suitable for their task, and visible use marks on the working edges. Having personally examined the artifacts, I have to agree with Rutot.

Rutot’s principal response to anticipated objections about the artifactual nature of the Boncelles discoveries was to compare the Boncelles collection to a collection of undisputed implements from Tasmania. Rutot said: “So the truth, after direct comparison, is that the two industries [Boncelles and Tasmanian] are exactly the same and that the Tasmanians, now annihilated, but still in existence just sixty years ago, were at the same level of culture as the very primitive inhabitants of Boncelles.”

In his report, Rutot compared illustrations of specific Tasmanian tools to illustrations of specific Boncelles pieces. Of course,
the best thing is to hold the implements in your own hands and look at them with your own eyes. I was able to do that because the Tasmanian collection was still there at the Institute. My hands-on research convinced me that Rutot had been entirely correct in his judgment that the implements from Boncelles were just like those made by humans in historic times.

A couple of years ago in Los Angeles, I attended an advance screening of the remake of the film Godzilla. The brother of a filmmaker friend of mine was involved in making the computer-generated special effects for the film, and he gave us tickets. During the screening it appeared at one point late in the film that the monster Godzilla was dead. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. But suddenly Godzilla jumped to life again, and the thrills continued. The false ending is common Hollywood scriptwriters technique. And it would seem that orthodox archeologists have perhaps written a false ending to the Boncelles script. I do not think that the story of the Oligocene artifacts from Boncelles is finished. The Oligocene implements of Boncelles therefore remain “un grave problème” for archeologists.

6
With Apologies to Columbus: A Report on the ISAC Annual Conference

Early on the morning of October 11, 2001, I went to the Los Angeles International Airport to get my flight to Columbus, Georgia, where I was to speak at the annual meeting of the Institute for the Study of American Cultures. ISAC is dedicated to “investigation of pre-Columbian and Native American culture and history.” Orthodox academic opinion holds that aside from a brief visit by Vikings, the Americas had no contacts with Old World cultures before the time of Columbus. But ISAC researchers have reported abundant evidence of reciprocal contacts between the Americas and a variety of Old World culture centers, such as Europe, India, China, and Egypt.

My road to Columbus began quite a few years ago. When my book Forbidden Archeology first came out, it was picked up by David Hatcher Childress, who included it in his Adventures Unlimited mail-order catalogue. David then told the late Jean Hunt, president of the Louisiana Mounds Society, about the book, and suggested that she publish a review in her Society’s newsletter. Jean did get in touch with me, and did publish a very favorable review. She became quite an enthusiastic supporter of Forbidden Archeology, and recommended it to many of her contacts in the early American studies field. For example, she put me in touch with Bill Cote, who invited me to participate in the making of his classic television special The Mysterious Origins of Man, which was aired on NBC. She also recommended Forbidden Archeology to Dr. Joseph B. Mahan, then president of ISAC, and to Vincent Mooney, an officer of ISAC. Mahan and Mooney separately invited me to come to an ISAC conference, but that year I was already scheduled to be doing a publicity tour for the launching of The Hidden History of the Human Race. Just this past year, Vincent again invited me to give a paper at the annual ISAC conference, and I was happy to accept. Unfortunately, Vincent died before the conference took place.

I arrived at the Columbus airport, meditating on the irony of an organization dedicated to dimming Christopher Columbus’s fame being headquartered here. I noted a distinct military atmosphere in the airport, which serves nearby Fort Benning. After
claiming my bag, I made my way to the conference hotel. At an evening reception, I met Morton A. Harris, president of ISAC, a genuine southern gentleman, and Carole Sides, ISAC’s secretary, who had taken on most of the burden of organizing the confer-
ence. I also met many of the conference speakers. At my table I had to turn down some of the drinks and snacks because they didn’t fit in with the strict vegetarian diet I follow as a practitioner of the Hare Krishna religion. When I was explaining this, Richard Flavin, one of the speakers sitting at my table, told me he had sometimes had some vegetarian meals at the Hare Krishna temple in Boston.

My main interest is not pre-Columbian culture contacts between the New and Old Worlds but the origin of anatomically modern humans. According to orthodox scientists, humans of our type came into existence about one-hundred thousand years
ago. So what I look for is evidence that humans of our type existed before that. In my ISAC lecture, I presented evidence for a human presence in the Americas that goes back more than one- hundred thousand years. Some of the cases I mentioned were the Sheguiandah, Canada, artifacts (125,000 years); the Trenton, New Jersey, human femur (114,000 years); the Calico, California, artifacts (200,000 years); the Lawn Ridge, Illinois, copper coin (200,000 years); the Hueyatlaco, Mexico, artifacts (250,000 years); the Buenos Aires, Argentina, skull (1 million years); the Nampa, Idaho, human figurine (2 million years); the Miramar, Argentina, flint arrowhead (3 million years); the California gold mine skeletons and artifacts (50 million years); the Macoupin County, Illinois, human skeleton (about 300 million years); the Antelope Springs, Utah, human shoeprint (500 million years), and the Dorchester, Massachusetts, metallic vase (600 million years).

Among the other lectures, one that especially caught my attention was Carl Johannessen’s talk on “Photographic Evidence of the Pre-Columbian Movement of Plants Across the Oceans.” It featured photographs of gods and goddesses in temples in South India holding ears of corn. The temples are over one thousand years old. Corn is native to the Americas, and according to standard historical reasoning, it should not have entered the Old World until after the voyages of Columbus, about five hundred years ago.

The ancient Sanskrit writings not only say that humans existed millions of years ago but also that the Vedic culture of India had a worldwide presence. Other speakers pointed out additional signs of contact between India and the Americas, such as lotus and elephant motifs on Central American temples. At the time the temples were constructed, way before Columbus, the lotus and elephant were not, according to standard opinion, found in the New World. Someday I would like to do a very thorough study of all of this evidence for contacts between India and the Americas (and other parts of the world) and put it together in a book.

Professor Stephen Jett, of the University of California at Davis, is one of the leading academic voices arguing in favor of pre-Columbian transoceanic contacts. He is presently working on a scholarly book summarizing the evidence. His talk at Columbus showed that a variety of cultures had both the ships and navigational skills to make voyages across oceans to the New World in ancient times.

In Columbus, I had the good fortune to meet Gloria Farley, the grand dame of early American research. She said she had always wanted to meet me because one of the more extreme anomalies that I documented in Forbidden Archeology comes from the town where she lives, Heavener, Oklahoma.

In 1928, Atlas Almon Mathis was working in a coal mine two miles north of Heavener. The shaft went down over ten thousand feet. Once, Mathis and other miners used dynamite to blast out a new “room” deep in the mine. In a signed affadavit, Mathis said, “The next morning, there were several concrete blocks lying in the room. These blocks were twelve-inch cubes and were so smooth and polished on the outside that all six sides could serve as mirrors. Yet they were full of gravel, because I chipped one of them open with my pick, and it was plain concrete inside.” Mathis added, “As I started to timber the room up, it caved in, and I barely escaped. When I came back after the cave-in, a solid wall of these polished blocks was left exposed. About 100 to 150 yards farther down our air core, another miner struck this same wall, or one very similar.” (Forbidden Archeology, p. 809) The coal at this level is almost 300 million years old.

Gloria was kind enough to give me a copy of her book In Plain Sight: Old World Records in Ancient America, which features an encyclopedic review of anomalous inscriptions on stone, shell, and metal. Dr. Mahan said about this work: “Anyone who reads this book can never again believe that Columbus or even Leif Erickson discovered America. Evidence presented that Old World people were here centuries before is in the form of translated writing on stone and related petroglyphs, which the author has care-
fully recorded for the past forty-five years.” Gloria’s talk at Columbus was about new discoveries of Old World coins in North America.

Another old friend I met at Columbus was archeologist Neil Steede. We had last met over the summer, in Vienna, where we had both spoken at the Unsolved Mysteries conference organized by Klaus Dona, in connection with his unprecedented exhibition of anomalous archeological artifacts gathered from museums and private collections around the world. Neil, I learned, was a vice president of ISAC. He is well known for his archeoastronomical work, showing that the temple structure at Tihuanaco, Bolivia, was aligned to the solstice and equinox points as they existed about twelve thousand years ago. At the ISAC conference in Columbus, he spoke about sundials found at Comalcalco, Mexico, and also showed similarities between Roman and Mayan dice. Neil has also been involved in some new work going on at the Hueyatlaco, Mexico, site, and he filled me in on some of the results.

Morton Harris asked me to give the after dinner talk at the conference banquet. I spoke on the topic of fraud in archeology, going over some of the things I wrote about in my last Atlantis Rising column.

I can recommend the ISAC annual conference to Atlantis Rising readers as an excellent opportunity to hear some top quality lectures from an assortment of speakers, ranging from university professors to expert amateurs. The audience is small enough that there is plenty of opportunity for attendees to meet and converse with the speakers over the course of the three-day event. For information about next year’s conference, readers can write: ISAC, P. O. Box 2707, Columbus, GA 31902, USA.

7
Czech Please!
The Forbidden Archeologist In Prague

In the fall of 2001, Volvox Globator, a major Czech publisher, brought out an edition of my book The Hidden History of the Human Race. So on November 6, 2001, I left Los Angeles on a KLM flight to Prague by way of Amsterdam, for a publicity and lecture tour of the Czech Republic. The next morning, as we were coming down through cloud cover into Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, there was a loud crash and a blinding flash of light from the windows. It felt as if the plane had been hit by a giant hammer. Given the events of September 11, my first thought was that we had been hit by a terrorist’s ground-to-air missile. But it turned out we had only(!) been hit by lightning. We landed safely. When my connecting flight to Prague took off, things were still stormy around Amsterdam, and the plane got hit twice by lightning shortly after take off. With the instruments reading “engine on fire” the pilot turned the plane around and landed at Schiphol. Was someone trying to send me a message? A couple of hours later, we were in the air again. Despite my late arrival, I was met by two people from the Prague Hare Krishna temple, who had helped organize my tour. We then drove to the temple in the outskirts of the city, where I would be staying, and there I had some short meetings with some of the other organizers and translators. We went over the next day’s schedule. After a late night snack, I went to sleep.

The next morning, the tour kicked off with a press conference in a club on the banks of the Vltava River in the center of historic Prague. The conference was well attended, with representatives of Czech national TV, the print media, and radio all there. I opened with a statement that I had always wanted to come to Prague. In the spring and summer of 1968, reformers in Prague had revolted against the hardline Communist regime. Desiring to take part in the historic events, I had headed to Europe around the end of  that summer, but before I arrived the Russians had invaded Czechoslovakia and put down the reformers. So now I was here in Prague, for the first time, thirty-three years later. And I was happy to be there. I have always regarded Prague, the city of Kafka, as quite a revolutionary intellectual place, a place where new ideas circulate underground before breaking into public view. It was a perfect place for me, the forbidden archeologist, to be launching a book that documents archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity, challenging the now dominant Darwinian evolutionary picture of human origins.

Over the next few days I appeared three times on Czech national television. On November 12, I signed books at Fisher’s, one of the prominent Prague bookshops. Then I gave a lecture at the Charles University, one of the oldest universities in Europe. I had been invited by the faculty of philosophy. The lecture hall was full of students and professors, and there were lots of good questions.
On November 13, I did a live internet chat on a major internet provider for the Czech Republic (chat.volny.cz). The whole tour was action-packed, with additional lectures at educational and cultural institutions, media interviews, and bookstore signings.

Of course, the reactions to my work in the media were not always favorable. Just after I left the Czech Republic to return to LA, one of the major Prague papers (Lidove Noviny) printed in its science section a sarcastic review of my book by a leading Czech anthropologist, Vaclav Vancata. The review was titled “The Hidden History of the Human Race: Sheer Quackery.” Vancata totally misrepresented the substance of the book and asked the public not to read it. I sent a reply to the editors, and asked them to print it.
Martin Uhlir, the science editor, wrote back to me on December 4, 2001: “I am sorry that you feel your book was misinterpreted in our newspaper. On the other hand, we have to admit that we do not want to give you the opportunity to respond . . . Frankly . . . we are a pretty conservative science supplement which defends the positions of the official science.” That was pretty much the kind of reply I expected.

A few days later, I was pleasantly surprised when I learned that the editor of the cultural affairs section of the paper had somehow seen my reply to Dr. Vancata and had decided to print it in her section, over the objections of the science editor. Here is the text of my reply:

“Dr. Vaclav Vancata reminds me of the father who tries to frighten a child by saying. ‘There is a monster in the closet, so you had better not open the door, or the monster will get you.’ As a representative of orthodox science, Dr. Vancata wants to frighten the Czech reading public into not opening the covers of my book The Hidden History of the Human Race. He warns that if they dare to do so against his fatherly advice they will find themselves attacked by the monster of ‘sheer quackery.’ Of course, an intelligent child might go ahead and take a peek inside the closet to see if there really is a monster. And I hope Czech readers will not be frightened by the monster stories of Dr. Vancata, and will be brave enough to open the covers of my book and see for themselves what is there.

“They should also know that Dr. Vancata does not represent the opinion of all scholars and scientists. The Hidden History of the Human Race (in its original English version, titled Forbidden Archeology), was reviewed in the major scientific journals of archeology and the history of science. In a lengthy review article in Social Studies of Science, historians of science Jo Wodak and David Oldroyd said the book made a genuine contribution to the literature on paleoanthropology because ‘the historical material . . . has not been scrutinized in such detail before,’ and the book calls attention to ‘the lack of certainty in scientific truth claims.’ In L’Anthropologie, archeologist Marylène Pathou-Mathis wrote: ‘M. Cremo and R. Thompson have willfully written a provocative work that raises the problem of the influence of the dominant ideas of a time period on scientific research. These ideas can compel the researchers to orient their analyses according to the conceptions that are permitted by the scientific community.’ She concluded, ‘The documentary richness of this work . . . is not to be ignored.’ And in British Journal for the History of Science, archeologist Tim Murray said of the book: ‘Certainly it provides the historian of archaeology with a useful compendium of case studies in the history and sociology of scientific knowledge, which can be used to foster debate within archaeology about how to describe the epistemology of one’s discipline.’ Furthermore, each year, I am regularly invited to speak at scientific societies, universities, and professional conferences of archeologists and historians of science around the world, and papers based on the work in my book have been selected for publication in the professional literature. Dr. Vancata’s crude dismissal of the book, and the work it represents, as sheer quackery is thus not shared by everyone in the world of science.

“Dr. Vancata complains that many of the cases that I mention in the book (which contradict current ideas of human origins) come from the earlier history of archeology. Of course, if you look in any orthodox textbook of archeology, you will also find many cases that come from the earlier history of archeology. For example, the discoveries of Neanderthal man (1856), Java Man (1893), Beijing man (1929), and a host of others come from the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. These he does not complain about. It is only when a discovery contradicts his ideas that he becomes suddenly allergic to ‘old’ evidence. I wonder where Vancata gets this strange idea that all science done before midnight of January 1 of the year 2000 must be dismissed? It is a foolish idea. Galileo worked in the seventeenth century, Newton in the eighteenth, and Einstein came up with the theory of relativity in the very early part of the twentieth century, and their work is accepted even today.

“In any case, many of the discoveries I mention in the book are from the more recent history of archeology. Also, I am happy to hear that Dr. Vancata agrees with me that the overly humanized characterizations of Australopithecus and Homo habilis still found in most textbooks and museum displays are wrong.

“I don’t mind that Dr. Vancata disagrees with any of the cases of evidence for extreme human antiquity that I have documented in Hidden History of the Human Race, but I do object to his characterization of the book as quackery. In his scornful review Dr. Vancata has done more to discredit himself than my work. I am prepared to come to Prague at any convenient time to publicly debate Dr.
Vancata on the actual substance of the book.”

8
Christian Creationism,
Krishna Creationism, and the Origin of the Human Species

For a long time, Darwinists assumed that anyone who argued seriously against their theory of human evolution must be a Christian creationist. Perhaps that’s why my book Forbidden Archeology came as such a surprise.

In a review of Forbidden Archaeology published in Geoarchaeology (1994, 9:337–340), Kenneth Feder wrote: “The book . . . represents something perhaps not seen before; we can fairly call it ‘Krishna creationism’ with no disrespect intended. The basic
premises of the authors are breathtaking . . . : The prevailing paradigm of human evolution . . . is wholly untenable. There is what amounts to a passive conspiracy (the authors call it a ‘knowledge filter’) to suppress a huge body of data that contradicts our prevailing paradigm . . . this purported evidence indicates that ‘beings quite like ourselves have been around as far back as we care to look—in the Pliocene, Miocene, Oligocene, Eocene and beyond.’”

Feder concluded, “We all know what happens when we mix a literal interpretation of the Judeo-Christian creation myth with human paleontology; we get scientific creationism. It seems we now know what happens when we mix a literal interpretation of the Hindu myth of creation with human paleontology; we get the antievolutionary Krishna creationism of Forbidden Archaeology, where human beings do not evolve and where the fossil evidence for anatomically modern humans dates as far back as the begin-
ning of the current manvantara.” Of course, I did not invent that fossil evidence, which does show that humans existed hundreds of millions of years ago. In reply to Feder, I say: “We all know what happens when we mix a strong belief in Darwinism with human paleontology. We get a fundamentalist evolutionary account of human origins, in which human beings evolve from apes and the fossil evidence for humans of our type only goes back about 100,000 years.”

Now let’s talk about my relationships with Christian researchers concerned with human evolution. Among them are three groups. The first is the Biblical creationists, who believe that God directly created the earth and human beings about ten thousand years ago. These young earth creationists are mostly from conservative Protestant denominations. The second group of Christian researchers is those who believe that God created human beings, but did it by the Darwinian process of evolution. These researchers tend to come from liberal Protestant and mainstream Catholic backgrounds. The third group, are the new Christian academics who belong to the intelligent design movement. They keep their Biblical commitments deliberately vague. To varying degrees, they are against the Darwinian theory.I have fairly good relationships with young-earth Christian creationists, despite my Vedic spiritual commitments and my oldearth position. The abridged edition of Forbidden Archeology, titled The Hidden History of the Human Race, got a positive review in Creation Research Society Quarterly (June 1995), the main journal of the young-earth Christian creationists. The author, Peter Line, said, “This book is must reading for anyone interested in human origins.” I have also appeared on Christian creationist radio and television shows. Here’s what I say: “Whether we believe the earth has been here for a few thousand years or a few billion years, humans have been here since the beginning. We did not come from apes, as the Darwinists would like us to believe.”

Sometimes, I get into discussions with young-earth creationists about the geological dating methods. They have to reject all of them as totally useless. But I don’t find that to be a very viable position. The dating methods can be checked against the yearly series of tree rings, which go back thousands of years, and the record of yearly snowfalls found in the Arctic and Antarctic ice core drillings, which go back hundreds of thousands of years. On rare occasions, trees can show more than one growth ring per year, or there can sometimes be more than one layer per year in ice cores. But this doesn’t happen very much. The observed tree rings and ice cores thus support the accuracy of various chemical and radiometric dating methods.

My own position is that the dating methods give approximately correct dates. By that I mean the dates obtained by these methods roughly correspond to the ages for the history of life given in the ancient Sanskrit writings of India. According to the Sanskrit writings, the current creation cycle began about 2 billion years ago. Still, there are many ways for the application of a particular dating method to a particular case to give an incorrect result. For example, the object being dated could contain contaminants that cause the dating method to give an age that is too young or too old. But in general, if the methods are applied properly, they should give roughly correct ages.

As for the Christians who have chosen to make a compromise with Darwinism (God created human beings, but He did it by evolution), I see two problems with their position. First of all, they have to give up any literal understanding of their scripture, which says that God directly created humans in his image. Nowhere in the Bible can one find any statements that God made human beings by evolving them from apes. Second, they have tied their theology to an evolutionary picture of human origins that is contradicted by huge amounts of physical evidence, in the form of anatomically modern human bones, footprints, and artifacts millions of years old. Nevertheless, most Catholic and liberal Protestant scholars and scientists have adopted the current Dar-
winian evolutionary explanation of human origins.

But I’ve managed to change a few minds. A couple of years ago, Dr. Dennis Bonnette, head of the philosophy department at Niagara University, a Catholic institution in New York State, contacted me by email. He was writing a book on human evolution, from the usual Catholic perspective (God created the human beings, but He did it by evolution). But after he read Forbidden Archeology, he changed his mind and began reworking his book. In the new draft, he suggested that in light of the evidence for extreme human antiquity documented in Forbidden Archeology, Christian scholars might once more take seriously the Biblical accounts of the direct creation of human beings by God. Bonnette wrote:
“Scholarly research, such as that found in Forbidden Archeology,
offers reasonable stratigraphic and other evidence that modern human beings predate proposed transitional hominids, such as Homo erectus. This presents probable cause to doubt current human evolutionary theory. . . . If human beings did not evolve, then
Adam and Eve did not descend from transitional hominids . . . (and) Adam and Eve’s direct divine creation . . . becomes credible.” Bonnette’s book, The Origin of the Human Species, which came out in 2001 in a philosophy series from a major European academic publisher, is well worth reading for anyone desiring to learn the ins and outs of various Christian positions on the human evolution question.

As for the intelligent design theorists, such as William Dembski and Michael Behe, I have fairly good relationships with them.  Behe attended my lecture on forbidden archeology at his university in Pennsylvania, and before the lecture, we had dinner together.  He appeared quite interested in the fossil evidence contradicting the Darwinian theory of human evolution. Phillip Johnson, author of Darwin on Trial, and one of the chief spokespersons of the modern intelligent design movement, wrote a foreword to my book The Hidden History of the Human Race encouraging scientists to “examine evidence that was not included in the textbooks and review articles they were given in their college and graduate school classes.”

My relationships with various Christian scholars working on the evolution question are part of a larger strategy. In the world today, we are in the middle of a major renegotiation of our whole picture of reality, the type of renegotiation that takes place only every few centuries. We are moving away from a strictly material and mechanical view of reality and toward a view that incorporates the subtle energies of mind and consciousness. There are many parties to this renegotiation: mainstream scientists, alternative science researchers, religionists, new-agers, and more. As a party to this renegotiation, my policy is to stay in touch with all the other parties, and my relationships with Christian researchers are part of that policy.

9
The Sunken City in the Gulf of Cambay, India: Will It Sink
The Aryan Invasion Hypothesis?

In January 2002, I attended a conference in Hyderabad, India, at which Dr. Murli Manohara Joshi, the Indian government’s minister for science and technology, was present. He confirmed that oceanographic researchers of the National Institute of Ocean
Technology, part of his ministry, had found remnants of a sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay, thirty kilometers off the shore of northwestern India. Sonar photographs of the ocean bottom revealed large, rectangular, walled structures extending nine kilometers along the banks of an ancient riverbed, now forty meters underwater. To confirm that the sonar images did represent a human habitation site, the researchers dredged up over two thousand artifacts, including semi-precious stones, stone tools, and human bones. A piece of wood from the site yielded a radiocarbon date of about 9,500 years.

If this age holds up, the sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay represents the oldest city in the world, at 7500 B.C. Jericho, in Palestine, previously thought to be the oldest urban settlement,  goes back to only 7000 B.C., and is much smaller in size.

Just as important as the age of the city is the cultural identity of its inhabitants. If it turns out that the inhabitants were part of the Vedic culture of India, this could revolutionize Indian history.

The historical writings of ancient India, the Puranas, tell of Vedic civilization existing in India not only 9,500 years ago, but much further back in time. Indeed, the Puranas record the existence of Vedic civilization in India going back hundreds of thousands, even millions of years.

When European powers like Great Britain came to dominate India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European scholars were reluctant to accept the great antiquity of Indian civilization. They were also troubled by the apparent connection between the ancient Sanskrit language of India and the European languages. If the historical and linguistic evidence were to be taken at face value, it would appear that the Indian civilization was more ancient than the European civilization, and that the European civilization was in fact descended from the Indian civilization. To avoid this conclusion, European colonial scholars concocted the idea Europe was the source of the Indian civilization. They proposed that a branch of the Aryan European people migrated from southern Russia (or some other nearby place) into India around 1500 B.C. This Aryan migration concept remains in force today, among most European and many Indian historians and archeologists. They insist that cities in the Indian subcontinent older than 3,500 years, such as Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, were not Vedic, even though many lines of evidence suggest they were.

One thing is certain. The ancient Sanskrit historical writings make no mention of a migration from a homeland outside India. Furthermore, all the place names in northern India are of Sanskrit origin. If the Sanskrit-speaking people were invaders, we would expect that many names of mountains, rivers, and places should reflect an earlier language, just as many thousands of geographical names in North America (Mississippi, Massachusetts, Connecticut, etc.) reflect the language of pre-European inhabitants.

The time scale of the Indian civilization was particularly troubling to the early European colonial scholars. In the eighteenth century, most European scholars and scientists, relying on Biblical accounts, believed that the earth itself was less than ten thousand years old. So the vast expanses of time recorded in the ancient Sanskrit historical writings seemed impossible, although some few European scholars did take the long chronologies of Indian history seriously, much to the dismay of their colleagues. In 1802, in his book A Historical View of the Hindu Astronomy, John Bentley said about one of these European intellectual traitors: “By his attempt to uphold the antiquity of Hindu books. . . . he endeavours to overturn the Mosaic account, and sap the very foundations of our religion: for if we are to believe in the antiquity of Hindu books, as he would wish us, then the Mosaic account is all a fable, or a fiction.” Of course that is not really true, because then as well as now some theologians  have interpreted the “days” in the Biblical creation accounts as being cosmologically long days. Still, the short Biblical chronology was dominant at that time.

Bentley regarded the vast time periods of Indian history to be a recent invention by the brahmanas of India, who desired “to arrogate to themselves that they were the most ancient people on the face of the earth.” Unable to tolerate this, Bentley suggested that the Puranic histories should be compressed to fit within the few thousand years of the Biblical short chronology. And that is what happened.

So, on one hand, we have the ancient Sanskrit historical writings, which tell us that the Vedic culture has been present in India for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years. And on the other hand, we have archeologists and historians who tell us that these accounts are ficitional, and that Vedic culture entered India only about 3,500 years ago. Any cities in the Indian subcontinent that are older than this are attributed to the Harappan culture, which is not considered Vedic by most mainstream researchers.

If it turns out that the 9,500-year-old sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay was inhabited by people of Vedic culture, this would,
of course, completely destroy the fiction that Vedic culture came into India by an Aryan migration from Europe or Central Asia some 3,500 years ago. It would instead lend support to the ancient Sanskrit histories, and open the way for research showing that the history of Vedic culture in India goes even further back in time.

Perhaps this is why Harvard University archeologist Richard Meadow says, “The discovery is important enough to launch an international collaborative study as was done to uncover the sunken ruins of the Titanic.” (India Today, Feb. 11, 2002, pp. 45
–46) On the surface, that sounds like an attractive offer. But Meadows, who has done extensive research at Harappa, is one of the archeologists who is strongly upholding the current Aryan migration hypothesis, and he has already complained about “wild gues-
ses” about the implications of the sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay. It may be that an international project, with people like Meadows excercising control, could be used to channel the direction of the research and conclusions in such a way as to not threaten
the reigning Aryan migration hypothesis.

My advice to the Indian scientists in charge of the research: If there is any international involvement, make sure that you do not lose control of the direction and results of the research.

The sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay is not the first to be found in the region. In the 1970s, not far to the north, the Indian marine archeologist S. Rao announced the discovery of ruins of a sunken city in the ocean waters offshore from the present-day
town of Dwarka. Could these be the remains of the fabled city of Dwarka described in an ancient Sanskrit work called the Shrimad-Bhagavatam? According to this work, Dwarka, with its palatial buildings and wide avenues, was the capital of the god-
king Krishna, who is identified in the Shrimad-Bhagavatam as the principal avatar of God. The Bhagavatam states that as soon as Krishna left this world, about 5,000 years ago, the ocean covered Dwarka. One problem with Rao’s discovery is that he gave an age of just 3,500 years to the underwater ruins he discovered. This leads me to suspect that either the date he gave is wrong or that the remains of the Dwarka of Krishna’s time lie further out to sea. The existence of the newly discovered sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay 9,500 years ago make the existence of a 5,000-year-old Vedic city in the same region all the more likely.

Architectural remains of ancient India’s Vedic culture are to be found not only underwater, but also still standing on the Indian subcontinent. During my recent lecture tour in South India, following the Hyderabad conference, I saw, for example, the Mallik-
arjuna temple in Vijayawada, in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The temple is situated on a hill overlooking the Krishna River. The present temple structure was built in the tenth century A.D. by King Tribhuvana Malla of the Chakukya dynasty, but according
to tradition, the first temple on the site was built by King Yudhisthira, one of the heroes of the epic Mahabharata, about 5,000 years ago. There are hundreds of such sites throughout India, many of them of far greater reputed antiquity. One of my goals is
to find archeologists in India willing to help document the true antiquity of such monuments.

But for now the focus is underwater, on the sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay. If it turns out to be a city of the Vedic culture, it could sink the Aryan migration idea for good.

10
Toumai: One Hominid Revolution Too Many

Every six months or so, we get a “revolution” in hominid paleontology. In July 2002 we got another one. Friends and wellwishers began to fill my emailbox with clippings from various web pages (BBC, CNN, MSNBC) about a new discovery from Chad.

There have been so many of these so-called revolutions in the past couple of years, that my head is spinning. First there was a new specimen of Ardipithecus, and then the Millenium Man, and then Meave Leakey’s “Flat Face” (Kenyanthropus). Each one was trumpeted as revolutionary. But now can anyone remember what the fuss was all about? Hardly. And yet here comes another.

The latest revolutionary discovery is Sahelanthropus tchadensis. The discoverers assert that it’s a hominid, a human ancestor, who lived between six and seven million years ago in the Sahel region of the Central African nation of Chad. Making anthropus (human) part of its name is a deliberate ploy to make us think this must be one of us, a direct human ancestor. And the media swallow it, and play it back to us in much-magnified terms. An article in the July 22 issue of Time featured a double-page painting of the creature, with the title “Father of Us All?” blazoned across the top. The skull itself made the cover, with the legend: “Out of Africa comes a face that may be seven million years old. Is he . . . Big Daddy?” Oh, please!

Further attempts to increase the humanity of the hunk of monkey skull were made when Michel Brunet, one of the discoverers, appeared on television proclaiming how overwhelmed with emotion he was to be holding in his hands the skull of what he called our oldest ancestor. Were those tears in his eyes? Of course, the little skull had to be given some cute personifying name, again meant to evoke the sympathy of the public. They came upon Toumai, which in the language of the local people means “child of hope.” Tears translate into research funds in the world of hominid paleontology.

All this hominid hype is based on the assumption that evolution is a fact, that it has been established beyond all doubt that humans like us have evolved from more primitive apelike creatures. Therefore, when scientists find any apelike bones from the period of four to seven million years ago, they strain their brains to find in them some humanlike features, so that they can be declared human ancestors.

Don Johanson, the discoverer of the famous Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), confessed in his book Lucy (p. 257): “There is no such thing as a total lack of bias. I have it; everybody has it.
The fossil hunter in the field has it. . . . In everybody who is looking for hominids there is a strong urge to learn more and more about where the human line started. If you are working back at around three million years, as I was, that is very seductive, because you begin to get the idea that is where Homo did start. You begin straining your eyes to find Homo traits in fossils of that age.” Johanson said this to explain why he had first labeled as Homo some bones found in the same region as Lucy.

Today, the time period of most interest to hominid hunters is around six to seven million years. That is when they think the very first hominids came into existence, by splitting off from the line that leads to the modern chimpanzees. So they expect on the one hand that the fossils of the earliest hominids should be very primitive, but at the same time they expect them to show some Homo traits. And they look very hard to find such traits, sometimes too hard in my opinion. This whole effort can be very speculative. It can best be compared to looking for Homo traits in the features of the clouds in the sky. Of course, you can find them. But that does not mean that clouds are ancestors of humans.

And lest you think that this is just your forbidden archeologist taking advantage of his column to force upon you his own totally unique point of view, I draw your attention to the fact that even some conventional scientists of considerable reputation in hominid studies disagree with the discoverers’ judgments about the so-called human ancestor from Chad. Brigitte Senut and others, such as Chris Stringer of the British Museum (Science News, July 13, p.19), suggest that the discoverers may have simply found the bones of a female ape, somewhat like a gorilla, with no connection to humans at all. In other words, Toumai is not a hominid at all, and therefore is not our oldest ancestor, not “the father of us all,” not “Big Daddy.”

Let’s consider one of the so-called Homo traits found in the Toumai skull—the heavy, straight, visorlike brow ridge that protrudes over the eye sockets. That this should be deemed a Homo trait may seem strange, when we consider that modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) do not have such a feature. Neither do the modern apes and monkeys. Neither do the members of the group of extinct African apes from which the hominids are said to have come over seven million years ago. But Homo erectus, now thought by most scientists to be a human ancestor, does have a straight, heavy, barlike ridge of bone over the eye sockets. Homo erectus supposedly came into existence about 1.8 million years ago and persisted until about 300,000 years ago. The Neanderthals also have the heavy barlike brow ridge. So it is on this basis that the discoverers of Toumai considered their find to be ancestral to modern humans.

But if we look back into the history of hominid paleontology, we find that Louis Leakey rejected Homo erectus and the Neanderthals (and Australopithecus) as human ancestors, just because of their strangely nonhuman brow ridges. In his book Adam’s Ancestors (1960, p. 164), Leakey noted: “The brow-ridge over each eye is made up of two component parts in Homo sapiens. One part in each case starts just above the nose and extends sideways and slightly upwards to overlap that second part, which on either side, starts at the extreme edge to the right and left of the eye-socket respectively, and extends inwards and slightly downwards. Thus, above the center of each eye-socket, there is an overlap of the two elements.” The quite different single horizontal bar of bone found in Homo erectus “suggested not an ancestral stage of human evolution but a side branch that has become more specialized, in this respect, than any Homo sapiens type.” Leakey thought it exceedingly unlikely that evolution should take the ancestors through a phase where they had no barlike brow ridge to a phase where they had a massive barlike brow ridge, and then back again to a phase with no massive barlike brow ridge. I think Leakey was correct. If so, Toumai’s big visorlike brow ridge is not evidence that the creature is a human ancestor. Quite the contrary.

But the biggest reason for denying Toumai the cherished status of being a human ancestor is the chain of anatomically modern human bones, footprints, and artifacts that extends from the present, back to the time of Toumai, and further back into the distant past. This evidence is documented in my book Forbidden Archeology. For example, Dr. J. D. Whitney, in his book The Auriferous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California (1880) published by Harvard University, details numerous discoveries of anatomically modern human bones and artifacts in layers of rock up to 50 million years old. One human skull fragment, which was sent to the Museum of Natural History in Boston, was found by Col. Paul K. Hubbs in the Valentine Mine shaft at Table Mountain, 180 feet below the surface in gold-bearing deposits, next to fossil bones of mastodons. The fossil-bearing layers were sealed off from the surface by thick layers of volcanic deposits at least 9 million years old. Whitney wrote (1880, p. 265): “The essential facts are, that the Valentine Shaft was vertical, that it was boarded up to the top, so that nothing could have fallen in from the surface during the working under ground, which was carried on in the gravel channel exclusively, after the shaft had been sunk. There can be no doubt that the specimen came from the drift [gold-bearing gravels] in the channel under Table Mountain, as affirmed by Mr. Hubbs.” And reports of human skeletal remains go even further back than that. In the December 1862 edition of The Geologist, we find a report that a complete anatomically modern human skeleton was found ninety feet below the surface of the ground in Macoupin County, Illinois, in deposits about 300 million years old.

So the scientists straining to find ancestral human features in this old ape skull are simply hallucinating. Their seeing humanlike features in the skull of Toumai is hardly different from seeing humanlike features in the marks on the surface of the full moon. The real revolution in hominid paleontology will come when scientists accept the fact that humans have always existed on earth, and that we did not come from the apes.

11
Adventures in the Ukraine   

Last year (2002), I visited the Ukraine twice, spreading the message of forbidden archeology among scientists, students, and the general public. 

The first visit was in the spring. At that time, I was invited to give a talk to the archeologists at the Institute of Archeology of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev, the ancient capital of the Ukraine. There I presented a summary of the evidence for extreme human antiquity documented in my book Forbidden Archeology. I also spoke about the Vedic background of my work, which is inspired by my studies in the Puranas, the ancient historical writings of India. And finally, I discussed the topic of knowledge filtration, by which archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity is eliminated from normal scientific discussion.

It is very upsetting to my extremist critics (I call them the “fundamentalist Darwinists”) that I get such invitations from professional archeologists. These extremist critics wish to totally bar me and my work from the world of science, but the world of science, apart from these extremist critics, seems quite open to at least hear my ideas.

The talk at the Institute of Archeology went well. About fifty archeologists attended. I was introduced by one of the directors. Afterwards, several archeologists purchased copies of the Russian edition of my book The Hidden History of the Human Race (the abridged edition of Forbidden Archeology). Although most of the people speak Ukrainian, a Slavic language related to Russian, they also know Russian quite well. Still, I hope that eventually a Ukrainian publisher will bring out a Ukrainian edition of the book. In any case, several archeologists approached me after the talk and told me that they have had experience of the knowledge filtering process operating in their discipline there. One of the archeologists accompanied me out to my car. He said he very much appreciated my talk. He said that some years ago, the archeologists at the institute would have weekly sessions in which they deeply questioned the fundamental assumptions underlying their practice of archeology, but over the years these discussions had stopped. He said that my work made a contribution to getting archeologists thinking about these things again.

Another highlight of the spring tour was a visit to the Dnepropetrovsk Historical Museum. The third-largest city in the Ukraine, Dnepropetrovsk during the Communist era was a closed city, off limits to tourists because of its missile factories and other
top secret installations. When I arrived at the museum, I was met by its director, who introduced me to Dr. Larisa Churilova, head of the archeology collection. Dr. Churilova led me on a tour of the archeology collections. I learned some interesting things from
her. While showing me old tombs, skeletons, and items buried along with the skeletons, she told me that the evidence suggested to her that the Stone Age people of this region believed in reincarnation. I found that quite interesting, because, as a student of
the Vedic philosophy, I accept reincarnation as a fact. I asked her if she and her colleagues had published anything on the topic. She said no, because the editors of many of the professional journals frown on such cultural interpretations of archeological evidence. They just want to print things like “a stone flake two centimeters long was found at a depth of one meter in the excavation,” without offering any thoughts about what role the object may have played in the conscious lives of the people who made and used it.

 Other objects in the museum suggested contacts or relationships with the Vedic culture of India. Aside from evidence for extreme human antiquity contradicting the Darwinian theory of evolution, evidence for the presence of Vedic culture in various parts of the world is one of my main interests. Many Ukrainian and Russian archeologists, having noticed the signs of Vedic culture in that part of the world, have concluded that the Vedic culture originated in the steppes of the southern Ukraine and then moved into India about 3,500 years ago. But I believe it is more accurate to say that the Vedic culture was always present in India, and that the signs of Vedic culture discovered by archeologists in the southern Ukraine represent a radiation of that culture from India.

During this first tour, I also spoke to students and professors of archeology and history at several universities in Kiev, Dnepropetrovsk, and Donetsk. And I also had a chance to speak to the people in general through public lectures and the media. Major
articles about me and my work were published in the major national and urban newspapers, with headlines such as “Humans Are Not Apes Says Controversial Archeologist from USA.” 

The response to the spring tour was so positive that I came again in the fall, to visit three other major cities—Kharkov, Odessa, and Lvov. Kharkov is like the Pittsburgh of the Ukraine—a tough, grimy industrial center—but like Pittsburgh it also has its cultural side. In Kharkov I had a meeting with prominent scientists and philosophers at the House of Science, who came there to hear me talk on forbidden archeology. Odessa, on the Black Sea coast, is somewhat like New Orleans—a rowdy port town, with a long history of smuggling and black marketing, and a mixture of various cultures.

In addition to my usual university lectures and media interviews, I had the chance in Odessa to meet Dr. Boris Mukha, a paleontologist at the Museum of Paleontology of the University of Odessa. Parts of underground Odessa are honeycombed with sand-
stone caves that go for miles. The caves were put to good use by the partisans who resisted the German occupation during World War II, but they are also filled with deposits in which can be found bones of animals millions of years old. Dr. Mukha showed
me a collection of animal bones between three and four million years old that display signs of having been modified for use as primitive tools. Some of the jaw bones of mammals have holes drilled in them. The holes have led some to speculate that the animals were killed by bullets shot by space visitors millions of years ago. My inspection of the bones does not support that particular idea. It seems that the bones were modified for some deliberate purpose.
In addition to the holes, I saw that many of the edges had been sharpened and polished.

Dr. Mukha told me that when the bones were first shown to specialists from Russia, they said that they obviously had been modified by an intelligent being. But when they were informed of the ages of the bones, they changed their minds. A report submit-
ted by Dr. Mukha to the Russian journal Priroda (Nature) was rejected. This seems strange to me. It seems that the bones could, at the very least, be attributed to a hominid on the level of Australopithecus. The evidence shows that the environment around Odessa three to four million years ago was warm and dry, like the African savannah. But scientists seem to object to the idea that Australopithecus could have been present outside of Africa. So the bone tools of Odessa provide another case of knowledge filtration.

As far as I am concerned, the modifications of the animal bones could have been made by anatomically modern humans living three to four million years ago in the Ukraine. I have shown in Forbidden Archeology that there are numerous discoveries of human bones and artifacts demonstrating that humans of our type were present in various parts of the world at that time, and far earlier.

 Inspired by the historical research I did in Forbidden Archeology, Dr. Mukha and a coauthor are now working on a study of the anomalous archeological discoveries made by earlier generations of archeologists, geologists, and paleontologists in Eastern Europe. I am looking forward to seeing that report, as it could add another chapter to the history of forbidden archeology. Dr. Mukha also showed me an account from Yevlia Chelevi, a seventeenth-century Russian traveler in Turkey, who saw bones of gigantic humans in a cave there.

After Odessa, I went to Lvov, a very cultured and architecturally beautiful city in the far western part of the Ukraine. There I had a public lecture attended by about five-hundred people. After the talk, a graduate student from the university raised some loud objections, of a purely theoretical nature. I let him go on for some time, but in the end, when I asked him if he could offer any specific objections to any of the specific cases I presented in the talk, he could not do it. As I did after the spring tour, I then went by
train to the Crimea, to spend a few days in Yalta. There I finished writing the introduction to my forthcoming book Human Devolution, which should be in the bookstores by fall, 2003. Yalta, because of its southern position, usually escapes the extreme cold of the Russian and Ukrainian winter. Czar Nicholas II had at Yalta a winter palace that was later used in 1943 for a famous wartime meeting between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill. My first two days in Yalta were sunny. The southern coast of the Crimea, with its dry mountains falling to the sea, has a California air to it.
But an unusual cold spell, powered by northeast winds from Siberia, brought snow to Yalta. Bowls of hot borscht with sour cream helped me survive until it was time to take the train to Kiev, where I boarded my flight back to Los Angeles.

12
Investigations into the Antiquity of the Ranganatha Temple In South India

In February of 2002, I was on a lecture tour of South India. At universities and other educational and cultural institutions in several cities, I was giving talks about the archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity documented in my book Forbidden
Archeology. This evidence is consistent with accounts of a very ancient human presence on earth, found in the Vedas, the ancient Sanskrit writings of India. The talks were therefore popular with many Indian scholars and the general public. 

In Chennai (as the city of Madras, the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, is now called), I had a couple of days off. On one of these free days, the tour organizers arranged for me to go to the ancient hilltop temple of Tirupati, visited by more people each year than any other temple in India. On another free day, I went to Kanchipuram, another important pilgrimage town in the state of Tamil Nadu. There I visited several ancient temples, such as the Varadaraja temple.

While in Kanchipuram, I met an Indian archeologist who was curious about my work. I told him that I was not only interested in the extreme antiquity of the human race but also in the history of the Vedic culture in India. With that in mind, I showed
him the following passage from the commentary of His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada on the Chaitanya Charitamrita, a sixteenth-century biography of the avatar Chaitanya Mahaprabhu: “It is said that in the year 289 of the Age of
Kali, the Alvar of the name Tondaradippadi was born. . . . He . . . prepared the third boundary wall of the Ranganatha temple.”
That bit of information has some bearing on the question of the antiquity of Vedic culture in India. To show how this is true requires a little background about the Ranganatha temple and the Vedic time system.

The Ranganatha temple, also in the state of Tamil Nadu, is the largest temple complex in India. It is situated on a large island in the middle of the Kaveri River. The central temple building is surrounded by seven extensive boundary walls. According to some, the seven boundary walls represent the seven material coverings of the eternal self (the atma). And the path a pilgrim takes through the gates of the seven walls therefore represents a progressive process of spiritual realization.

According to the Vedic cosmological calendar, time proceeds in cycles of ages called yugas. There are four yugas in each cycle: a Satya Yuga, a Dvapara Yuga, a Treta Yuga, and a Kali Yuga. A cycle of four yugas lasts 4,320,000 years. A thousand such yuga cycles comprise a day of Brahma. According to the traditional calendar, we are now in the Kali Yuga of the current yuga cycle. The Kali Yuga began 5,105 years ago, in the year 3102 B.C. according to our Western calendar. So year 289 of the Kali Yuga corresponds to the Western year 2813 B.C. This means that the South Indian alvar (or saint) Tondaradippadi was born 4,816 years ago. If he built the third boundary wall of the Ranganatha temple during his lifetime, that means that this Vedic temple had been standing even before that. In other words, the Ranganatha temple has existed for at least 5,000 years.

This contradicts the standard Western account of the antiquity of Vedic culture in India. According to the standard Western account, the Vedic culture goes back no further than 3,500 years in India. So if it can be shown that the third boundary wall at
Ranganatha really does date back to between 4,700 and 4,800 years ago, that would give support to the great antiquity of Vedic culture in India attested to in the Vedic literature.

The attribution of relatively recent dates to various non-Western civilizations is quite common. For example, according to standard Western accounts, the origin of the Mesopotamian civilizations goes back about six or seven thousand years. But there are Babylonian king lists that go back 432,000 years. Similarly, the traditional histories of Egypt and China go back much further in time than the standard Western histories now tell us, and the calendars of the Mayan civilization cover vast spans of time, millions of years.

The age of the Ranganatha temple could go back much further than 5,000 years. The main deity worshiped in the Ranganatha temple is a reclining form of Vishnu. According to the traditional histories this deity was originally worshiped on the planet of the demigod Brahma, called Brahmaloka. It was transferred to our earth during the reign of the Vedic king Ikshvaku, who ruled from the city of Ayodhya tens of millions of years ago. During the time of the avatar Rama, the deity was taken by vimana (flying machine) for the purpose of transporting it to the island kingdom of Lanka in the south. But along the way, the vimana landed in South India. According to the conditions of transport, if the deity touched the ground before its final destination, it would remain there and would go no further. So the deity remained in the place where it landed, and a local king built a temple to accommodate the deity.

How along ago was that temple built? The construction of the temple occurred during the time of the avatar Rama, who lived toward the beginning of the Treta Yuga. The Treta Yuga of the current yuga cycle began about 2,155,000 years ago and ended about 840,000 years ago. That would mean the temple was constructed about 2 million years ago. However, there are some authorities who say that Rama appeared in the Treta Yuga of the fourth yuga cycle before the present one. If that is true, then the temple may have been constructed almost 20 million years ago.

That original temple, according to traditional sources, was later lost and covered by sand and jungle. In more recent times, over 5,000 years ago, a local king uncovered the deity and began the construction of the current temple. On the roof of the central temple building, just above the place where the deity rests inside, there is a gold-covered cupola. This cupola is called in Sanskrit vimana, perhaps a reference to the aircraft (vimana) by which the deity (with its interplanetary history) was transported to its present location. And the third boundary wall around the central temple building housing the deity was constructed by Tondaradippadi, who was born in 2813 B.C.

So my immediate purpose is to show that the Ranganatha temple is at least 5,000 years old, and that the third boundary wall is slightly younger than that. To that end I visited the Ranganatha temple complex with my Indian archeologist friend in February
of this year (2003). A European archeology graduate student who is also interested in the antiquity of the Ranganatha temple also accompanied us. Our goal was to see if there were any places along the third boundary wall that might be suitable for excavation. Our concern was that all the spaces in this inner part of the sacred temple complex might be either covered with construction, or excess-ively trafficked by the millions of pilgrims who visit the temple complex each year.

We entered through the main gate in the seventh, or outer wall, of the temple complex, and then we proceeded through the gates to the sixth, fifth, and fourth walls. Coming to the third wall, we noticed that there were some places that were out of the way of the pilgrims and were not covered by stone paving. We especially noted that on the west side of the third boundary wall was a garden area blocked off to the public. We concluded that it would be possible to do excavations in that area. Having determined this, we went to the temple offices, and began the process of getting the proper permissions from the trust that administers the temple complex. My archeologist friend will also seek needed permission from the Archeological Survey of India. One reason I am hopeful that the permissions will be granted is that the official archeological guide book to the Ranganatha temple, published by the temple trust itself, recommends that further excavations be made to determine the true age of the temple. If all goes well, I shall return to the Ranganatha temple this coming December to begin the excavation work. The idea will be to see if the present temple is built upon older foundations. Excavations might also reveal Vedic artifacts connected in strata 5,000 years and older. It may also be possible that part of the current structure is quite old. If such parts can be identified, there are also possibilities for dating them. For example, the mortar between the stones could contain organic materials that could be dated by the radiocarbon method.

For me, the traditional literary sources provide sufficient proof of the great antiquity of the Ranganatha temple. But for those who do not give much credence to this source of historical information, new archeological evidence might help them come to a better understanding of the temple’s true age.

13
The Forbidden Archeologist Goes to Russia

In April of this year (2003), I went to Russia, for a lecture and media tour. My first stop was Kiev, in the Ukraine, where I got my visa for Russia. Then I took a night train from Kiev to Moscow. The train was modern and comfortable. I actually like sleeping in trains. But there was the annoyance of having to wake up twice for border guards—once in a town on the Ukrainian side, and an hour later at a town on the Russian side. Still, it wasn’t so bad.

Moscow is a huge city. The most remarkable feature, to my mind, was the endless rows of big apartment blocks. I do not recall seeing even one single family dwelling during my whole stay, although I was told there were some, somewhere.

I was invited to speak to the department of anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The main RAS building in Moscow is a towering modernistic structure. A member of the department met me at the entrance. Before going inside, I had to go to an office, where a guard took down information from my passport, and gave me a pass. Then we went in through the security check point, and took an elevator to one of the top floors.

The small lecture auditorium was packed with about a hundred scientists and press people. I set up my digital projector. After years of depending on the audiovisual arrangements of various institutions around the world, sometimes to be disappointed, I have decided it is better to be self-contained.

Your forbidden archeologist has had quite a bit of experience speaking before scientists in universities, scientific institutions, and scientific conferences around the world. But he is always conscious of the difficulty of his task. He is a “Krishna creationist,” a Vedic antievolutionist, openly professing a controversial account of human origins and antiquity based on the ancient Sanskrit writings of India.

The organizers had told me that most of the scientists who were present had read my book already (The Hidden History of the Human Race was published in Russian a few years ago), and therefore they wanted to hear not just a general presentation, but more specifics. So I had prepared a talk to satisfy them. I discussed in detail a small number of cases of evidence for extreme human antiquity that contradicts the Darwinian theory of human evolution. This evidence is not well known among scientists and the general public because of a process of knowledge filtration that operates in the world of science.

One anthropologist was a bit angry with me for speaking about the knowledge filtering process. She said that I was accusing scientists of being dishonest. But that is not exactly what I had said. The knowledge filtering process operates in a more subtle way. In most cases, it is not that scientists believe that they are hiding “true” evidence, which if known to the public would cause them to reject their theories. Instead, when scientists encounter evidence that radically contradicts their theoretical expectations, they simply conclude, based on their deeply held beliefs in the correctness of their theories, that something must be wrong with the evidence. This Russian anthropologist herself provided a perfect example of this. After she criticized me for speaking about knowledge filtration, she said, “I have not read your book, but I am sure that everything in it must be a mistake or a hoax.” This is the knowledge filtration process in action. She was convinced that her ideas about human evolution were correct, and that any evidence that contradicted these ideas must be a hoax or a mistake.

This anthropologist also accused me of being a “nonspecialist.” It is common for defenders of orthodox views to hide behind the shield of professional qualification. Anyway, this does not bother me, because ultimately, the specialist should be able to de-
fend his or her point of view on the intellectual field of battle. I pointed out that if she was a specialist, then she should be able to point out specific evidence of mistakes or hoaxing in the cases I had presented in my talk, instead of making vague blanket accusations. She could not give any such specific evidence.

However, another scientist present at the talk said during the question session that I was quite right to talk about the knowledge filtering process. She gave an example from Soviet times, when a scientist in one of the Soviet republics (Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan) found human footprints alongside dinosaur footprints. His colleagues advised him not to try to have anything published about this, as it would never be accepted and it would be bad for his career. I am trying to learn more about this case.

After the talk was over, I met Dr. Dmitri Bayanov, a Russian scientist who has long been active in researching evidence for living apemen in various remote parts of Russia and neighboring countries. He had come to hear me speak, along with his publisher. I mentioned Bayanov’s work in the chapter on evidence for living apemen in my book Forbidden Archeology. Bayanov gave me copies of his English-language books In Search of the Russian Snowman and American Bigfoot: Fact, Not Fiction. I read both books
over the next couple of weeks. They are essential references for anyone interested in evidence for living apemen.

While in Moscow, I was invited to speak at the Darwin Museum, which is, of course, dedicated to the Darwinian theory of evolution. It used to be called the Museum of Atheism in Communist days. So that was quite an experience, to make a presentation against Darwinism, with a big painting of Darwin hanging on the back wall of the room where I lectured, staring me in the face. One of the administrators of the museum gave me a tour of the section on human evolution. But she also said that she liked my talk, and pointed out that it is the policy of the museum that evolution is only one of several possible explanations for human origins. Among the others she mentioned were creation and extraterrestrial intervention. During one of my television appear-
ances in Moscow, I mentioned that one of my goals as I travel around the world is to encourage education officials to include alternatives to Darwinism in the science curriculum. After this interview, the man who interviewed me told me that he had just recently interviewed an official from the Moscow school district, and she had said that this was in fact the policy in the schools in her system. I would like to learn more about this, but if true, it is a good example for America, where federal courts have consistently ruled against presenting alternatives to Darwinism, such as creationism, in the public school systems.

The day I appeared on another national television program, called DATA, happened to be the birthday of Lenin, the leader of the coup that brought the Communists to power in Russia in 1917. Just before the show, some of the producers were joking about asking me how I felt about Lenin. In the same joking spirit, I said, “Well, I always liked the Beatles, but I thought George Harrison was more interesting than Lennon.” Later, on the air, I said at the end, “Today is Lenin’s birthday. Like Lenin, I am also trying to make a revolution, but mine will have a better result.”

Traffic jams in Moscow rival anything you can find in America. Once, on the way to a lecture at the philosophy department of Moscow Government University, I got stuck in a traffic jam in central Moscow, where no one moved for fifteen minutes. My
translator and I jumped out of our car, and took the Moscow subway to the university, leaving our driver to follow on later.

After an action-packed couple of weeks in Moscow, I took a night train to Nizhny Novgorod, the third-biggest city in Russia, after Moscow and St. Petersburg. The train I took was one of the famous Trans Siberia Railway trains. The end station for this par-
ticular train was Beijing, and there were several Chinese people in my car. Although I would have liked to have gone all the way to Beijing, I got off the next morning in Nizhny Novgorod. There I had some more lectures, and then the organizers of my tour arranged for me to spend a few days at a camp deep in the forest on the Nyumba River, a couple of hundred miles northeast of Nizhny Novgorod. I had a nice cabin, and every day spent some time in a Russian sauna (called banya). The banya uses more steam than a sauna, giving a wet heat that is more intense than the drier heat of a sauna. A special feature of the banya is getting beaten with leafy birch branches (ouch). After it all, jumping into the cold river was a relief. After some peaceful days at the camp, I went back to Nizhni Novgorod for a few more talks, and then took a train to Moscow. On May 19, I left Moscow by plane. My next destination was Bulgaria, where I was scheduled to do another lecture and media tour. I will tell you what happened in Bulgaria in one of my future columns.

14
Beyond Stones and Bones:
Alfred Russel Wallace And the Spirit World

Earlier this year (2003), on an April afternoon, I walked into the Darwin Museum in Moscow to give a lecture against the Darwinian theory of human evolution. The lecture was attended by museum staff, scientists from Moscow universities, and members of the general public. As I spoke, I could see on the wall opposite me two large portrait paintings, one of Charles Darwin and the other of Alfred Russel Wallace, who was, with Darwin, the cofounder of the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Darwin had been working for twenty years on his book The Origin of Species, but could never seem to finish it. One day he received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace. In an enclosed paper, soon to be submitted to one of London’s scientific societies, Wallace outlined the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin was troubled. By the rules of scientific etiquette, the theory of evolution by natural selection should be credited to Wallace—because Wallace would be the first to publicly present it. Darwin consulted his elite scientific friends, who said he should ask Wallace to allow him to submit an evolution paper of his own at the same time.
Wallace agreed, and for a long time the theory of evolution was known as the Wallace-Darwin theory. Later Wallace and Darwin had a falling out over Wallace’s research into the paranormal. After reading one of Wallace’s papers, in which he attributed the development of the human brain to a guiding spiritual intelligence, Darwin wrote him a letter (March  27, 1869), saying, “I differ grievously from you . . . I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child [the theory of evolution by natural selection].”

Wallace did not kill the young theory of evolution, but he did lay the foundations for alternative explanations for human origins.
My own alternative explanation, which can be found in my latest book, Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory, owes quite a bit to Wallace’s research.

When I spoke at the Darwin Museum in April, I simply presented the archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity documented in my earlier book Forbidden Archeology. For example, I outlined the evidence from the California gold mines. These discoveries of human bones and artifacts, from deposits now regarded as Eocene, over 33 million years old, were published by geologist J. D. Whitney of Harvard University in 1880. Wallace accepted Whitney’s evidence. In an article in Nineteenth Century (1887, vol. 22, p. 667), Wallace noted that such evidence tended to be “attacked with all the weapons of doubt, accusation, and ridicule.” Wallace suggested that “the proper way to treat evidence as to man’s antiquity is to place it on record, and admit it provisionally wherever it would be held adequate in the case of other animals; not, as is too often now the case, to ignore it as unworthy of acceptance or subject its discoverers to indiscriminate accusations of being impostors or the victims of impostors.”

The archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity accepted by me and Wallace shows that we need a new explanation for human origins. But this evidence does not itself provide that new explanation. For that, we have to go beyond stones and bones.

In Human Devolution, I propose that before we ask the question “from where did human beings come?” we should first of all ask the question “what is a human being?” Today, most scientists believe that a human being is simply a combination of the ordinary material elements. But if we dare to look at all the evidence accumulated by scientists, we find that the human organism also includes more subtle vital and conscious elements. Some of the best evidence for this was provided by Wallace.

Wallace, along with other British scientists, such as Sir William Crookes, a prominent physicist, conducted extensive experiments into the paranormal. From these experiments, Wallace concluded that the universe is populated with spirit beings. Some of
the minor spirit beings, he proposed, are in contact with the human population on earth. According to Wallace, the minor spirit beings, acting through human mediums, were responsible for a variety of paranormal phenomena, including clairvoyance, miracu-
lous healings, communications from the dead, apparitions, materializations of physical objects, levitations, etc. More powerful spirit beings may have played a role in the origin of species.

In this regard, examples of paranormal production of biological forms are important. A particularly striking case was reported by Wallace, who, accompanied by others, saw a clergyman medium named Monk produce a complete human form. In his autobiography (1905 v. 2, p. 330), Wallace described the event, which took place in an apartment in the Bloomsbury district of London: “Everything happened in the full light of day. After a little conversation, Monk . . . appeared to go into a trance; then stood
up a few feet in front of us, and after a little while pointed to his side, saying, ‘Look.’ We saw there a faint white patch on his coat on the left side. This grew brighter, then seemed to flicker, and extend both upwards and downwards, till very gradually it formed a cloudy pillar extending from his shoulder to his feet and close to his body. . . . but appearing joined to him by a cloudy band at the height at which it had first begun to form. Then, after a few
minutes more, Monk again said ‘Look,’ and passed his hand through the connecting band, severing it. He and the figure then moved away from each other till they were about five or six feet apart. The figure had now assumed the appearance of a thickly draped female form, with arms and hands just visible. Monk looked towards it and again said to us ‘Look,’ and then clapped his hands. On which the figure put out her hands, clapped them as he had done, and we all distinctly heard her clap following
his, but fainter. The figure then moved slowly back to him, grew fainter and shorter, and was apparently absorbed into his body.”

Wallace wrote in his autobiography (1905 v. 2, pp. 349–350): “The majority of people today have been brought up in the belief that miracles, ghosts, and the whole series of strange phenomena here described cannot exist; that they are contrary to the laws of nature; that they are the superstitions of a bygone age; and that therefore they are necessarily either impostures or delusions. There is no place in the fabric of their thought into which such facts can be fitted. When I first began this inquiry it was the same with myself. The facts did not fit into my then existing fabric of thought. All my preconceptions, all my knowledge, all my belief in the supremacy of science and of natural law were against the possibility of such phenomena. And even when, one by one, the facts were forced upon me without possibility of escape from them, still, as Sir David Brewster declared after being at first astonished by the phenomena he saw with [the medium] Mr. Home, ‘spirit was the last thing I could give in to.’ Every other possible solution was tried and rejected. . . . We ask our readers not for belief, but for doubt of their own infallibility on this question; we ask for inquiry and patient experiment before hastily concluding that we are, all of us, mere dupes and idiots as regards a subject to which
we have devoted our best mental faculties and powers of observation for many years.” For Wallace, all this had implications for human origins. In his book Contributions to a Theory of Natural Selection (1870, p. 359), Wallace concluded that “a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms.”

My own views, inspired by the ancient Sanskrit writings of India, differ somewhat from those of Wallace, but share a family resemblance. For example, I share with him the ideas that there is more to a human being than atoms, and that the cosmos is inhabited by a hierarchy of spirit beings, who play a role in the origin, history, and future of the human species. In Moscow, during my talk at the Darwin Museum, looking at the paintings of Wallace and Darwin, I certainly felt a closer bond with Wallace.

15
Having a Ball in Bulgaria

On the afternoon of May 17, 2002, I wound up my tour of Russia, and went to the Moscow international airport to catch a flight on Czech Airlines, which would take me to Sofia, Bulgaria, by way of Prague. The flight was delayed coming in. It seemed strange, because the weather in Moscow was clear and sunny. I later learned that the delayed departure out of Prague was caused by a labor dispute between the employees and management of Czech Airlines. The employees were engaged in a work slowdown. The flight finally arrived and departed Moscow in the evening, landing at Prague fairly late, causing me to miss my connection to Sofia. Czech airlines put me up in a hotel near the airport, and the next morning I was off to Sofia.

At the airport in Sofia, I was met by representatives of BARD, the publisher of the Bulgarian language edition of my book The Hidden History of the Human Race, and also by some of my friends from the Sofia Hare Krishna temple. They took me to the room where I would be staying at the temple. When I am on tour in various parts of the world, I prefer to stay in the Krishna temple ashramas, because it makes it easier for me to follow my special karma-free vegetarian diet and to keep up with my daily practice of mantra meditation.

Bulgaria is a fascinating country, with lots of forests and mountains, and a stretch of picturesque shoreline on the Black Sea.
The weather is Mediterranean-like. The history of the Bulgarians is quite intricate, extending back to tribal origins in the mountains of northwestern India, according to some accounts. The people have a mystical side to them. The territory of Bulgaria was
home to the Orphic mysteries, the mystical Bogomil Sect (connected with the Cathars in France), and various other spiritual influences.

Your forbidden archeologist made quite a splash in Bulgaria. I appeared on the nation’s most popular television show, hosted by a tall, very imposing, intelligent-looking man named Slavi. He was wearing a suit with an open shirt and also sported a shaven head and gold earrings. His late night extravaganza is a combination of America’s Tonight Show, featuring the comedy of Jay Leno, and Nightline, featuring the erudite commentary of Ted Koppel.  After Slavi did his monologue, I came down the stairs to the stage, while the band was playing and a troupe of girls was dancing. It was pretty wild. The crowd was going crazy. But when I sat down with the translator next to Slavi’s desk, the conversation turned serious. We explored the archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity that contradicts the Darwinian theory of evolution. In the middle of the discussion, the leader of the show’s band interrupted us. He joked that he and the band had often wondered about Slavi’s ancestry. Was it possible if I could tell them whether or not he was the offspring of some kind of apeman? At that point, I got up and felt the bumps on Slavi’s skull, and replied that he was completely human, with no sign of ape or apeman in his ancestry. The live audience loved it. Then we got into the alternative theory of human origins that I present in my latest book Human Devolution. I explained that we did not evolve up from matter; rather, we have devolved, or come down from the realm of pure consciousness, or spirit. Slavi then said he had read in the biographical sketch in my press kit that when I was at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C., I was in the school of foreign affairs, preparing for a career in one of the intelligence services. I said that was true, but I had gone in another direction. Slavi asked, “How do I know that your archeology work is not just a cover for your intelligence work?” I replied that my archeology work did have some connection with intelligence work. I am investigating archeological secrets, things most people do not know about. But the difference between me and an intelligence officer is that I tell the people in general about the secrets I have discovered. At the end, Slavi gave me a guest book to sign. I wrote that I was happy that forbidden archeology was not forbidden on his show.

A couple of days later, I went to the National Palace of Culture in Sofia, where the nation’s largest book fair was being held. I went to the booth of my publisher, and found a line of hundreds of people waiting to have their copies of the Bulgarian edition of The Hidden History of the Human Race autographed.

During my visit, I was invited to speak at the department of experimental morphology and anthropology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. I was introduced by the head of the department, Dr. Yordan Yordanov, one of the world’s leading experts in
the reconstruction of the facial features of ancient humans. The lecture hall was full of staff members of the department, mostly anthropologists. The talk was well-received. Afterwards, Dr. Yordanov took me on a tour of the department’s museum, which included human skeletons uncovered at archeological sites in various parts of Bulgaria. One of the skeletons was that of an adult crouched in fetal position. Dr. Yordanov told me that in his opinion, this burial position indicated the people of that culture believed in reincarnation. The dead person was placed in birth position, in preparation for his next life. The previous year, I had met an archeologist in the Ukraine who had found in Neolithic burials signs that the people there had also believed in reincarnation, but she had hesitated to submit her results for publication, because of the opposition of some influential archeologists. I think this kind of archeological evidence is a useful supplement to the evidence for reincarnation that comes from reports of past life memories, of the kind gathered by psychiatrist Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia medical school.

During my stay in Bulgaria I had the chance to speak at other scientific societies and universities in Sofia and other cities. I was invited to give a talk to the professors and graduate students of biology at the University of Sofia. In addition to presenting arch-
eological evidence contradicting the current theories of human origins, I also entered into some of the genetic evidence, such as the failure of scientists to account for the chemical origin of life and their failure to explain on the biomolecular level the origin of complex features of the human organism, such as the eye. One of the professors said afterwards, “Mr. Cremo, I am not a man who is easily confused. But I have to confess that you have confused me.”

While returning to Sofia for a speaking engagement outside the capital, my hosts took me to the isolated mountain monastery of Rilka. I found the paintings on the outside of the church in the beginning of the walled monastery to be particularly interesting. They illustrated some of the themes in Human Devolution. In that book, I propose that a human being is composed not just of matter, but of matter, mind, and spirit. This leads to the assumption that the cosmos itself is divided into regions of matter, mind, and spirit, with different life forms adapted to the conditions at each level. Several paintings on the church wall reflected this concept. In one we find Christ in the topmost spiritual level, angels on the more subtle astral or mental level, and humans like us on the terrestrial level. I learned the monastery was also the site of a series of miraculous healings, attributed to the influence of the departed St. Rilka, for whom the monastery is named.

In Plovdiv, the second largest city in Bulgaria, which features a large well-preserved Roman amphitheater, I had a private meeting with the town’s Union of Scientists. The meeting, which took place in the Union’s historic headquarters in the old town center, lasted a long time. The scientists were especially interested in my proposed alternative to the current evolutionary theories of human origins. My approach involves reintroducing elements that were eliminated from European science during the modern era, e.g. the subtle element of mind and the element of pure consciousness, or spirit. After my visit to Plovdiv, I was taken to the remains of an old Thracian temple in the southwestern part of the country. In Human Devolution, I propose that the process of devolution, which involves the covering of pure consciousness with the lower energies of mind and matter, can be reversed. There is a process of spiritual re-evolution, by which consciousness can be freed of its coverings and restored to its original pure state. The ancient Orphic mystery religion of Thrace, as far as I can tell, also centered on this process.

All in all, I enjoyed my stay in Bulgaria. My Bulgarian publisher is soon coming out with a Bulgarian edition of Human Devolution, which might provide a chance for me to go back again.

16
At the World Archeological Congress

Washington, D.C. has always been a special place for me. I went to George Washington University there during the late 1960s. I witnessed firsthand protests against the Vietnam War and the burning of downtown in the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Those events, and others, changed my life, setting me on a different, more spiritual path, which eventually led me to begin the practice of mantra meditation and yoga at the old Q Street center of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. It was my subsequent studies of the ancient Sanskrit writings of India, with their accounts of extreme human antiquity, that later led me into my career in forbidden archeology.

Well, not quite always forbidden. This past June (2003), I went to Washington, D.C. for the WAC (the acronym for the World Archeological Congress, the world’s largest international organization of archeologists). The WAC meets every four years in a different country. Since its founding, it has met five times. I have presented papers at the last three meetings.

In December of 1994, I went to New Delhi, India, for the WAC3, shortly after my book Forbidden Archeology was published. In New Delhi, I presented a paper titled “Puranic Time and the Archeological Record.” I gave it in a conference section on time
and archeology, chaired by Tim Murray of Australia and D. P. Agrawal of India.

The Puranas, the historical writings of ancient India, speak of a human presence on this planet extending back through vast courses of cyclical time—hundreds of millions of years. In my paper, I presented an explanation of the Puranic time concept and the archeological evidence that supports it. The paper was later included in a peer-reviewed conference proceedings volume, Time and Archeology, published by Routledge in 1999.

In 1999, I went to the WAC4 in Cape Town, South Africa. I stayed in a hotel in downtown Cape Town. The conference itself was held at the University of Cape Town, on the slopes of a mountain overlooking the city. My WAC4 paper was titled “Forbidden Archeology of the Pleistocene.”  It dealt with evidence that anatomically modern humans have existed for at least 2 million years. Of course, I believe the evidence for a human presence goes back much further than that, to about 2 billion years ago. But I thought that for the WAC4 I would concentrate on the more recent end of the evidential spectrum.

About two years ago, the first announcements for the WAC5 started coming out. Ana C.N. Martins, a Portuguese archeologist, asked me to co-organize with her a session on history of archeology. I agreed, and we put together a proposal to submit to the WAC4 academic program committee. We called our session “The History of Archeology in the Service of Isms.” The academic organizers accepted the session for the Congress.

The description of the session read: “Among all the sciences, archeology has come to play a central role in defining the goals of nations and humanity in general. Our identities and the goals that we set for ourselves, individually, and collectively, are to a large extent determined by our picture of the past. And the exploration of the human past is largely in the hands of archeologists.” But archeologists are not independent. Archeologists serve now, and have served in the past, a variety of isms, such as nationalism, colonialism, and Darwinism, among others.

In my paper, I chose to examine the case of the California gold mine discoveries. I documented how Darwinist ideas influenced the treatment of evidence for extreme human antiquity. In the middle of the nineteenth century, miners discovered human skeletons and human artifacts deep inside the tunnels at Table Mountain and other locations in the gold-mining region. These bones and artifacts were found embedded in formations that geologists now say belong to the Eocene period (38–55 million years). This evidence was reported to the scientific world by Dr. J. D. Whitney, the chief government geologist of California, in his book The Auriferous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California, published by Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1880. But the evidence was dropped from scientific discourse because it contradicted the then-current Darwinist explanations of human origins. William B. Holmes, a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, said, “If Professor Whitney
had fully appreciated the story of human evolution as it is understood today, he would have hesitated to announce the conclusions formulated, notwithstanding the imposing array of testimony with  which he was confronted.” In other words, if the evidence did not fit the theory, then the evidence had to be set aside, which is exactly what happened.

Today, some of the artifacts mentioned by Whitney are still in the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. In my WAC5 paper, I explained how Darwinist preconceptions are still influencing the treatment of this extraordinary evidence. A few years ago, I was a consultant for a television special called The Mysterious Origins of Man, which was aired on NBC. When the program was being filmed, I told the producer, Bill Cote, that he should go to Berkeley to film the artifacts, but the museum officials refused permission. Instead of using new video footage, he had to use photographs taken in the nineteenth century for Whitney’s book. MOM inspired a huge reaction from Darwinist scientists. They tried to prevent NBC from airing the show, and when this failed, they tried to get the Federal Communications Commission to investigate, censure, and fine NBC.

When I approached the museum officials in 2002, they did allow me access to the artifacts, perhaps because my research was for a paper to be presented at the WAC5 and because I was an organizer for one of the sessions. With some assistants, I came and photographed the artifacts, and from information gathered from old maps and mining records, was able to go out to the Sierra Nevadas and relocate some of the old gold-mining tunnels from which the artifacts originally came.

Darwinism and other isms also influenced the treatment of archeological evidence at Hueyatlaco, Mexico. In the 1970s, archeologists led by Cynthia Irwin-Williams found stone tools associated with butchered animal bones in excavations there. A team
of geologists, including Virginia Steen-McIntyre, came in to date the site. Using four different methods (uranium series dates on butchered animal bone, zircon fission track dating on volcanic layers above the artifact layers, tephra hydration dating of volcanic crystals found in the volcanic layers above the artifact layers, and standard stratigraphic analysis), the geologists determined the age of the site was at least 250,000 years. The archeologists refused to accept an age this great for the site, because: (1) they believed no human beings capable of making such artifacts existed 250,000 years ago anywhere in the world and (2) they believed no human beings entered north America until about 15,000 or 20,000 years ago, maximum. When Virginia Steen-McIntyre tried to get the true age of the site known, she lost a teaching position she held at a university and also found all her opportunities for professional advancement in geology were blocked off. I invited Virginia (Ginger) Steen-McIntyre to present a paper on the history of the case at the WAC5 in D.C. Although I have been communicating with Ginger for a good many years, it was the first time I had met her in person.

I also invited geologist Sam VanLandingham to present a paper in the section I organized. Sam is an expert on diatoms, small marine and freshwater algae that leave tiny mineral skeletons. Different types of diatoms are characteristic of different geological
periods. A couple of years ago, I put Sam in touch with Ginger. Sam showed that the types of diatoms found in the artifact-bearing layers at Hueyatlaco are consistent with an age of 250,000 years. He thus provided confirmation of the original age for the site obtained in the 1970s by Ginger and her colleagues. Some of his reports about this were blocked from publication by scientists influenced by the idea that the people who manufactured the artifacts of the Clovis type (after the New Mexico site where the artifacts were first found) were the first to enter North America, about 15,000 years ago.

Did we get a lot of attention? No. But that is what it’s like to be in the extreme minority of researchers opposing Darwinism in modern archeology. Still, I am grateful to the WAC organizers for allowing us to make our presentations in this important scientific
forum. If ideas about human origins are going to change, the first step is that archeologists have to be willing to hear alternatives.
And at least that much is happening.

17
Extraterrestrial Archeology Goes Mainstream

In June of last year (2003), I went to the World Archeological Congress in Washington, D.C. The WAC is the world’s largest international organization of archeologists. I had gone there to present a paper about the 50-million-year-old artifacts found in the nineteenth century in the California gold mines. But I was surprised to see that mine was not the only extremely controversial contribution to the conference agenda. Scanning over the abstracts in the conference program (WAC-5, The World Archaeological Congress, Washington, D.C., June 21–26, 2003), I noticed that there was a major session on extraterrestrial archeology—a real shocker for a mainstream science conference.

The session on archeoastronomy and extraterrestrial archeology was organized by archeologists John B. Campbell of James Cook University in Australia and Clive Ruggles of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. It was divided into three
sections: one on archeoastronomy, one on extraterrestrial archeology within our solar system, and one on extraterrestrial archeology outside our solar system.

The session on archeoastronomy was interesting, but archeoastronomy is a fairly common topic at mainstream archeology conferences, touching on, for example, how ancient stone structures are aligned to various celestial objects. The real news was the two sessions on extraterrestrial archeology. The one on extraterrestrial archeology within our solar system focused on coming up with United Nations and other national and international  legislation to handle space heritage sites and artifacts. Two types of space heritage sites and artifacts were recognized, those resulting from terrestrial human space exploration, and those resulting from space exploration by extraterrestrial intelligent beings. 

In ordinary terrestrial archeology, the ownership, protection, and conservation of sites and artifacts has come to be governed by complex national and international laws. How space heritage sites and artifacts will fit into this evolving system of laws is still a major question. At the present moment, there is a United Nations Outer Space Treaty which declares that remains of rockets, satellites, etc., whether found on the Earth, the Moon, Mars, or any other body
in the solar system, belong to the nation that launched them. But the sites where the artifacts are found, if extraterrestrial, belong to no individual nation—just as is presently the case with Antarctica. The archeologists at the WAC recommended that further international agreements be signed to protect the sites themselves from tourism, unregulated scientific research, etc. Among the protections could be declarations that they are historical sites. The archeologists also suggested that objects floating in space should be given some legal status, even though many of these objects are now regarded as being simply “space junk.”

Extraterrestrial archeology is moving beyond the theoretical stage. Beth L. O’Leary and her coauthors, in a paper on the Apollo 11 Tranquility base site on the moon, say in their abstract (WAC5, p. 177): “With initial funding from the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium (NASA), team members researched and documented the archeological assemblage of over 106 artifacts and features ranging from discarded meal pouches to structural components of the spacecraft.” The team members have made a preliminary archeological map of the site, and argue that the artifacts and site fall under the existing US federal laws. They also believe that the site is eligible for listing in the National Registry of Historic Places and for protection under the UNESCO World Heritage List.

As far as extraterrestrial archeology beyond our solar system is concerned, scientists have been busy locating habitable planets in other star systems and are also actively searching for various kinds of signals from these planets. In their introduction to this section of the session, the organizers John B. Campbell and Douglas Vakoch stated (p. 177): “As with our own off-world heritage in the Solar System, we have no protocols for how we would deal with or respect artifacts from beyond the Solar System.” They added (pp. 177–78), “Travel between neighboring solar systems might be quite possible. In fact, other intelligent species might send robotic probes to explore and monitor various planetary systems, as we already do within the Solar System. These extraterrestrial probes could be self-replicating and might be made of materials which are hard for us to detect with radar, infrared, etc.” Campbell and Vakoch also suggested that archeologists might be able to help decode and evaluate signals from civilizations in other solar systems.

In his individual contribution to the session on archeology beyond our solar system, Campbell (p. 178) pointed out that in addition to searching for signals, the governments of the US and the former Soviet Union also funded projects that searched for
evidence of nuclear wars and Dyson spheres. A Dyson sphere is a shell deliberately constructed around a star to create an expansive living environment with practically unlimited amounts of energy. The shell could either be continuous or constructed of
millions of separate parts. Campbell said he believed it is time for archeologists to become involved in this kind of work. “Closer to home,” he stated, “some astronomers have considered the possibility that ETI [extraterrestrial intelligence] artifacts might be parked permanently at . . . points in the Solar System. It is assumed that these would be made of polycarbons or other materials which would be difficult to detect” (p. 178).

The section organized by Campbell and Vakoch also featured workshops on how archeologists could help identify ETI technologies. Addressing themselves to archeologists, they said (p. 178), “We wish to encourage your assistance or direct involvement with SETI [search for extraterrestrial intelligence], especially as it relates to technologies which may have been developed by other intelligent species. The successful detection and observation of extraterrestrial or Earthlike exoplanets in our galactic neighborhood (say within 50 light years) is likely to occur within the next 5 to 10 years.
Archeological and archeometric advice on how to look for or detect the physical, chemical, and biological evidence for extraterrestrial intelligent life would go a long way in helping with the future research.”

Of course, most of the readers of Atlantis Rising are way ahead of these mainstream archeologists in their willingness to accept the reality of extraterrestrial archeology (as shown, for example, by ongoing interest in the reality of the face on Mars), but I thought it still would be of interest for AR readers to see just how far mainstream scientists are moving in our direction. They have made a few good steps (but have a long way to go).

For one thing, they are still caught up in a purely materialistic picture of the cosmos. Of course, even the “purely materialistic” picture of the cosmos is becoming quite strange, with cosmologists being forced to introduce new elements (dark matter, dark energy) to account for their observations. And these new elements have very little in common with ordinary matter. So, like the archeologists, the cosmologists have been making some progress, but again, like the archeologists, they still have a long way to go.

Even with all its new elements and dimensions, modern cosmology is still quite some distance from the consciousness-based, multidimensional universe of the world’s traditional mystical cosmologies, such as my favorite, the Vedic cosmology of India. According to Vedic cosmology the planets in our solar system and those in other solar systems are residences of various categories of celestial beings and perfected humans. Indeed, the Vedic literatures speak of 400,000 human species scattered throughout the universe. But reaching those planets and communicating with those beings will require techniques still unknown to today’s sciences.

It would seem, according to what we are told by mainstream scientists, that they have sent humans to the Moon, and unmanned probes to the Moon and other planets, such as Mars and Venus. But that is only partially true. First of all, I think it is quite possible that humans did not actually reach the Moon planet. I do not think that it has been conclusively proved that the Apollo moon landings were hoaxes. But there are certainly a good many reasons for thinking they might have been. As far as the unmanned probes are concerned, I think that they have been able to reach the physical locations of planets in our solar system. But I also think that these probes are being kept at a very superficial level of these multidimensional planets. For example, a tourist might be able to visit certain rooms in the White House, but will be denied access to the more confidential rooms, the ones where the President and his family reside, and the ones where the President meets with his most confidential advisors. There is more to the Moon, Mars, and Venus than sand and rocks.

As far as extraterrestrials are concerned, we are all extraterrestrials, in that we all have our origin in some higher dimension of the cosmos, a dimension dominated by pure consciousness. But now that pure consciousness has become covered by layers of subtle and gross material energies. The ultimate extraterrestrial archeology will lead not to an experience of dead cultures, but to the experience of the living spiritual world that is our original home. But for that we may have to do more digging inside our heads and hearts than on other planets.

18
A Trip to Bali 

Your forbidden archeologist sometimes has to endure being invited to out-of-the-way places such as Bali, the original tropical island paradise. This can mean some very tiring flights, like the one  from LA to Tokyo, and then on to Singapore, where I spent a restless night at one of the city-state’s monotonous glass and steel hotels. The next evening I caught the Garuda Airlines flight to Denpasar, Bali’s main city and site of its international airport. When I arrived, my hosts put me up in a boutique-tropical-village-style hotel in Sanur, on the southeast coast of Bali. The name of the place is the Tamu Kami Hotel, and I highly recommend it. Those who follow the lives of the rich and famous may recall that Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall were married in a Hindu wedding ceremony at Sanur back in the 1990s. In the mornings, I would take walks along the Sanur beach (some nice breaks out beyond the reef, if you are into surfing), chanting Hare Krishna on my beads. In the distance, up the coast to the north, I could see the Gunung Agung volcano rising from the golden tropical mists of dawn. Back in 1963 it blew its top, but it’s quiet now. I found the beachfront always a little deserted, an effect of some terrorist bombings a couple of years back in the main Balinese resort town of Kuta. Still, I did notice a smattering of mostly elderly tourists from Germany, Holland, and Japan.

Bali is part of Indonesia, the fifth largest nation in the world by population. Centuries ago, it was dominated by Hindu culture. Then the Muslims came, and now Indonesia is mostly Islamic. In fact it is the largest Islamic country. But somehow Bali remained untouched, and is today still 95 percent Hindu. Because the traditional art, music, and culture throughout Indonesia is based on Hindu themes, from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, even the Islamic majority retains some of that influence.

The centerpiece of my visit to Bali was a seminar, with me as chief guest, at the island’s main university, the Udayana University in Denpasar. The seminar was dedicated to a discussion of my latest book, Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory, and was attended by several hundred students and professors from the university, including heads of several departments, and the vice chancellor. The vice governor of Bali also attended.

During my stay in Bali, I also took a side trip to Surabaya on the nearby island of Java, where university students and representatives of a Hindu cultural society invited me to speak on Human Devolution at the city’s ornate main Hindu temple.

In all of my lectures in Bali and Java, I discussed an interesting case of evidence for extreme human antiquity from that part of the world. In the 1990s, archeologists from Australia and Indonesia found human artifacts on Flores Island, located a few islands to the east of Bali in the Indonesian island chain (Nature, 1998, vol. 392, pp. 173–176). The artifacts were found in a stratum given an age of 800,000 years by the zircon fission track dating method. The archeologists had to attribute the tools to someone. They decided the makers could not have been human beings like us because according to their current way of thinking humans beings like us did not exist 800,000 years ago in Indonesia. They believe anatomically modern humans came into existence between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. So what kind of hominid was existing 800,000 years ago? Homo erectus. So the archeologists dutifully attributed the stone tools to Homo erectus. But there was a problem with this. How did Homo erectus get to Flores Island, which, 800,000 years ago (as now), was separated from the nearest land by wide ocean straits? The archeologists proposed that Homo erectus must have made some kind of boat or raft and deliberately crossed the seas from Java (then still attached to the Southeast Asia landmass).

But there was a problem with that. Up to that time, archeologists had thought that only anatomically modern humans made deliberate sea crossings. In fact the oldest recognized evidence for deliberate sea crossings was the arrival of anatomically modern humans in Australia from Southeast Asia at around 50,000 years ago. So to have the apeman Homo erectus sailing across the seas at 800,000 years ago was quite extraordinary. In order to explain the evidence on Flores Island, the archeologists had to elevate the cultural level of Homo erectus to the anatomically modern human level.

I proposed that there was another solution to the problem. And the solution lies on Java (it was really nice to say that in Java). It was in Java, late in the nineteenth century, at a place called Trinil, that the the Dutch researcher Eugene Dubois found the first fossils of Homo erectus. One year he found a primitive skullcap with a prominent brow ridge. A year later, he found a femur (thigh bone) about fifteen yards away. He put the two together, and proclaimed the Java apeman to the world of science. Dubois called the creature Pithecanthropus erectus, but scientists now classify it as a variety of Homo erectus.

The story of Dubois’s discovery is recorded in every archeology textbook. What we do not see in most textbooks is that in the 1970s two prominent British physical anthropologists carefully studied the femur found by Dubois (Michael Day and T. I. Molleson, Symposia of the Society for the Study of Human Biology, vol. 2, pp. 127–154). They concluded it was identical to modern human femurs and that it differed in significant ways from every Homo erectus femur that had been found afterwards. That’s interesting, because Dubois’s drawings of the site show that he found both the skullcap and the femur in the same stratum. And modern geologists have used the potassium-argon method to give a date of 800,000 years to that stratum at Trinil.

The evidence shows that 800,000 years ago two kinds of hominids were living in Java. First, a population of Homo erectus, as represented by the primitive skullcap. And second, a population of anatomically modern humans, as represented by the anatomically modern human femur. And I propose it was members of that anatomically modern human population, existing on Java 800,000 years ago, who made the sea crossing to Flores Island, and left the stone tools there.

So in order to explain the stone tools on Flores Island it is not necessary to raise the cultural level of Homo erectus to the anatomically modern human level. (At this point in the talk, I showed an image of a Homo erectus male wearing a dress shirt and bow tie, to which the audience mercifully responded with the hoped for laughter—sparing me the embarrassment of a visual joke gone flat.)

Between lectures, my hosts arranged to take me to some interesting places in Bali. One of them was Pura Penataran Sasih, the Temple of the Fallen Moon, at Pejeng. As in most Balinese temples, you enter a first gate into an outer courtyard. Then you go through a second more elaborately carved stone gate into an inner courtyard, where you find the actual sacred temple structures, which look like small pagodas. On the top of one of the pagodas, partially hidden from view, is a large bronze kettle gong. The hour-glass shaped kettle, about six feet long, rests on its side. It was cast as a single piece of bronze, and is the largest single-piece bronze object in the world. According to local legends, however, it is not of human manufacture. In his book The Art and Culture of Bali, Urs Ramseyer, says, “The gong known as the ‘moon’ (sasih) of Pejeng is one of the category of objects considered to be charged with unfathomable power; many Balinese believe that at some time these objects fell from heaven (piturun), and thus were not made by man. In the course of time numerous stories have grown up around this gong, all of which start out with an event connected with the moon. For some it is the wheel of the moon’s ‘carriage’. . . . Others see it as an ear peg of the moon godess Ratih, or as a symbol of the moon itself.”

In Bali, you do get the feeling that spirits are everywhere, not all of them of the friendly type. I happened to be in Bali for the traditional New Year’s celebration. On the day before the New Year begins, the Balinese hold elaborate exorcisms at the main
crossroads of towns and villages (evil spirits congregate at crossroads). The evil spirits depart into the sky. The ceremonies cease at dawn, and for the next twenty-four hours, everyone must remain inside their dwellings, making no noise and showing no lights. If the evil spirits who have been driven into the sky see no people below, they will think no one is there and will go to some other place. The prohibition on going out is rigidly followed, and even tourists are asked to observe it (although I was advised I could keep a small light on in my hotel suite if I kept my curtains tightly drawn). And stay inside I did. I certainly did not want to be the guy who caused the evil spirits to come back down.

19
Encountering New Realities in Montreal

On May 13, 2004, your forbidden archeologist landed at the Dorval airport in Montreal. It was quite a hike from the arrival gate to customs, seemingly miles down long corridors, and the customs hall, when I finally got there, was full of thousands of visitors crushed together in snaking, but mercifully fast-moving, lines. Having made my way through, I took a taxi to the Hotel Delta Centre-Ville in downtown Montreal. The Delta was the venue for a conference called Awakening to Spirit. Even though I do regard myself as a somewhat spiritual person, sometimes I do need a wake-up call.

The conference has been held in Montreal for the past twenty-eight years, a joint venture of the International Institute for Integral Human Sciences, founded by Dr. John Rossner (an Episcopal minister and professor of history of religion and culture), and the Spiritual Science Fellowship of Canada (founded by Dr. Marilyn Zwaig Rossner, child therapist and spiritualist). The Rossners had invited me to speak on my new book Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory and to give a workshop on forbidden archeology.

I always like arriving at a conference a day before the events actually start. It gives me a chance to get settled into my new surroundings and collect my thoughts. It gives me a chance to check out the room service menu and local restaurants, so that I can find the best place to satisfy the requirements of my strict vegetarian diet. Room service did not have very much that was suitable, so I located some restaurants within walking distance that had vegetarian items on the menu, including a nice Italian place. I also searched for a place for my usual morning-meditation walk. Each morning, wherever I am in the world, I go out for a one- or two- hour walk, during which I chant the Hare Krishna mantra on my beads. The Delta Hotel was not far from the spacious Montreal
riverfront, lined with old grain elevators.

One thing I especially enjoy about conferences like this is the chance to meet other researchers in the field of alternative science. On my second evening at the Delta, after the opening ceremonies for the conference, I did meet one such researcher under circumstances slightly unusual. I put my plastic card key into the slot under my door handle, removed the card, and pulled open the door. As I looked up, I saw sitting at the other end of the room a strange man. My first shocked and hurried thought was, “My God, I’ve entered someone else’s room!” That thought was quickly replaced by, “Who is this guy?” And finally, I just said, out of habit, “Can I help you?” The man got up from his chair, my chair, the hotel’s chair, somebody’s chair, put out his hand and shook mine. “You must be Michael Cremo. I’m Stephan Schwartz.” After sorting out what had happened (the five-star hotel front desk staff had made a regrettable error in assigning Stephan his room), we sat and talked a bit.

Stephan was part of a group of researchers, initially at the Stanford Research Institute, who put together a remote viewing program that was employed by agencies of the United States government and military from the 1970s through the early 1990s, at an admitted cost of over $20 million (see Human Devolution, pp. 189–192 for details and documentation). I told Stephan I had once met another member of that founding group of researchers—the very gifted psychic Ingo Swann. I met Ingo a few years ago at his studio on the Bowery, in the East Village area of New York City. Strangely enough (for me, anyway), his studio was just around the corner from the first Hare Krishna temple, set up in 1966 in a storefront at 26 Second Avenue. And both the temple and Swann’s studio, Ingo pointed out to me, are quite close to Nicola Tesla’s laboratory on Lafayette Street. A little bit of psychic synchronicity.

Another dimension of Stephan’s work was of very direct interest to me. After doing remote viewing work for government intelligence agencies, he applied remote viewing to a field of scientific investigation, namely archeology. One of his achievements
was to use psychic archeology to locate remains of the ancient city of Alexandria, now sunk in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Egypt. I have noticed in myself a strange ability to track down “lost” artifacts in dusty old museum collections and to relocate sites where unusual archeological discoveries were made in the nineteenth century in America and around the world, as if I were being somehow guided by an unseen person or force. Of course, I also did the normal kinds of research, but at times it has seemed that more was required, and whatever that “more” was, it seemed to be something psychical or supernatural.

Stephan and I talked for about half an hour until the staff solved the question of what room to put him in. Then he departed. But the next day, I made time to attend his lecture and workshop. The most interesting of the two was the workshop, during which he conducted an exercise in remote viewing. There were about a hundred of us in the workshop room. Stephan selected three persons from the group, and told them to take fifteen minutes to go somewhere in Montreal, wherever they pleased. When they arrived at the place, they were to remain there for fifteen minutes and film the place with a camcorder. Then they were to return to the workshop. They departed, and fifteen minutes later, those of us remaining in the workshop room attempted to visualize where they were. Stephan guided us through a simple protocol. He advised us to report whatever first came to our minds. He asked us not to analyze the impressions but to simply report them in writing, and to draw a picture of the first image.

The first image that came to my mind was a cathedral. My mind resisted it. “That’s dumb, really dumb,” I thought. “Why would they go to some obvious tourist place? Most probably they went to a bowling alley, or something like that, just to throw us off.” So I lifted my pen to start drawing a bowling alley, but then I thought, “Okay, he said go with the first image, so as dumb and stupid as it seems to me, I’ll do it.” I sketched a cathedral building. Then came a series of questions from Stephan. What do we see when we look in front of us, in back of us, to the left, to the right, up and down? And finally we were asked if there were any one object visible to us that very strikingly summed up our whole impression of the place. An image of a bank of votive candles, with bright flames glimmering through the deep-red glass of the candle holders, came immediately to my mind. So I wrote that down along with everything else.

Eventually, the party of three came back. The camcorder was hooked up to a digital projector, and I was genuinely shocked to see a close-up of votive candles in red candle holders appear on the screen. It turned out that practically every detail of the place that I had envisioned was correct. About 60 percent of those who took part in the experiment had gotten key details of the place correct, although not everyone of those identified the building as a church.

Obviously, what happened in carrying out the simple demonstration in the Montreal workshop does not conform to the rigorous protocols that Schwartz would employ in a formal experiment intended for scientific publication. But the demonstration did have its intended effect of convincing a good many of those who took part about Stephan’s main point—we all possess this remote viewing capacity to some degree or another.

How does remote viewing work? According to Stephan, there is a part of us that extends beyond the limits imposed upon us by the ordinary conceptions of material reality. There is a part of us that is connected with every other conscious entity, with every other part of existence. It is through this connectivity that remote viewing is possible. This accords well with the Vedic concept of Supersoul. According to the ancient Sanskrit writings of India, within each atom and within the heart of every living thing, is Supersoul. Although apparently divided, the Supersoul is one. So, if we all are, as Stephan said in Montreal, like computer stations on a cosmic network, it would be the Supersoul that provides the connectivity that allows our minds and senses to participate in remote viewing and other paranormal phenomena.

The Bhagavad-gita, probably the best known of the ancient Sanskrit books of knowledge, has a direct connection with remote viewing. The Bhagavad-gita records a philosophical conversation between Lord Krishna and the warrior prince Arjuna. The conversation takes place on the battlefield of Kurukshetra in northwest India. The parties to the battle are the five Pandava brothers, one of whom was Arjuna, and their armies and the armies of the rival Kuru dynasty. The head of the Kuru dynasty was King Dhritarashtra. The King, who was some distance from the battlefield, was blind. So he asked his secretary, Sanjaya, to report to him what was happening. Sanjaya was able to envision what happened, including the conversation between Krishna and Arjuna, by remote viewing.

Back in Montreal, I guided myself to the Italian restaurant I had picked out a couple of days before, not through remote viewing, but through the concierge.

20
Morphing My Genetic Fields in Montreal

Last May (2004), I was a speaker at the Awakening to Spirit Conference in Montreal. I have already written about this in a previous issue of Atlantis Rising, in connection with my meeting Stephan Schwartz, an expert in remote viewing and psychic archeology. This time, I will talk about my encounter with Rupert Sheldrake. It is one of the things I most like about attending conferences—the chance to hear and speak with researchers whose works I have read and appreciated, but whom I have never met personally.

Rupert Sheldrake is well-known as the originator of the concept of morphogenetic fields, which he says provide a key to the understanding of biological form. These ideas were put forward in his book A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance. In his lecture on May 17, Rupert laid out his ideas. 

In his talk, Rupert explained how the generation of the complete form of an organism from a fertilized egg is still unexplained by modern science. The fertilized egg splits into two cells, and those two split into four, and the process goes on millions of times. But in the course of those cell divisions, we find some cells becoming parts of specific organs and tissues, which continue to develop through the cell-division process in very complex ways, until the whole organism is complete. The problem is that each cell contains the exact-same genetic information. So how does a particular cell know to become a certain kind of cell in a certain kind of tissue in a certain organ or limb of a body that is structured in a particular way? Scientists have observed that certain genes are “turned on” at certain stages of the cell-division process. How that happens is not very well explained, but even if it were explained it would not solve the whole problem. All that a gene does is tell the cell how to string amino acids together to form particular kinds of proteins. And that in itself does not really explain how millions of cells pattern themselves into the ultimate form of the organism. In Sheldrake’s words, this genetic determinism is “grotesquely inadequate” as an explanation for the biological form of the organism.

Sheldrake appeals to the existence of morphogenetic fields to explain biological form. (The term morphogenesis is a combination of morph, which refers to form, and genesis, which refers to origin.) Morphogenetic fields would explain not only the generation of the structure of an organism, but also such extraordinary phenomena as the regeneration of limbs, or even complete halves of bodies. If you cut a flatworm in half, either lengthwise or crosswise, both halves will again develop into complete flatworms. The morphogenetic field has something in common with the idea of a subtle form-giving seed (bija), an idea derived from the ancient Sanskrit writings of India, and which I have included in my latest book, Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory, as an explanation for biological form.

In his talk, Sheldrake specifically connected morphogenetic fields with Aristotle’s idea that a formal element associated with matter produces the specific form of an organism. This formal element does not exist apart from matter, and matter does not organize itself in the absence of the formal element. They exist only together. Sheldrake says that the morphogenetic field can change through time, and is thus harmonious with the Darwinian theory of human evolution. During the questions after Sheldrake’s talk, I asked if the concept of morphogenetic fields might not also be compatible with a Platonic conception of a formal element existing apart from matter. He said it could be, but that he preferred the Aristotelean metaphysics. The concept of a form-giving seed that I derive from the Vedic cosmology is more Platonic. There are actually two seeds: conscious selves (atmas, or souls) that animate the bodies of organisms, and also the form-giving seeds, which are given by a supreme intelligence and which are eternally existing, and thus are not harmonious with Darwinian evolution.

Sheldrake identifies morphic fields with mind. Mind, he said, extends beyond the brain, just like the magnetic field of a magnet extends beyond the magnet itself. This extension of the mind- field beyond the body can help explain extrasensory perception and  telepathic communication. My own ideas on this topic, drawn from the ancient Sanskrit writings of India, are similar to those of Sheldrake. In addition to the gross physical body (sthula sharira), there is a subtle mental body, endowed with subtle senses. This subtle body (linga sharira) is responsible for various yogic siddhis, or perfections, such as durdarshan (seeing at a distance).

Sheldrake explained that many people have the sensation that someone behind them is staring at them. When they look behind them, they see that someone is in fact looking at them. This can be the basis for some experimental work. During a workshop that followed his talk, Sheldrake asked the participants, including me, to organize themselves into pairs. One member of the pair was the subject of the test, and the other conducted the test. The subject sat in a chair, and the experimenter sat behind the subject. The experimenter was given a sheet of paper giving instructions for twenty trials. For each trial, the instruction gave the experimenter one of two choices. Stare at the back of the neck of the subject, or stare somewhere else. For each trial, the subject had to say whether or not the the experimenter was in fact staring. The results of each trial were recorded on the paper.

There are two possibilities. One possibility is that the subjects have no paranormal ability that informs them of the actual truth. In that case, one should expect that the subjects will simply be guessing, and because there are two choices, the expectation is that they will guess correctly 50 percent of the time, over a sufficiently great number of trials. The second possibility is that the subjects do have some degree of paranormal ability that lets them actually “perceive” whether or not the experimenters are actually staring at the backs of their necks. In that case, one would expect the subjects’ scores for correct choices would be significantly higher than the chance expectation (50 percent correct). According to Sheldrake, the results of a large number of such experiments do in fact show that the subjects’ results are significantly greater than 50 percent, amounting to about 60 percent. It would thus appear that we do have eyes in the backs of our heads. In the experiment in which I participated, I scored 60 percent correct.

Sheldrake pointed out that such apparently simple experi-ments have the power to make important contributions to our understanding of reality, and challenge the current understanding, which is based on a strict materialism. Sheldrake has outlined more such experiments, which anyone can carry out, in his book Seven Experiments That Could Change the World.

Remarkably, Sheldrake has done experiments that show telepathic connections between humans and animals. For example, it seems that dogs appear to know when their masters are coming home. Sheldrake tested this by having coordinated time-coded filming of the dog at home and the master away from home. The master was given an instruction to return home, at a time different from the normal time. At the same time the master started to return home, the dog went to the window of the home to await the master’s return.

Both Sheldrake and I wound up sitting next to each other at Stephan Schwartz’s workshop on remote viewing, and we both participated in the experiment I outlined in a previous column. A “sending” team was sent out to go to a place of their choice in
Montreal and “send” imagery back to the rest of us. Both Sheldrake and I were able to identify the place to which they went, giving many correct details. We then compared notes about our respective experiences with what I have called the “knowledge filter.” Actually, I think I am a little more of a victim than Sheldrake, and I think he would agree. He was therefore surprised that I had once been invited by Royal Institution director Baroness Susan Greenfield to lecture there on Forbidden Archeology. Sheldrake
has never been invited to the Royal Institution, which, after the Royal Society, is England’s top scientific society. I told Sheldrake that after my talk, I had been hosted for dinner by Peter Atkins, a well-known Oxford atheist and husband of Baroness Greenfield, who was abroad when I came. “They’re not married anymore,” said Sheldrake. True enough, I found by checking the web. I also found out that Baroness Greenfield is having her own problems with the knowledge filter. Apparently, some members of the Royal Society threatened to resign if she were elected as a fellow, objecting, among other things, to her high public profile and engagement with the media. 

21
Moving in the Right Circles At the Glastonbury Symposium

On Friday morning, July 23, 2004, I arrived at Gatwick airport, south of metropolitan London, on my way to speak on my new book Human Devolution at the Glastonbury Symposium, which is mainly about crop circles. The very term crop circles gives new meaning to the expression “it’s not my field,” because it really is a field in which I have not made very much of a mark.

I made my way rapidly through immigration and customs, and then found my way to the streets at the arrival level. My driver was there to meet me and take me to Glastonbury, which is located in the southwest part of England. We headed out of the airport to the M25, the dreaded circle route around London, The traffic was not so bad, and the weather was good as we headed west on the M1. After a while, we came onto the Salisbury Plain, and up ahead on the right, stark against the bright blue summer sky, rose the mystical megalithic forms of Stonehenge. Some of the huge stones were rolled on logs or dragged on planks, from as far away as Wales. Or perhaps they were floated to their present positions by Stone Age wizards.

Some time later, the Glastonbury Tor, a lone stone tower on the top of a steep conical hill, appeared on the skyline. Glastonbury is a potent place, deeply soaked in the lore of the Grail and Arthurian Avalon. We entered the town and found Magdalene Street, with its associations with Mary Magdalene. According to Essene and other esoteric doctrines, she was the wife of Jesus, who himself, say many here, spent his lost years in Glastonbury studying Druidic mysteries. My lodgings were at No. 3 Magdalene, at the
unimaginatively named No. 3 Hotel, which was not a hotel, but a luxury bed-and-breakfast mansion. The lady of the house showed me up to my lodgings in the second-floor Walnut Room. My cheerfully gracious hostess told me there were ghosts in the house, but I said I was a bit tired and would have to meet them later on.

After that, I crashed into dreamless sleep. In the early evening, I got up and wandered up Magdalene Street toward the town center. I strolled by the Abbey ruins, reputed to be the site of the most ancient Christian church in England. The Abbey was destroyed by King Henry VIII in the sixteenth century. In 1908, a trust appointed architect Frederick Bligh Bond to conduct excavations. He located many lost structures using psychic methods, and by automatic writing established communication with long-dead monks. When his methods became known, the trust fired him. A little further up Magdalene, I found the quaint Town Hall, the venue for the conference. I went in and introduced myself to one of the three organizers, Sheila Martin, and peeked into the lecture hall, which was packed full. Then I went out to get something to eat. There was a fine Italian restaurant across the street from the Town Hall, but my international reputation had not yet reached the maitre d’, and he turned down my request for a table for one, saying that the establishment gave tables for one only after ten o’clock. Thus humbled, I found my way to a fish-and-chips joint, and had an order of chips (fish is off limits to me) with an apple juice to drink.

On Saturday morning, I had an ample English breakfast in the dining room of No. 3. Of course, being a vegetarian I had to confine myself to the fresh fruits and juices, whole wheat toast with jam and butter, fresh fruits with yogurt, some local cheeses, and decaf coffee. Later in the day, I ran into Suzanne Taylor, who is producing a documentary film on crop circles. She and her crew interviewed me in front of the Town Hall. My contribution was to comment on the process of knowledge filtration that operates in the world of science, something I had documented in my book Forbidden Archeology. The knowledge filter ensures that phenomena that radically contradict the current scientific consensus do not enter the mainstream discourse—except as examples of pseudoscientific foolishness. I enjoyed the shoot, and we parted agreeing to meet sometime in LA, where both of us are based.

Sunday morning, I got up and performed my usual ablutions and meditations before heading down to breakfast. Sunday was the last day of the symposium, and I was to be the last speaker. I spent most of the morning and early afternoon putting the finishing touches on the presentation. In the late afternoon, I went over to the Town Hall to hear the talk of Robert Bauval, whose work I very much like. I ran into him and his wife Michele at the Town Hall café. We reminisced about the last time we had met and then went into the lecture hall.

I liked Robert’s talk, taken from his latest book, Talisman: Sacred Cities and Secret Faith, coauthored with Graham Hancock.
The talk focused on the similarities between the city design of Paris in France and Luxor in Egypt. Certain monuments and boulevards in Paris, namely the Louvre, the Champs-Elysees, and the old Place de l’Etoile, have celestial alignments related to the goddess Isis, mirroring a similar arrangement of temples and boulevards in Luxor. Bauval explored the historical transmission of the Isis concepts from ancient Egypt to the Masonic secret societies of France.

Afterwards, I met with Karen Doug, another of the three symposium organizers, to take care of the technical preparations for my presentation. Then it was showtime. After a nice introduction by Andy Thomas, the third of the trio of symposium organizers,
I began by relating the topic of my book Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory to the crop-circle phenomenon. In Human Devolution, I present a view of the cosmos in which crop circles make sense. The message of Human Devolution is that we do not evolve up from matter, as most scientists now believe, but that we devolve or come down from pure consciousness or spirit. We exist in a multilevel cosmos with beings adapted to the conditions at each level. Originally, we are spirit beings who exist in the realm of pure consciousness. If we depart from that level, having become attracted to the lower energies of mind and matter, we descend to those levels. We now find ourselves on the level of gross matter. But beings from higher levels may be attempting to communicate with us, through, for example, crop circles. 

Even mainstream science accepts that there are very probably intelligent beings in other parts of our universe trying to communicate with us, hence the existence of government-funded projects in SETI—the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. But today’s mainstream scientists are not imaginative enough in their thoughts about the means of communication such extraterrestrial intelligences might use to contact us, and what means of communication we might use to contact them. However, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, imaginative scientists made provocative proposals, such as using  geometrical forms inscribed in crops  to communicate with extraterrestrials. In his book SETI Pioneers, David W. Swift says (1990, p. 6): “Mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss suggested planting broad bands of forests in Siberia in the shape of a right-angled triangle. Inside the triangle wheat would be planted to provide a uniform color. An elaboration of this basic scheme would have included squares on each side of the triangle, to form the classic illustration of the Pythagorean theorem.” So if human scientists have thought that geometrical forms inscribed in crops might be a good way to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligences, perhaps some of the extraterrestrials have concluded that this would also be a good way to communicate with us.

After my talk, as I was making my way out of the hall to go sign some books, Dr. John Mack came up and introduced himself. Mack is the Harvard University psychiatrist who got into trouble with his faculty colleagues when he became involved in researching reports of alien abductees, and concluded they were not mentally ill or hallucinating. His colleagues convened an academic court to remove him from the faculty. Fortunately they failed, but provided a good example of the knowledge filtration process in action. It had been a long time since we last spoke together at a conference—a few years ago, at an event organized by Erik von Daniken in Bern, Switzerland. I told John I had cited his work in Human Devolution, in a chapter that documents evidence for beings existing at higher levels of reality in our cosmos.

After we parted, I made my way to the book room where Marcus Allen of the UK edition of Nexus was selling copies of Human Devolution. I sat down and signed some books, making some nice contacts with purchasers, some of whom invited me out for dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant. I then spent my last night in Glastonbury at the No. 3 Hotel, and at dawn my driver was there to take me back to Gatwick.

22
In Memory of Dr. John Mack

After a recent tour of the Ukraine (October 2004), while I was taking a few days rest in Yalta, a Black Sea resort in the Crimea, I learned by email that Dr. John Mack had died after being struck by an automobile in London. I had seen John only a few months earlier in July in Glastonbury, where we were both speakers at the Glastonbury Symposium. After my talk, I was walking out of the hall to the book exhibition room to sign some copies of my books when John approached me and thanked me
for my talk. I had spoken about my new book Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory. He said he admired the way I was able to mine so many scientific disciplines for information that contributed to a systematic new explanation for the origin of life and the universe. I took this kind of recognition from him as a great honor, for as I told him that afternoon, he had for a long time been one of my heroes. We recalled our last meeting, a few years previously at an ancient astronaut conference organized by Erich von Daniken in Bern, Switzerland, and then we parted, agreeing to stay in touch.

I first became interested in Mack’s work when I was doing the research for Human Devolution. In that book, I suggested that before we even ask the question “where did human beings come from?” we should first of all ask the question “what is a human being?” Today most scientists consider human beings to be simply a combination of the ordinary material elements. But I proposed that if we look at all the evidence that comes to us from various fields of science, we will find it is more reasonable to say that a human being is a combination of three things: matter, mind, and consciousness, or spirit. And from there we can move on to a further assumption, namely, that our cosmos is a multilevel cosmos, with each level dominated by one of the three elements and inhabited by forms of life adapted to the conditions there. Originally, we begin our existence at the level of pure consciousness or spirit. By a process of devolution, the conscious self becomes covered by the lower energies of mind and matter, but it is a process that can be reversed.

One might ask, “Where is the evidence for beings existing at different levels of a multilevel universe?” There are several categories of such evidence, including (1) telepathic communications from departed humans, (2) apparitions of departed humans, (3) possessions of living humans by departed humans, (4) possessions of living humans by superhuman entities, (5) apparitions of superhuman entities, etc. Another category is the alien-abduction phenomenon—and that brings us to the work of John Mack.

John’s position as a psychiatrist at Harvard University added serious credibility to his influential reports on alien abductees. Mack became interested in the alien-abduction phenomenon through reading the works of UFO researcher Budd Hopkins. After studying some of the cases recorded by Hopkins, he concluded they were genuine. In his book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens  (1994, p. 2), Mack noted, “Most of the specific information that the abductees provided . . . had never been written about or shown in the media. Furthermore, these individuals were from many parts of the country and had not communicated with each other.” This ruled out some of the usual skeptical explanations for the similarity of the reports, such as collusion among those reporting the incidents and repetition of media stereotypes. Further analyzing those who gave the reports, Mack said, “They seemed in other respects quite sane, had come forth reluctantly, fearing the discrediting of their stories or outright ridicule they had encountered in the past. They had come to see Hopkins at considerable expense, and, with rare exceptions, had nothing to gain materially from telling their stories. . . . What Hopkins had encountered in the more than two-hundred abduction cases he had seen over a fourteen-year period were reports of experiences that had the characteristics of real events: highly detailed narratives that seemed to have no obvious symbolic pattern; intense emotional and physical traumatic im-pact, sometimes leaving small lesions on the experiencers’ bodies; and consistency of stories down to the most minute details.”

After interviewing some of Hopkins’s subjects, Mack (1994, p. 3) concluded: “None of them seemed psychiatrically disturbed except in a secondary sense, that is they were troubled as a consequence of something that had apparently happened to them. There was nothing to suggest that their stories were delusional, a misinterpretation of dreams, or the product of fantasy. None of them seemed like people who would concoct a strange story for some personal purpose.” Mack then began working with his own alien- abduction subjects and found that each of them had “no apparent mental condition that could account for the story” (1994, pp. 3–4).

Mack eventually got into trouble with his Harvard colleagues for his research on alien abductees, thus providing an excellent contemporary example of the knowledge filtering process that Richard Thompson and I first described in Forbidden Archeology. We showed that the knowledge filtering process can involve institutional pressures to keep researchers in line. Mack was kind enough to send me a collection of documents related to his case. A report in the Boston Globe (August 3, 1975) said, “Mack had become a cause célebre at Harvard after the 1994 publication of his bestselling book Abduction. In countless television and newspaper interviews, he was inevitably dubbed ‘the Harvard professor who believes in UFOs,’ causing considerable anguish to many of his colleagues” (Beam, 1995, p. 1). A special faculty committee at the medical school carried out the investigation. The Boston Globe reported, “The Medical School committee’s preliminary report . . . chastised Mack for ‘affirming the delusions’ of his many patients who claim to have been abducted by aliens. The committee also found Mack to be ‘in violation of the standards of conduct expected by a member of the faculty of Harvard University.’” Some of Mack’s colleagues advised that his tenure should be revoked. Mack mounted a vigorous defense, and in the end he retained his position at Harvard. 

Many of the cases studied by Mack contain strong paranormal elements. In his book Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters (1999, pp. 166–177), Mack explored the case of Sequoyah Trueblood, an American Indian of the Choctaw nation. In July 1970, Sequoyah had just returned to the United States from Vietnam, where he had served as a United States Army officer. On July 4 he reported being taken into a spacecraft by alien beings who communicated with him telepathically.

Mack (1999, p. 175) stated, “Sequoyah does not distinguish the beings who he says took him into a spacecraft from the guardian spirits that have guided and protected him all his life. The use of the word extraterrestrial by whites, Sequoyah believes, is just another expression of our separation from spirit. There are many other planets, stars, and universes populated, he believes, by a virtually infinite number of beings. Such beings are always among us and become visible in humanoid form so they can interact with us and bring us back to Source. . . . The form in which spirit chooses to manifest on any given occasion—as human, humanoid, or animal creature, for example—is itself a sacred mystery. According to Sequoyah, we are all in a sense extraterrestrial, for star beings took part in the creation of the human species and have always been our teachers.”

For Mack, the paranormal aspect of the UFO phenomenon came to assume great importance. Mack (1999, pp. 268–269) said, “Efforts to pin down physical evidence for the existence of UFOs and the material aspects of abductions will and probably should continue, if for no other reason than the fact that they corroborate the actuality of the phenomena. But I am increasingly convinced that the subtle and elusive nature of the abduction phenomenon is such that its secrets will be denied to those using a purely empirical approach, who try to keep observer and observed, subject and object, totally separate.” Mack (1999, p. 269) added, “It appears ever more likely that we exist in a multidimensional cosmos or multiverse. . . . The cosmos . . . far from being an empty place of dead matter and energy, appears to be filled with beings, creatures, spirits, intelligences, gods . . . that have through the millennia been intimately involved with human existence.” Of course, all this fits in quite well with the view of the cosmos presented in my book Human Devolution, and the congruent nature of our views is one reason I felt I had found in John Mack a kindred spirit.
       I cannot say that I was an intimate associate of John Mack on the level of ordinary socializing. Our meetings were infrequent and brief. But intellectually I have always felt a fortunate comradeship with him, and other researchers working in the alternative history and cosmology fields. His courage, scholarship, and humility will continue to inspire me. And I wish him well as he continues on his spiritual journey.

23
A Tour of Brazil

In 2004, I did a publicity tour of Brazil, in connection with the appearance of a Portuguese edition of The Hidden History of the Human Race (the abridged version of Forbidden Archeology). I landed in São Paulo early on the morning of August 26. It was a landmark day for me. It was my first visit to South America, and this meant I had finally visited all the main continents. That leaves Antarctica, and I am scheming how to get there. Since I was traveling with carry-on luggage only, I just went straight
out through customs and into the airport arrival hall. My Brazilian publisher, Adriano Piazzi, met me. He accompanied me to his car, and we began the long drive from the international airport into the city.

Adriano showed me a copy of the Brazilian edition of The Hidden History of the Human Race, translated into Portuguese. This kind of book was a new venture for Aleph, the family publishing company. In the year 2003, a young man named Anilson, part Brazilian Indian and part European, and very interested in alternative science, found out about my work and suggested to Adriano that he should publish a series of books about new thought, new paradigms. At the top of Anilson’s list was my book The Hidden History of the Human Race.

The drive from the airport was seemingly endless. São Paulo just goes on and on. Finally we got to our destination, and Adriano checked me into my hotel. The only thing on the schedule that day was a photo shoot by a photographer from one of the big São Paulo papers, Estado São Paulo, which was running an article about me.  On the morning of August 27, I flew from São Paulo to Brasilia, the capital. That evening a car and driver came to take me from my hotel to a mansion on a lakefront on the outskirts of Brasilia.
The house is the headquarters of the Planetary Union, a spiritualistic, ecological, social-transformational group. They have a TV studio there, and they taped a show with me, that was later shown on cable television in twenty-five cities in Brazil. Then I went back to the hotel, and I was hungry. I called five pizza-delivery places, but nobody at all spoke English and neither could they understand my attempts at Portuguese. Finally, I got the concierge to call out for pizza for me.

The next day I gave a lecture for a local UFO group. In that talk, and in the other talks I gave in Brazil, I discussed cases that would be of special interest to the audience. For example, because of Brazil’s connection with Portugal, I spoke about the discoveries of Carlos Ribeiro. In the late nineteenth century he was the chief government geologist of Portugal, and he found human artifacts in Lower Miocene formations about 20 million years old. I also discussed some significant South American discoveries made in the early twentieth century by Carlos Ameghino at Miramar, in northern Argentina. There, human artifacts were found in Pliocene formations about 3 million years old. Also, Florentino Ameghino, the elder brother of Carlos, reported the discovery of a human skull in Buenos Aires. It was found in layers of rock about 1 million years old. After the lecture, I flew back to São Paulo.

On August 29, I spoke at a seminar titled “Thinkers of the New Age.” The next day I  had lunch with Adriano and his mother at her place. Knowing that I am a vegetarian, they had their cook prepare a wonderful selection of vegetarian Brazilian dishes, in-
cluding palm heart salad, rice with beans, palm heart pie, farofa  (roasted manioc meal), and fried bananas, with coconut pudding and mangos and papayas for desert, and fresh grape juice to drink. The evening of August 31, I did a lecture and book signing at São Paulo’s best bookstore, Livraria Cultura. I was introduced by Viktor Salis, one of São Paulo’s leading intellectuals. It went really well, with about 200 people coming, completely packing the lecture area. The crowd was a mixture of intelligent people of all ages, from university professors to neo-hippies. 

My last event was a lecture at a UFO conference in Curitiba. Unfortunately, the tour schedule was a little tight, so there was not a lot of time for me to conduct any forbidden archeology investigations on my own. But I am going back to Brazil for another tour, and I have asked organizers to fit in some time for exploring archeological mysteries.

There have been some very interesting discoveries in Brazil that relate to the peopling of the Americas. The standard theory is that humans like us came into the Americas from northeast Asia about 10,000–15,000 years ago. But some sites in Brazil put that theory into doubt. For example, in northeastern Brazil, we find the rock shelter of Pedra Furada. In the 1980s, a team of French and Brazilian researchers, led by Niede Guidon, excavated the rock shelter and reported three meters of stratified deposits going back as far as 60,000 years, according to an interview published in Athena Review  (2002, vol. 3, no. 2).  The  layers contained circular hearths, charcoal, and a variety of stone tools, as well as painted fragments of rock that had fallen off the walls (evidence for cave paintings). Conservative archeologists, such as D. J. Meltzer, have tried to dismiss the discoveries, saying that the ashes were washed into the rock shelter from forest fires and that the stone tools are just naturally broken rocks. But Guidon and her coworkers replied that their critics, who had published a negative article about Pedra Furada in Antiquity, were misrepresenting the facts. For example, Guidon called attention to a published photograph of a piece of stone that the critics said was created by rock falls in the shelter, writing: “The artifact in their figures . . . has five successive parallel flake scars on the same edge. By the authors’ hypothesis, it will have suffered the first when it fell; thereafter, four other pebbles fell on top of it, one beside the other, regularly, causing flake scars with equal technical characteristics” (Antiquity 1996, vol. 70, p. 408). When asked why she thought she was experiencing so much opposition, Guidon said in her Athena Review interview: “I cannot understand why. Perhaps because when you are the first to discover something, people want to kill you because you disturbed the placid waters of the lake. The theories on the peopling of America are only theories, and in prehistory it is not possible to say that something does not exist only because we do not find them. A theory is not a law, but may and must be changed each time new facts are discovered. And I am sure of our discoveries because our team is very good with specialists in different sciences. I have degrees in both Natural History and Prehistory, and decades of fieldwork. I know when I am digging a place where people placed stones in order to make a fire inside the structure, and when I am facing a natural fire.”

Another interesting site is Toca da Esperança (Cave of Hope), also in northeastern Brazil, in the state of Bahia. Excavations revealed four layers in the cave. The first was a thick layer of limestonelike rock. Beneath this were three layers of sand and clay. In the lowest layer, the archeologists found stone tools (made from quartz) along with animal bones. The animal bones were dated using the uranium-series method, which gave ages up to 295,000 years. The discoveries were reported to the scientific world by Henri de Lumley, a prominent French archeologist, in the proceedings of the French Academy of Sciences in 1988. De Lumley and his coauthors said, “The evidence seems to indicate that Early Man entered into the American continent much before previously thought.” Despite the solid evidence, the site has been virtually ignored by most American archeologists.

In 1970, Alan Lyle Bryan, a Canadian archeologist, was looking through some of the fossils found in the Lagoa Santa Caves in Brazil, north of Belo Horizonte. Many human fossils were collected from these caves during the nineteenth century. Among the fossils, Bryan found one that was exceedingly primitive, resembling Homo erectus. Bryan took photographs of the strange skull, leaving the fossil itself in the museum where he found it. When he showed the photos to American scientists, they could not believe that the skull was really from South America. According to current theories, no apemen ever existed here. Only fully modern humans ever came to the Americas, and they supposedly came here less than 15,000 years ago.

After my tour of Brazil was over, I boarded a Delta Airlines flight from São Paulo to Atlanta. Flying through the night skies over the Amazon, I meditated on my next tour, which is scheduled for September 2005 and will take me to practically all the major cities, from the northern Amazon region down to Rio and Porto Alegre, and hopefully to places like Pedra Furada, Toca da Esperança, the Lagoa Santa caves, and perhaps some other sites as yet unknown to me.

24
The Flores Island Hominin:
Old Hobbits Are Hard to Break

For over a century, scientists have gotten into the habit of interpreting every archeological discovery through the lens of the Darwinian theory of evolution. And it seems like this old habit is very hard to break, as evidenced by a discovery published late last year.

In the October 28, 2004 issue of Nature, archeologists announced the discovery of a new hominin. A few years ago they would have used the word hominid, to indicate the taxonomic family that includes all living humans and all their fossil ancestors. But in recent years, the tendency has been to group the chimpanzees and gorillas in the same family as humans and in a different family than the orangutans. Accepting this line of thinking, the word hominid now includes not only humans and their direct ancestors but also the chimps and gorillas. So if today taxonomists want to speak of only humans and their direct fossil human ancestors, they use the term hominin. Technically speaking, hominins are a tribe within the family of the hominids.

The archeologists found the new hominin in a cave on Flores Island, part of the Indonesian island chain. The bones they found included a partial skeleton of a female and the isolated bones of other individuals. The new Flores Island hominin was small both in stature and brain size, smaller than the smallest australopithecines, yet the archeologists attributed the creature to the genus Homo, to which we also belong, giving it the species name Homo floresiensis. In the popular press, some scientists called the Flores Island creatures “hobbits,” hoping to cash in on the celebrity status of the diminutive humans in the popular film series Lord of the Rings. Good marketing can sell not only films but also archeological discoveries, and part of good marketing is a catchy name. Hobbit is certainly more catchy and memorable than Homo floresiensis.

 In their Nature article, the archeologists proposed that Homo floresiensis was the dwarf offspring of the apeman Homo erectus, who had earlier migrated to Flores Island. But the new creature is so different morphologically from Homo erectus that its attribution to the genus Homo is to me questionable. For example, living  pygmy humans have brain sizes somewhat the same as those of normal-sized humans, whereas the Flores Island creature has a brain much smaller (in terms of its relation to body size) than the brain of Homo erectus.

The discoverers attributed the animal bones and stone tools found in the cave, along with the bones of Homo floresiensis, to actions by that creature. The discoverers noted that the stone tools were of an advanced type, usually attributed to anatomically modern humans. So why did they attribute them to the little hobbit, with a brain smaller than that of an australopithecine? The reason they gave was not very convincing. They simply noted that no anatomically modern human bones were found in the cave. But it is nevertheless possible that the advanced stone tools, and the animal bones, as well as the bones of Homo floresiensis itself, were the work of anatomically modern humans. If the animals, including Homo floresiensis, were the hunted, it is reasonable to suppose that only their bones would be found and not those of their hunter. It is a fact in archeology that at a great many sites where human stone tools are found, the bones of humans are not found.

This is not the first time that stone tools were found on Flores Island. In an article published in Nature in 1998 (vol. 392, pp. 173–176), Australian and Indonesian archeologists, including Michael Morwood, who was involved in the most recent discovery, an-
nounced finding some stone tools, in layers dated at about 840,000 years. This age was obtained by using the zircon fission track method on a volcanic ash layer above the artifact layer. In that case, the discoverers attributed the tools to Homo erectus, again illustrating the bad habit of interpreting everything according to evolutionary preconceptions. Who was around in Indonesia over 800,000 years ago? Certainly not humans like us. According to current evolutionary concepts, humans like us came into existence between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, most likely in Africa. So the tools must have been made by Homo erectus, because that was, supposedly, the only hominin present at that time.

The first Homo erectusbone—an apelike skull and a femur, or thigh bone—were found on Java in the late nineteenth century by Eugene Dubois. He put the femur and thigh bone together (although they were found about forty-five feet from each other, in a layer containing bones of many animals), and called the resulting creature Pithecanthropus erectus, now regarded as a member of the Homo erectus group. Later, in the 1970s, two British physical anthroplogists, Michael Day and T. I. Molleson, examined the femur and found it identical to anatomically modern human femurs and different from all Homo erectus femurs discovered afterwards (Symposia of the Society for the Study of Human Biology, 1978, vol. 2, pp. 127–154). This is interesting, because according to Dubois, both the skull and femur were found in the same layer at the Trinil site in Java, and this layer has been dated using the potassiumargon method as being about 830,000 years old (T. Jacob, J. Human Evolution, vol. 2, p. 477). This indicates that around 800,000 years ago there were two kinds of hominins in Java—a population of Homo erectus, represented by the apelike skull, and a population of Homo sapiens sapiens, represented by the anatomically modern human femur.

If the anatomically modern human femur were an isolated discovery, that might lead us to question it, but in my book Forbidden Archeology, coauthored with Richard L. Thompson, I document many more such discoveries of evidence for extreme human antiquity from all parts of the world. For example, in 1899, the top part of a skull was found in an excavation for a dry dock in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Ales Hrdlicka, a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, examined the skull during a visit to Argentina. In his book Early Man in America (1912, p. 377),  Hrdlicka found the skull to be anatomically modern: “Every feature shows it to be a portion of the skull of man himself; it bears no evidence of having belonged to an early or physically primi-
tive man, but to a well-developed and physically modern-like human being.” Yet the skull was found at a depth of 11 meters, as workers were breaking through a layer of limestonelike rock (Hrdlicka 1912, p. 318). The presence of the skull below the unbroken
limestone indicates it had not come down from some higher level.
According to modern paleontologists, the oldest part of the Ensanadan formation, which lies over the Pre-Ensanadan formation, in which the skull was found, is about one-million years old (Marshall et al., Science, 982, vol. 215, p. 1352). So the Pre-Ensanadan
formation would be at least that old. Therefore, the physiological and geological facts indicate evidence for humans existing in South America over a million years ago. Hrdlicka, exhibiting a bad habit of evolutionary thought, could only assert (1912, p. 3): “The antiquity . . . of any human skeletal remains which do not present marked differences from those of modern man may be regarded . . . as only insignificant geologically.” In other words, if you find a human bone that is anatomically modern, it cannot be very old, geologically. So one possible solution to the Flores Island puzzle is that Homo erectus apemen from Java crossed the sea and went to Flores Island about 800,000 years ago, and then over hundreds of thousands of years became hobbitlike dwarfs. One big problem with this is that it requires attributing humanlike capabilities for deliberate sea crossings to Homo erectus, not previously known to scientists as a sailor. The earliest known sea crossings, previous to the Flores Island case, were the arrival of humans in Australia about 50,000 years ago and the arrival of humans on islands in the Mediterranean Sea about 25,000 years ago.

The other, and more realistic, possibility is that anatomically modern humans from Java settled Flores Island 800,000 years ago. During their continuing life on Flores Island, they made stone tools, and killed animals, including the apelike creatures now improbably called Homo floresiensis. So it is not necessary to raise Homo erectus to the anatomically modern human level to explain the presence of the stone tools and animal bones on Flores Island. There is a much more reasonable explanation, based on
physical evidence for extreme human antiquity in the Indonesian archipelago and elsewhere.

In the end, the bones of the little creature found in a cave on Flores Island, as interpreted by their discoverers, represent not a nice little hobbit but a bad habit of thinking according to evolutionary preconceptions, a habit that needs to be broken. 

25
California Dreaming:
The State Highway 54 Mastodon Blues

In 1992 and 1993, paleontologists of the San Diego NaturalHistory Museum were monitoring the construction on State Highway 54 in San Diego County. In the road excavations, they found some interesting fossils that raise the possibility that humans have existed in North America for far longer than most archeologists now think possible.

According to the current consensus, humans entered North America no earlier than 20,000 years ago, maximum. A recent genetic study puts the date of entry at about 12,000 years ago. But the report by the San Diego paleontologists suggests that humans were present much further back in time than that. 

The lead author of the July 28, 1995 final report, prepared for California’s Department of Transportation (Caltrans, District 11), was paleontologist Thomas A. Deméré. On May 31, 1990, I met Deméré at the San Diego Natural History Museum. I was doing research for my book Forbidden Archeology, which was published in 1993. In that book there is a section about incised animal bones, such as whale bones. There can be questions as to whether cut marks on such bones were made by human hunters or by
sharks. So my coauthor Richard Thompson and I visited Deméré, who showed us collections of whale bones with marks of shark teeth on them. Richard and I concluded that it was possible to distinguish marks from shark teeth from marks made by stone tools
on bone. And thus we included in Forbidden Archeology some reports of whale bones bearing marks of flint tools. Originally reported by Italian geologist G. Capellini in the late nineteenth century, the whale bones date back to the late Pliocene (2–3 million years).

While in the San Diego museum, I asked Deméré if he had heard of some discoveries made by George Miller in the AnzaBorrego Desert east of San Diego. In 1988, Miller had reported finding some mammoth bones with cut marks made by stone
tools. The United States Geological Survey used the uranium isotope method to date the bones and obtained an age of about 300,000 years, according to a report published in the San Diego Union (October 31, 1988). Deméré told me he did know about the finds but cautioned me that a report like that would never make it through peer review into any scientific journal. That is how the knowledge filtration process works in science.

It is interesting that a few years later Deméré himself was involved in a similar discovery of ancient elephant bones. In the State Route 54 excavations, Deméré and his paleontologist colleagues found parts of a mammoth skeleton. The bones they found,
according to the report, were “right and left tusks, two molars, three vertebrae, 10 ribs, portions of both femurs, at least two phalanges, and numerous large and small bone fragments.” The bones were scattered. Some of them were arranged in a way that suggests deliberate human action. For example, the report said, “Of special note was the discovery of both isolated femur heads sideby-side.” One of the tusks was found buried perpendicular to the bedding planes, extending from Bed E down in Bed D, as if someone had deliberately pushed it into the ground. Some of the bones also showed signs of having been deliberately broken. The report said, “a large, sharply fractured piece of long bone was found with a distinct impact scar on its internal surface.” Some of the rocks found along with the bones appeared to have been brought to the site and broken for use there. The scientists were able to gather broken pieces of rock from among the bones and put them back together. The report said, “Pieces of a single granitic boulder were found scattered over an area of approximately 16 square meters.” This small boulder and others like it were found in fine-grained silty sandstones, indicating that they did not belong there naturally, and were probably transported there.

Although this discovery has lots of features characteristic of human action, the authors of the report were quite cautious in their statements. They admitted that the mammoth bones showed “no convincing evidence of carnivore activity or trampling.” Is it possible the bones were broken by natural processes in the earth, long after their deposition? The authors noted, “The spiral fracturing and angular transverse breaks noted on some specimens does suggest green bone breakage.” In other words, the bones were broken when the animal was alive, or shortly after its death. Could boulders have fallen on the dead animal? The report said that at the site there was “no evidence for boulder fall.” The authors added, “The mastodon skeleton was recovered from an overbank silty fine sandstone that was deposited away from any topographic high such as a stream cut bank or cliff.” Could the bones have been broken by action of swift water? The report noted that the bones show no signs of abrasion, as would be the case if they had been transported in a rapidly flowing stream. In the end, they decided that breakage by torsion (twisting of the limbs or falling) was possible. But this seems unlikely, given that the bones were found away from cliffs or other places that could have resulted in such a fall. The authors conceded that “this type of breakage can also be produced by human activity.” And to me, given all the evidence, this seems the most likely explanation.

A sample of ivory from the mastodon site was dated using the uranium series method at the geochemistry lab of the department of geological sciences of the University of Southern California. The age obtained was 335,000 years. So it appears that we have evidence for some kind of mastodon hunters in southern California over 335,000 years ago. Richard Ku, the geologist who reported the dates to Deméré, said in a letter to him (January 7, 1994) that “one cannot completely rule out the possibility that the sample could be older than 375ka [375,000 years].” Ku said that the safest thing to say is just that the ivory sample is more than 300,000 years old. How much older is anyone’s guess.

So who were these mastodon hunters? According to current views, anatomically modern humans, humans like you and me, go back one- or two-hundred-thousand years at most. Before that there were no humans like us. So perhaps the San Diego mastodon hunters were representatives of Homo erectus. Even that would be quite revolutionary, because according to current ideas that apeman never came to the New World. But if we go beyond the evidence mentioned in the current textbooks, we see that there have been archeological discoveries indicating the presence of anatomically modern humans in the New World that go back two- or three- hundred-thousand years or more.

I have already mentioned the butchered mammoth bones found by George Miller in the Anza Borrego Desert, not so far from San Diego. These bones, like the State Highway 54 mastodon,  yielded an age of 300,000 years. Furthermore, in the 1970s, American archeologists working at Hueyatlaco, near Puebla in Mexico, found artifacts of the type that archeologists routinely attribute only to anatomically modern humans. The archeologists called in a team of geologists to date the site. Mammal bones with butchering marks were found in the same layers as the stone tools. The bones were dated using the uranium series method. According to a report published in Quaternary Research (1981, vol. 16, pp. 1–17), the age of the butchered bones was 245,000 years. (Actually, it was Virginia Steen-McIntyre, one of the geologists involved in dating the Hueyatlaco site who sent me the copy of the report on the State Highway 54 discoveries.) In the early twentieth century, the Argentine paleontologist Florentino Ameghino reported the discovery of an anatomically modern human skull in an excavation at Buenos Aires (Forbidden Archeology,  pp. 413–418). It came from a formation that modern geologists say is about one million years old. And if you really want to go back, there are the California gold mine discoveries reported by J. D. Whitney, chief government geologist of California, in the year 1880, in a book published by Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (The Auriferous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California). Those human bones and artifacts go back to the Eocene, the geological period that extends from 38–55 million years ago. 

The State Highway 54 discoveries are not very well known because they can only be found in an obscure report in the files of the California Department of Transportation. Because state and federal laws now mandate that there must be archeological and paleontological reports in connection with road construction and other construction projects, there are thousands of such reports, and who knows what’s in them. Somehow, because of some inside connections, I got wind of this particular report, which gives evidence that humans were in California over 300,000 years ago. I wondered what they called California back then.

26
Folk Archeological Traditions in India

On July 2, 2005, I flew overnight from Los Angeles to London’s Gatwick airport. I took a Thameslink train from Gatwick to the Thameslink Kings Cross railway station. From there I walked a short ways up Pentonville Road to Dinwiddy House, where I stayed while attending a meeting of the European Association of South Asian Archaeologists. The meeting, at which I presented a paper, was held in the British Museum, from July 4 to July 8.

The conference was attended by a few hundred archeologists and art historians from Europe, India, and other parts of the world. Among the archeologists from India was one with whom I have been working, trying to get permission from the Archeological Survey of India (ASI) to conduct some test excavations at the Shri Rangam temple in South India. I would like to show that the temple is at least five thousand years old. However, the ASI is not inclined to give permission for doing such work on the temple grounds proper. The archeologist informed me that we probably could get permission to do such work outside the temple compound. That might work, if we could locate buried older foundations or other buried structures connected with the temple and surrounding settlement in ancient times.

On the morning of July 7, shortly before nine o’clock, I walked out of Dinwiddy House. I thought about taking the Underground from the Kings Cross station to Russell Square, the stop nearest the British Museum. But I decided it would be better to walk, so that I could chant the Hare Krishna mantra on my meditation beads. A young Indian archeologist attending the conference and also staying in Dinwiddy House actually did go down into the King’s Cross underground station and was on the train that was bombed shortly after nine o’clock. She later told how she and the other survivors had to climb out of the damaged car over dead bodies and then walk through the tunnel to get back to safety.

At the conference, I heard only a very brief and low key announcement about the attacks. The archeologists kept giving their papers, while outside the city was coming to a halt. It was only after the conference, when I tried to walk home and found my route blocked with police, that I learned the true extent of what had happened.

The next day, it was my turn to read my paper, the title of which was “Excavating the Eternal: Folk Archeological Traditions in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern India.” Histories of Indian archaeology typically begin with observations by sixteenth-century
European travelers, such as Pietro de Valle. In the introduction to his History of Indian Archaeology from the Beginning to 1947, D. Chakrabarti says, “Without doubt these records constitute the first group of archaeological writings on India.” But Indian sacred
writings reveal a parallel indigenous archaeological tradition, involving the excavation of lost artifacts, deities, temples, and sacred sites. I will give one example each from ancient, medieval, and modern India.

According to the Mahabharata, in ancient times King Marutta desired to perform a sacrifice, which required gold vessels. The king’s priest, Samvarta, instructed him to go to the Munjaban mountain in the Himalayas and take gold from the mines there. Marutta obeyed, and his artisans turned the gold into sacrificial vessels. After the sacrifice, Marutta buried some of the gold vessels. According to the Ramayana, Marutta lived millions of years ago in the age called Satya Yuga. After the Mahabharata war, about
five thousand years ago according to traditional accounts, the sage Vyasa ordered King Yudhisthira to perform a sacrifice. Much wealth was required for the sacrifice, so Vyasa told Yudhisthira about the gold vessels left by Marutta in the Himalayas. Yudhisthira
excavated the gold objects and took them to his capital. We do have other evidence of ancient people collecting artifacts. For example, archeologist C. L. Woolley, in his book Ur of the Chaldees (1950, pp. 152–154) informs us that in the sixth-century B.C. the daughter of King Nebonidus put together a collection of much earlier Babylonian artifacts.

And now an example of Indian folk archeology from medieval times. About five thousand years ago, King Vajranabha installed a worshipable stone deity of Krishna in a temple on Govardhan Hill in the town of Vrindavan. In the eleventh century, temple priests removed the deity from the temple and buried it, to protect it from attack. It remained lost until the fifteenth century, at which time Madhavendra Puri, a devotee of Krishna, came to Vrindavan. Once
Madhavendra Puri was fasting and meditating beneath a tree at Govinda Kunda, a pond near the village of Aniyor, at the foot of Govardhana Hill. At night Krishna appeared to him in a dream, revealed the location of the deity, and asked that it be excavated.  Awakening from the dream, Madhavendra went into the nearby village and gathered some people. Together, they excavated the deity. Under Madhavendra Puri’s direction the villagers took the deity to the top of Govardhana Hill and eventually installed it in a new temple. In the seventeenth century, under new threats of attack, the deity was taken to Nathdwar in Rajasthan, where it remains today. The story of how Madhavendra Puri excavated the deity can be found in Chaitanya-charitamrta, a Bengali work completed  by Krishnadasa Kaviraja in 1615 A.D. Finally, an example of folk archeology from more modern times. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, an avatar, or incarnation, of God, appeared in the late fifteenth century in a town called Navadvipa, on the banks of the Ganges in what is now West Bengal. In the centuries after Chaitanya’s time (1486–1534), the place of his appearance was lost, because of the shifting river. In the late nineteenth century, Bhaktivinoda Thakura (1838–1915), relocated the site of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s birth, beginning its development into a major pilgrimage place. Bhaktivinoda Thakura, educated in English, served as a magistrate in the British administration of India. Eager to find the exact place of Caitanya Mahaprabhu’s appearance, he sought and finally received a transfer to Krishnanagara, a town near Navadvipa. Each weekend, he would come to Navadvipa, but did not find what he wanted. One night in 1888, he was standing on the roof of a guesthouse. Looking across the Ganges River he saw “a large building flooded with light.” The next morning, he looked out across the river at the place where he had seen the shining building in the night sky. He saw no building: only a tall palm tree. Asking some of the local people, he learned that the place was called Ballaldighi. The next Saturday he returned to Ballaldighi. That night, he again had a vision of a shining building there, and the next morning he went on foot to explore the area where it had appeared. Some of the elderly villagers told him this was the birthplace of Chaitanya. Bhaktivinoda Thakura confirmed this by carefully studying the geographical descriptions given in the early biographies of Chaitanya. He also studied old records and maps by Dutch and British cartographers. In 1895, a small temple was opened on the site. Later, in 1934, a larger temple was opened, and it can still be visited today. 

There are many more examples that I could give. Together they show that archeology in India did not begin, as many scholars claim, with the arrival of European travelers in the sixteenth century. Long before that, there was a folk archeological tradition in India, a tradition that began thousands of years ago and continued through the arrival of the Europeans in the colonial era right up to the present day.

27
Your Man in Beijing

In July 2005, I went to Beijing to give a paper at the 22nd International Congress of History of Science. It was my first trip to China. At the Beijing airport, I ignored the advice in my Lonely Planet guidebook. Instead of walking to the regular taxi stand, I took up an offer from a man who walked up to me as I was coming out from customs and passport control. As the guidebook warned, I wound up paying three times the normal fare for the ride to the Beijing Friendship Hotel. The Congress was at-
tended by about a thousand historians of science from around the world. The title of my paper was “Beijing Man and the Rockefeller Foundation.”

The Beijing Man fossils were discovered in the 1920s at Zhoukoudian, about 50 miles southwest of Beijing. They were important in establishing the theory of human evolution.

The Beijing Man research was led by Davidson Black, a physical anthropologist at the Beijing Union Medical College, which was opened by a division of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1921. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and his entourage attended the opening.
It was the largest project of the Foundation outside the United States. Significantly, China was a major market for Standard Oil, the main source of the Rockefeller fortune. By 1921, Standard Oil controlled 77 percent of the kerosene sales in China. The kerosene was used for lamps, hence the slogan “oil for the lamps of China.” As a marketing ploy, Standard Oil distributed free kerosene lamps to the Chinese, to get them to burn kerosene instead of traditional lighting fuels. After John D. Rockefeller, Jr. attended the opening of the Beijing Union Medical College he journeyed to Shanghai to tour the Standard Oil headquarters there, with its extensive port, storage, and distribution facilities. So the Rockefellers had a huge economic as well as charitable presence in China.

A couple of years ago, I wrote in this column about the Rockefeller Foundation’s funding of the Beijing Man discoveries. Since then I have learned more about why the Foundation became involved. John D. Rockefeller, Sr. was throughout his life a strict Baptist. Even as a young clerk, Rockefeller made regular charitable contributions to his church. When he earned a huge fortune through the Standard Oil Company and other ventures, he continued his lifelong pattern of charity. Not surprisingly, his charity was directed toward Baptist churches, hospitals, schools, and missions. As a result, he was continually being approached by Baptist ministers and other Baptist petitioners. To relieve himself from having to attend personally to all of these requests, Rockefeller ap-
pointed Frederick T. Gates, a former Baptist minister and officer of the American Baptist Education Society, to oversee his charitable contributions. Gates soon organized a system whereby Rockefeller would give a lump sum to a mission board that would dis-
tribute the funds in an appropriate fashion.

 Rockefeller and Gates later set up a number of charitable trusts, including the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the General Education Board, the International Education Board, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Trust. The Rockefeller charities were generous. For example, Rockefeller gave 35 million dollars for building the University of Chicago, which started out as a Baptist institution.  In the end, it turned out to be something different, teaching the scientific account of human evolution rather than the Biblical creation story. Indeed the whole pattern of Rockefeller giving moved away from Baptist causes into science, including evolution. Why did this happen?

At this point, I should say something about my own perspective on evolution. My work in history of science is inspired by my studies in the ancient Sanskrit writings of India, which offer a picture of human origins and antiquity quite different from that of modern evolutionists. The picture is one of coexistence of humans and apemen, rather than the evolution of humans from apemen.
I am therefore interested in how the Rockefeller Foundation, with its roots in John D. Rockefeller’s gifts to Baptist causes, came to be involved in funding scientific research that favored the theory of evolution and challenged a literal reading of the Bible.

Rockefeller’s own views on evolution are not easy to discern. I have not been able to find anything in his own words on the question of biological evolution. Furthermore, he stayed in the background of his charitable foundations, which were created late in his life. He left their direction to others, especially Gates, whose views are more directly evident. Gates started out as a typical Baptist but underwent a conversion to a more liberal Christianity. While retaining a nonsectarian belief in God, he became a supporter of the methods and conclusions of modern science.

Gates served as a mentor to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who assumed the oversight of the Rockefeller charitable enterprises on behalf of his father. The younger Rockefeller followed the lead of Gates in moving away from sectarian Baptist beliefs and organizations. On July 28, 1921, Rockefeller, Jr. wrote to his father against “fundamentalist” Baptists: “These ‘Fundamentalists’ as you know, believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible and in other kindred doctrines which men of broader minds and wider vision cannot today accept.” Rockefeller, Jr. would later end his contributions to the main Baptist organization in the United States. Instead, he supported the establishment of the interdenominational Riverside Church in New York City. The monumental church, formally opened in 1931, was decorated with statues of scientists, including Darwin.

Around the same time, Rockefeller, Jr. led a restructuring of the Rockefeller charities. All the programs on science were moved to the Rockefeller Foundation, which chose to concentrate its efforts in biology. The Rockefeller Foundation in the early twentieth century was an evangelical organization. Although its roots were in evangelical Christianity, it turned to evangelizing the modern scientific worldview. And the Foundation’s support of the Beijing Man research was part of the program of scientific evangelism.

While I was in Beijing, I took the opportunity to visit the Beijing Man site at Zhoukoudian. I hired a car and driver from the hotel where I was staying, and headed out of the city. It took about two hours to get to Zhoukoudian, in some forested hills that in the haze of a hot and humid summer day looked like a scene from a traditional Chinese landscape painting. Today Zhoukoudian is a United Nations World Heritage Site. As you drive into the parking lot, you are confronted with a gigantic bust of Beijing
Man. Guides take you along the tree-shaded paths to the various places where discoveries where made in old quarries in the Zhoukoudian hills. The whole place seems designed to produce a religious air of reverence for our supposed ancestor. The site’s museum fulfills the role of a temple, and behind the museum one finds a garden in which one can pay respects at shrinelike graves of archeologists (saints of science) who were involved in excavations there. There were a few things at Zhoukoudian that struck
me as charmingly amusing, such as the displays of information about Beijing Man above the urinals in the bathroom and the packs of Beijing Man playing cards on sale in the gift shop. As I was walking around Zhoukoudian, I was thinking how strange it was
that this well-developed tourist site is a monument to a mistake.
Beijing Man is not our ancestor, but just another kind of apelike animal.

If we did not come from apes, then where did we come from? In my latest book, Human Devolution, I propose that we did not evolve up from apes. Instead, we have devolved, or come down from a higher spiritual level of the cosmos. We are part of a cosmic hierarchy. In one of the chapters of Human Devolution, I give a cross-cultural study of cosmologies, which demonstrates that the idea of a cosmic hierarchy of beings is the common spiritual heritage of humanity. While I was in Beijing, I visited the Temple of Heaven park, which contains some traditional Chinese structures that embody the concept of a cosmic hierarchy, composed of divine and earthly beings. For example, the Circular Mound is a massive three-tiered altar, with stairs and balustrades and rings of stone paving in multiples of nine, symbolizing the nine levels of heaven in the Chinese cosmology. Surrounding the Circular Mound are huge metal vessels used for the worship of the sun god, moon god, and other celestial beings.

After spending most of the day in the Temple of Heaven park, I went to a nearby Chinese Buddhist vegetarian restaurant. Most of the items on the menu were vegetarian versions of various meat and fish dishes. I chose some dishes that were recognizably vegetarian, like braised eggplant.

I am one of the very few tourists to come to Beijing without visiting the Great Wall of China. But there were other things that were of more direct interest to me.

28
Fancy Footwork in Mexico

There is some fancy scientific footwork going on in the case of some recently discovered footprints in Mexico.

In 2003, some curious tracks were found in solidified volcanic ash deposits (the Xalnene tuff) in the dried-up bed of the ancient Valsequillo Lake near Puebla, Mexico. The ash fell in prehistoric times from the nearby Toluquilla volcano and later turned to stone.
Silvia Gonzalez, a British geoarcheologist, investigated the prints in the Xalnene (pronounced Hall-nay-nay) tuff. According to a news report published in Nature Online (July 4, 2005), she said there were over 200 prints, including those of humans, birds, and
animals with cloven hooves. Gonzalez reported that the tracks were 41,500 years old. The age was obtained by Thomas Higham of Oxford University, who used the carbon 14 method to date pieces of shell from a layer above the footprints. The age of 41,500
years was revolutionary, because the oldest human site in the Americas generally accepted by mainstream archeologists is the Monte Verde site in Chile, which has an age of about 14,500 years.

In a report to the B News website (July 5, 2005), Gonzalez said: “It’s going to be an archaeological bomb, and we’re up for a fight.” She was right.

In December 2005, Paul Renne and his team of geologists and archeologists announced a new date of 1.3 million years for the layer of rock containing the footprints. Paul Renne is director of the privately funded Berkeley Geochronology Center and is
also a professor of geology and geophysics at the University of California at Berkeley. Renne and his coworkers obtained their date using the argon/argon method, which measures the ratio of two isotopes of argon (argon 39 and argon 40) in rock.

The great antiquity of the layers containing the footprints was also confirmed by paleomagnetic dating. Over long periods of time, the magnetic field of the earth reverses its polarity. Renne found that iron oxide grains in the rock had a polarity the opposite of that of the earth’s magnetic field today. The last reversal of the polarity of the earth’s magnetic field took place about 790,000 years ago, so the rock containing the Mexican footprints has to be at least that old.

Chris Stringer, head of human origins studies at the Natural History Museum in London, said, “The new dating is far beyond any credible evidence of humans in the Americas. Some experts had questioned whether the prints were indeed human, and this issue will now have to be reexamined very carefully.” (Epoch Times, Dec. 7, 2005)

To such suggestions, Silvia Gonzalez replied, “Even if we are wrong and the ash is indeed 1.3 million years old, that is not automatically a reason to disregard interpretation of the features reported as footprints, simply because they are not in agreement with the established models for the settlement of the Americas.” (Epoch Times, Dec. 7, 2005)

What I find most interesting is that scientists are using the very age of the tracks to deny that they are human footprints. This clearly backs up the point that I made in Forbidden Archeology, namely that scientists often reject evidence for an ancient human presence simply because it contradicts their current theory of human evolution, which holds that the oldest humans like us go back no more than about 150,000 years.

Here is one of several examples of this phenomenon from the recent scientific reactions to the new dating study. A report in Nature Online (Nov. 30, 2005) said: “Marks that were hailed as the earliest traces of humans in the Americas may not be what they seem. A dating study puts the age of the volcanic ash in which the indentations were found at 1.3 million years, which casts fatal doubt on the theory that they are footprints.”

Such doubts are based on the mistaken belief that there is no evidence that humans were present in the Americas (or anywhere else in the world) over a million years ago. But there is such evidence, as I documented in Forbidden Archeology. I will focus
on some cases from the Americas. In the early twentieth century, the renowned Argentine paleontologist Florentino Ameghino announced the discovery of a human skull at Buenos Aires. He thought it was primitive, but the American physical anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka demonstrated that the skull was in fact anatomically modern. On the basis of the modern anatomy, Hrdlicka concluded that the skull must be quite young-—only a few thousand years old. As he put it himself in his 1912 report (Early Man in South America, p. 2), “The antiquity . . . of any human skeletal remains which do not present marked differences from those of modern man may be regarded, on morphologic grounds, as . . .not reaching in time, in all probability, beyond the modern . . . geologic formations.” But the original reports of the discovery show that it was found at a depth of forty-five feet, beneath a thick unbroken layer of limestone rock. The skull was found in the Pre-Ensanadan formation, which, according to modern geological
reports, is over 1 million years old.

At Miramar, in Argentina, even more ancient discoveries were made. In 1914, Carlos Ameghino announced the discovery of a flint arrowhead, found solidly embedded in the thigh bone of an extinct South American mammal called Toxodon. The bone was discovered in the late Pliocene Chapadmalalan formation, which gives the find an age of about 2–3 million years. Later, more human artifacts and a human jaw bone were found in the same formation. The discovery of the jaw fragment is noted by Hugo
Obermaier (Fossil Man in Spain, 1924, p. 306): “In 1921 M. A. Vignati discovered further human remains at Miramar, not far from Buenos Aires, consisting of a fragment of lower jaw with two molars still in it. According to Vignati it came from the geologic formation of Chapadmalal.” Anthropologist Eric Boman said in his report that the teeth were identical to those of modern humans.

So if the impressions found by Gonzalez are in fact footprints and are in fact 1.3 million years, they would not be alone as evidence for the presence of anatomically modern humans in the Americans over a million years ago.

Renne admits the possibility that the impressions, if they are footprints, could have been made by some ancient apeman. At 1.3 million years, that would have to be Homo erectus. But the foot structure of Homo erectus is not known. In Nature (Nov. 18,
2004, p. 351) Dennis Bramble and Daniel Lieberman say “we currently lack any H. erectus feet.” For all we know, they could be quite different from modern human feet. If we are to stick to what we know from actual physical evidence, the only creature known to science with a foot like a modern human foot is Homo sapiens.

Some scientists, like geologist Mike Waters of Texas A&M University, believe that the impressions found by Gonzalez could have been formed when heavy rains eroded marks left by mining tools in the solidified volcanic ash deposits. Although this seems unlikely to me, it is a possibility that has to be considered. Scientists who propose the idea that the impressions are not real footprints say they would be convinced only if human footprints could be found in layers of ash not now exposed on the surface. Gonzalez has received a grant of $375,000 from the British Natu-ral Environment Research Council to do such research early in 2006.

Interestingly enough, the new footprint site by Valsequillo Lake is not too far from another controversial site in the same region—the Hueyatlaco human artifact site. Here, human artifacts were found by archeologists. In the 1970s, geologists obtained an
age of about 250,000 years for the artifact-bearing layers at Hueyatlaco. The archeologist in charge, Cynthia Irwin-Williams, rejected the age, saying that humans capable of making the artifacts did not exist 250,000 years ago anywhere in the world, what
to speak of the Americas. In fact, Irwin-Williams refused to publish the age for the site given by the geologists, and gave the site a far younger age, within the bounds of mainstream scientific acceptability. Eventually, the geologists independently published the 250,000-year age for the site (Quaternary Research, 1981, vol. 16, pp. 1–17)

Virginia Steen-McIntyre, one of the geologists involved in dating the site, wrote in a letter (March 30, 1981) to Estella Leopold, associate editor of Quaternary Research: “The problem as I see it is much bigger than Hueyatlaco. 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.”

Regarding the new tracks, my current belief, pending further studies, is that the tracks are probably human footprints and that they are 1.3 million years old. The other main possibilities are (1) they are 1.3 million years old and are tracks of Homo erectus, (2) they are 41,500 years old and are human, (3) they are not real tracks. So that is where things stand now. If there are any significant developments, I will report them in this column.

29
Reck’s Skeleton:
The First Olduvai Gorge Discovery

Olduvai Gorge in the East African nation of Tanzania is one of the most famous archeological sites in the world. It is especially renowned as the place where Louis Leakey discovered fossils of a variety of apemen, including Homo habilis. These discoveries began in the 1930s and have continued to the present. They are mentioned in most textbooks. But these textbooks are usually silent about the very first skeleton discovered at Olduvai Gorge, Reck’s skeleton.

At the time Louis Leakey began his work at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, now independent, was a British colony called Tanganyika. But before World War I, Tanganyika was part of German East Africa. During that era, a German scientist, Hans Reck, came to Olduvai Gorge to search for fossils. One of Reck’s African collectors saw a bone protruding from the earth and started to excavate. Reck came and completed the excavation. Using hammers and chisels, workers under Reck’s direction took out an almost complete, anatomically modern, human skeleton in a solid block of hardened sedimentary rock. The skeleton was found in Upper Bed II of Olduvai Gorge.

There are five beds at Olduvai Gorge, Bed V, the uppermost, being the most recent. According to modern dating methods, Bed II is from 1.15–1.7 million years old. Was the position of the skeleton in Bed II the result of burial or earth movements? Reck carefully studied the geology of the site, and concluded, “The bed in which the human remains were found . . . showed no signs of disturbance. The spot appeared exactly like any other in the horizon. There was no evidence of any refilled hole or grave” (cited in A. T. Hopwood, Man, 1932, vol. 32, p. 193).

Bed III, higher in the sequence than Bed II, contained layers of pebbles of a dark reddish color, and Bed V contained a layer of white calcrete. Reck noted: “The sediment . . . is so constituted that the artificial breaking of the bed with its visible layering by
digging of a grave would necessarily be recognizable. The wall of the grave would show in profile a division from the undisturbed stone. The grave filling would show an abnormal structure and heterogeneous mixture of excavated material, including easily recognizable pieces of calcrete. Neither of these signs were to be found despite the most attentive inspection. Rather the stone directly around the skeleton was not distinguishable from the neighboring stone in terms of color, hardness, thickness of layers, structure, or order” (cited in Hopwood, pp. 193–194). 

So here we have evidence that anatomically modern humans were existing in the very distant past, over a million years ago. According to today’s orthodox scientific opinion, humans like us did not come into existence until about 150,000 years ago.

Reck returned to Germany, taking the skeleton’s skull with him personally, while the block of rock containing the rest of the skeleton followed by ship. When his first reports on the skeleton came out, he won the support of many scientists, including the American anthropologist George Grant MacCurdy of Yale University, who wrote in his book Human Origins (1924, vol. 3, p. 423): “The human skeleton . . . came from the next to the lowest horizon (no. 2). . . . The skeleton was found some 3 or 4 meters (10 to 13 feet) below the rim of the Oldoway gorge, which here is about 40 meters (131 feet) deep. The skeleton bore the same relation to the stratified beds as did the other mammalian remains, and was dug out of the hard clay tufa with hammer and chisel just as these were. In other words, the conditions of the find were such as to exclude the possibility of an internment. The human bones are therefore as old as the deposit.” MacCurdy also agreed that the skeleton was of modern type and not like an earlier form of human such as the Neanderthals.

Other scientists, including Louis Leakey, disagreed that the skeleton was as old as Bed II. To settle the question, Leakey and some others went to Olduvai Gorge to personally examine the site in 1931. After careful study, Leakey concluded that Reck had been right. Reck and Leakey, along with A. T. Hopwood of the British Museum of Natural History, published a report in Nature (1931, vol. 128, p. 724) affirming that the skeleton was as old as the bed in which it had been found—Bed II.

Other scientists continued to object to the great age of Reck’s skeleton. Reck and Leakey held their ground, until in 1932 an English geologist named P. G. H. Boswell published in Nature (vol. 130, pp. 237–238) a report in which he claimed he had found reddish pebbles from Bed III and white calcrete fragments from Bed V in a sample of the matrix from which Reck’s skeleton had been extracted. This is somewhat strange, because both Leakey and Reck had previously reported that they had observed no signs of Bed III pebbles and white calcrete fragments in the matrix of rock surrounding the skeleton—in the course of carefully looking for just such evidence of intrusive burial.

The sample that Boswell studied had been sent to him from Munich. And there is no way of knowing if it came from the matrix that directly encased the skeleton or from some other sediments that had come in the crate along with the skeleton. 

Nevertheless, Reck and Leakey, along with Boswell, jointly concluded in a report published in Nature (1933, vol. 131, pp. 397–398) that the skeleton was younger than Bed II, and had come into the position in which it was discovered by burial from the time when Bed V was being deposited. This would still give the anatomically modern human skeleton an age of perhaps as much as  400,000 years, because the oldest part of Bed V is about that old.  And 400,000 years is still far beyond the orthodox scientific estimates for the maximum age of anatomically modern humans.

Why did Reck and Leakey capitulate? It is hard to say. It could be that after twenty years, Reck was tired of fighting. And perhaps Leakey was becoming more interested in fighting for acceptance of his own discoveries in Africa, such as the human fossils he had found at Kanam and Kanjera.

So then what happened? During World War II, Reck’s skeleton, except for the skull, vanished from the Munich museum housing it. In the 1970s, a German scientist named Reiner Protsch decided to use the carbon 14 dating method to determine the age of the skeleton. The skull was considered too valuable to use for testing, but eventually, claimed Protsch, the museum provided him with a few bone fragments that were supposedly from the original skeleton. Protsch got an age of 16,920 years from the bone (Journal of Human Evolution, 1974, vol. 3, pp. 379–385). But there are several problems with this date. First, we cannot be sure that the bone fragments from which he got his samples were really from Reck’s skeleton. Second, the sample he got was only one third the size of the sample normally used in the method he employed. Third, it is possible that the sample was contaminated with recent carbon 14, which would cause the test to yield a younger age. Protsch himself noted that the bone fragments were covered with an organic (i.e. carbonaceous) preservative.

There is one final reason to question the age obtained by Protsch—his competence and character. In 1994, Protsch was exposed for publishing fraudulent dates. A report in the August 16, 2004 edition of the German news magazine Der Spiegel announced
that Protsch had deliberately falsified numerous carbon 14 dates on human fossils. Protsch was also accused of plagiarism and selling university fossils for personal profit. The Frankfurt University commission that investigated the case said in its report: “Prof. Protsch has forged and manipulated scientific facts over the past 30 years” (Deutsche Welle, Feb. 18, 2005). The commission found that Protsch was unable to work his own radiocarbon dating equipment (The Guardian, Feb. 19, 2005).

So where does this leave us? I think the original observations by Reck are the best guide to the true age of the skeleton. Reck excavated the skeleton from Bed II in Olduvai Gorge. He carefully searched for signs of intrusive burial (especially materials from Bed III and higher levels) and found none. Louis Leakey and other scientists, who personally studied the skeleton in Germany and investigated the Olduvai Gorge site itself, confirmed Reck’s reports.
I think that the sample examined by Boswell was not from the actual matrix of the skeleton. It was probably from other materials that came in the box with the skeleton from Africa. As for the radiocarbon date by Protsch, it is not to be trusted. The most reasonable conclusion is that we have in Reck’s skeleton evidence for the existence of anatomically modern humans over a million years ago.

30
Doing Forbidden Archeology

In March 2006, I gave a talk about my work at the annual conference of the International Fortean Organization (INFO), held at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore (this extraordinary museum full of intriguing contemporary art is well worth a visit). Charles Fort (1874–1972) was an American author who searched through scientific and popular publications, collecting accounts of strange and unusual phenomena, ranging from rains of fishes to instances of archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity. These anomalies are called Fortean phenomena by Fort’s followers. Over the years, I have received a number of invitations to speak at conferences organized by Fortean societies in the United States and the United Kingdom. I have also contributed some articles to Fortean publications, which have, as might be expected, also reviewed my books.

The Baltimore INFO conference was enjoyable for me. John Anthony West, known for his pioneering challenges to standard Egyptology, was there, and we had some good talks. Bob Hieronimus was there, speaking about the involvement of the Founding Fathers of the United States with various secret societies, like the Freemasons. I have been a guest on his 21st Century radio show a few times. Bob’s wife, Zohara, who is pursuing studies in Kabbala, was also there. She has her own radio show, on which I have also been a guest. Another highlight for me was participating in the psychic archeology workshop led by hypnotherapist and Atlantis researcher Dr. Barbara Lane.

The evening I arrived in Baltimore for the conference, I went to dinner at the One World Cafe with a few of the conference participants. The One World Cafe, which is quite spacious, has lots of vegetarian and vegan dishes on its menu, and a lively neo-bohemian atmosphere. During the meal (I had a nice penne pasta with pesto sauce and an organic green salad), one of the people I was with asked how I do my work. I explained that much of the forbidden archeology work I do involves searching out and investigating information contained in the archeological literature of the past 150 years.

Let me give as an example one of the hundreds of cases that I currently have under study and give my readers a chance to assist in the investigation of this case, if they so desire.

Some time ago, one of my correspondents sent me some pages from a book titled The Fossils of the South Downs, or Illustrations of the Geology of Sussex, by Gideon Mantell and published in 1822 in London.

Gideon Mantell (1790–1852) was a medical doctor and also a pioneering paleontologist, the discoverer of some of the first fossils identified as coming from dinosaurs. He and his wife found teeth and bones that resembled those of the modern iguana, but from an animal about twenty times larger. Initially, he met opposition from other scientists, who attributed the teeth and bones to either fish or mammals. Finally, scientists accepted his attribution of the teeth and bones to a large reptile called Iguanodon, and he was elected a member of the Royal Society, England’s top scientific organization.

The Fossils of the South Downs was Mantell’s first book. In one of the chapters, he discussed the formation of the chalk and flint beds in England. My correspondent called my attention to a footnote that started at the bottom of page 147 and ran over to the bottom of page 148. Here is the most interesting part of the footnote by Mantell:

As connected with the history of the formation of siliceous nodules [i.e. nodules of flint, which is composed mostly of silicon], I cannot refrain from noticing in this place, the extraordinary occurrence of coins, and other antiquities, having been found encased in them.

In Schneider’s Topog. Mineral.mention is made of 126 silver coins, that were found enclosed in flints at Grinoc, in Denmark (Phillips’ Mineralogy, 2d edition, p. 12). It is however much to be regretted, that no description is given of the coins, nor any conjecture offered of their probable age; since if the account be correct the determination of that circumstance would fix a certain date, at least, of the formation of the flint.

Mr. Knight Spencer, in a letter published in Bakewell’s Introduction to Geology (Bakewell’s Introduction to Geology,
8vo. 1813, p. 338), relates the following interesting story, and which, from its authenticity, may be considered as decisive of the comparatively recent formation of flint, in certain situations.

“In 1791, two hundred yards north of the ramparts of Hamburgh, in a sandy soil, M. Liesky of that city picked up a flint, and knocking it against another, broke it in two. In the center of the fracture, he observed an ancient brass pin, and on picking up the other half, he found the corresponding mold of the pin so laid bare; he presented them to Thomas Blacker, Esq. in whose possession they now are, and who has shewn them to the writer of this paper.”

According to the geological reports with which I am familiar, the flints found in northwest Europe are eroded from deposits of chalk that were laid down in the Cretaceous period, which extends from about 65 million to 146 million years ago. According to most geologists, the chalk formed from calcium carbonate skeletons of tiny sea creatures. A common, though not universally accepted, theory is that flint came from deposits of silicon derived from dissolved skeletons of creatures like sea urchins. Nodules of flint thus formed in the chalk deposits, which were laid down starting about 100 million years ago, in the middle Cretaceous. The younger, or upper,  chalk dates to the late Cretaceous. It is the upper chalk that contains the most flints. After the late Cretaceous, there was geological uplift, and the chalk deposits were raised above sea level, and as the deposits were eroded the flint nodules came out.

So although Mantell speculated that the formation of the flint nodules containing the coins and brass key might be fairly recent, it seems the standard geological interpretation is that flint nodules date back to the Cretaceous. The objects found in these nodules should therefore be more than 65 million years old, thus qualifying as instances of forbidden archeology, evidence for ex-treme human antiquity. According to most scientists today, coins and brass keys go back only a couple of thousand years.

So what needs to be done here? It would be good to get the original references mentioned by Mantell. One should always check the primary source, and not rely entirely on a secondary source like Mantell. In the primary source, one often finds important details that the author of the secondary source has left out.
And one might also find in the primary source more cases of evidence for extreme human antiquity. I found this to be so when I was doing the research for my book Forbidden Archeology. While I was reading the reports of geologist J. D. Whitney about the extremely old California gold mine discoveries of the nineteenth century (the human skeletons and artifacts Whitney described go back as far as the early Eocene—about 50 million years ago), I encountered a brief footnote reference to the work of Portuguese geologist Carlos Ribeiro, who found stone tools in formations of the early Miocene period, which goes back about 20 million years. Ribeiro’s reports greatly amplified the brief information provided by Whitney, and Ribeiro’s reports led me to other reports of evidence for extreme human antiquity. That’s how it goes.

It would also be good to track down the actual objects, if at all possible. In the case of the brass key from the flint, we learn from Mantell that it was in the possession of Thomas Blacker, who appears to be English. Perhaps it would be possible to find out where he lived, and what happened to his estate, including the present location of the flint nodule with the key. The case of the coins in the flint nodules from Denmark is more difficult. I am not aware of any town named Grinoc in Denmark. But place names and national borders have changed since the early nineteenth century. Perhaps some research could turn up the actual location of the find, and perhaps more information about the finds themselves, including their present whereabouts. Another thing that should be done is a careful search of the geological literature, to see if there are any recognized cases of recent formation of flint in northwest Europe, particularly in the area of Denmark and northern Germany (Hamburg). I doubt such cases exist, but this does
need to be checked. All in all, it seems that we have in Mantell’s footnote some good evidence for extreme human antiquity. But the case could be made stronger through further research.

If any of my readers are able to come up with any of the above mentioned research items, they can communicate them to me by going to my website www.mcremo.com and leaving a message for me, or by writing to me at 9701 Venice Blvd. #5, Los Angeles, CA 90034. Meanwhile, I will be working on some other cases, as always.

31
Sterkfontein: The Cradle Of Humanity or Cradle of Lies?

On May 27, 2006, I finished my last lecture in the Johannesburg area. I was on a tour of South Africa, lecturing on forbidden archeology at universities in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, Pietermaritzburg, Cape Town, and Stellenbosch, and also doing some radio and TV interviews. May 28 was a free day. One of the tour organizers suggested we go out somewhere. I picked  the Sterkfontein archeological site. We drove out of Johannesburg, past Pretoria and into the countryside. At the site’s entrance stood
a tall obelisk, with signs proclaiming that we were entering a United Nations World Heritage Site—the Sterkfontein Caves, the Cradle of Humanity.

We continued along the access road to the visitors center.
We bought tickets for the tour, and then waited in the center’s museum for the tour to begin. In the museum you are invited to explore yourself. Who are you? A sign displaying an infamous quote by arch-evolutionist Richard Dawkins gives you the an-
swer: “We are survival machines—robot vehicles programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” 

And how did our human robot vehicles come into existence? The colorful museum displays give you the answer. You began as chemicals. The chemicals combined to form the first single-celled living thing. You look in vain, however, for any description of exactly which chemicals combined in exactly which way to form exactly which first living thing. Actually, no scientist anywhere in the world can give any such account.

Then for some untold reason some of these single-celled creatures start sticking together. Eventually, they became simple sea plants and animals. Some of the animals came out of the ocean.  Some of these first amphibious animals became reptiles. Some of the reptiles became mammals, and some of the mammals became primitive apes. Some of the primitive apes became apemen, and some of the apemen  became humans, with trillions of cells arranged in complex organs. 

So how did all this happen? By a series of genetic changes that led to changes in physical structure, we are told. But in the museum you look in vain for any account of exactly what the genetic changes were. In fact, no scientist in the world can tell us what those genetic changes were. But we have to accept that it happened.

Then it’s time for the walk to the Sterkfontein caves. Our cool young guide recites a memorized script, which includes quite a few laugh lines. Still, there is some gravity to it, like a sermon. We are told we are going to visit the cradle of our ancestors. Evolution is like the new religion. Not only does it have its priests (evolutionary biologists) and scriptures (The Origin of Species) and saints (Darwin). It also has its churches (museums) and sacred places (like Sterkfontein) and relics (fossils of our “ancestors”) and its Inquisition that condemns heretics (like me). All very religious. The closest thing to my experience at Sterkfontein was going down into the cave where Christ was born, beneath the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

The walk from the museum to the cave entrance was indeed like a pilgrimage. There were about forty of us. We were told we were walking the path of evolution, sort of like walking the Stations of the Cross in Jerusalem, the route that Christ followed on the way to his crucifixion. At intervals on either side of the path were big exhibition slabs of rock containing fossils, from the simplest to the more complex forms of life. The first stone slabs contained fossils of microorganisms. Then came fish fossils. Then reptile fossils. Then land mammal fossils. Then apeman fossils. And finally some human fossils. But there were many fossils absent from this display, the fossils of humans from all periods of the earth’s history, as documented in my book  Forbidden Archeology.

At last, we descended into the cave. The Sterkfontein cave is a series of limestone caves of moderate size, with the usual stalactites and stalagmites. In ancient times, there were breaks in the roof of the cave, through which animals, including some apelike creatures fell down. They died on hitting the cave floor, and their bones were incorporated into the cave breccia (a mix of stones and bones cemented together with the limestone that gradually forms by the dripping of mineral-rich water).

Many scientists suppose that the bones of the apelike creatures found in the cave are human ancestors. Standing in the cave, and looking up at the light coming down from a small opening to the surface I was suddenly overwhelmed with a very strong sense of the utter falsity of this supposition. It was clear what happened. Three million years ago, some  poor ape with some few humanlike features in its bones fell down into the cave and died. The bones were incorporated into the rock. And then later some human scientists found the bones and called them “our ancestor,” although that is not true at all. Three million years ago, and further back than that, there were humans, apes, and apemen, all coexisting.

One of the most important alleged human ancestors found in the cave is called Little Foot, an australopithecine discovered by Ron Clark and his coworkers. The skeleton, which is fairly complete, is about 3.3 million years old. Last time I was in South Africa, at the World Archaeological Congress in Cape Town in 1999, I heard Ron Clark give a report about the discovery of Little Foot. During his talk, he showed a model of the reconstructed foot of this australopithecine. The foot was quite apelike. For example, it had a long first toe, which could move out to the side like the thumb of a human hand. The other toes were also longer than normal human toes. After Ron Clark gave his talk, I asked a question. Why doesn’t the foot of the Sterkfontein australopithecine match the footprints found by Mary Leakey at Laetoli, in Tanzania? In her original report in National Geographic (1979), Mary Leakey said the Laetoli footprints were indistinguishable from modern human footprints. They were found in layers of rock 3.7 million years old. So you can see the problem: if the Sterkfontein australopithecine, with its apelike foot, is supposed to be a human ancestor, how are we to explain the presence of fully modern human footprints existing at roughly the same time at Laetoli?

Clark insisted that a creature like his Little Foot did in fact make the Laetoli  prints. But, according to him, the creature must have been walking with his long first toe pressed tightly against the others. And he also must have been walking with his other four long toes curled under. And that is why the footprints looked human! Otherwise, one would have to say, as I do, that humans like us were walking around in Africa over 3 million years ago. According to the current evolutionary theories, humans like us only came into existence between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.

In some of his papers, Clark shows photographs of footprints made by Bonobo chimpanzees. At times, the tracks of these creatures will show a footprint or two with the large, long, first toe pressed up against the others, instead of being extended out sideways from the body of the foot, as is normal. If we had at Laetoli only a couple of footprints, one might suppose that perhaps they could have been made by an apelike australopithecine foot with the toes scrunched up in an abnormal position. However, at Laetoli, there are dozens of prints, from three different individuals. It defies the imagination to think that three individuals, walking for some distance, were all doing so with all the toes of their feet in an abnormal position. But evolutionists have very active imaginations. 

Another way to avoid the conclusion that the Laetoli footprints were made by humans like us is to say that perhaps there existed 3.7 million years ago some kind of apeman who had feet exactly like human feet. That is possible. Unfortunately, no one has ever discovered from that time period the bones of any apemen with feet just like human feet. At the present moment, the only creature known to science that has a foot just like a modern human foot is a modern human, someone like us.

So the best explanation for the Laetoli footprints is that they were made by humans like us. And there is other evidence to support that. As I have documented in Forbidden Archeology, there are many human bones (of modern type) and human artifacts (of the kind normally attributed to Homo sapiens) that are as old as the Laetoli footprints and older. That means that the Little Foot australopithecine is not a human ancestor. Over 3 million years ago, at the same time this apelike creature fell into the Sterkfon-
tein cave and died, humans like us were already existing. So the Sterkfontein Caves UN World Heritage site is not the Cradle of Humanity, but rather the cradle of one of the biggest lies that has ever been forced on the human mind—the theory of evolution.

32
Forbidden Archeology And Education Policy

On May 24, 2006, I addressed the Faculty of Education, School of Education Studies of the University of Kwazulu-Natal, Edgewood Campus, South Africa. In attendance were professors of education and officers of the Provincial History Committee. Here are some excerpts from the address:

Ladies and gentleman, over the years, I have had a chance to present my ideas at some of the world’s leading scientific institutions, such as the Royal Institution in London, the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and many others. I have also presented my ideas at international conferences on archeology, anthropology, and history of science, and at universities throughout the world, and I am honored to be here today at the University of Kwazulu-Natal.

In recent times, archeologists have become interested to see what the science of human origins and antiquity looks like from different cultural perspectives. My investigations in the field of human origins and antiquity are inspired to some extent by my studies in the ancient Sanskrit writings of India. Among these writings is a group called the Puranas, or histories. These histories inform us that humans have existed since the beginning of life on earth. If you are interested in learning more about the Puranic concept of extreme human antiquity and how it relates to physical evidence, you can have a look at my paper “Puranic Time and the Archeological Record,” presented at the World Archaeological Congress 3 in New Delhi, in 1994, and later published in the peer reviewed conference proceedings volume Time and Archaeology (Routledge, London, 1999) edited by archeologist Tim Murray.

The same message of extreme human antiquity—that humans have been present since the beginning of life on earth—is found in other spiritual traditions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Of course this idea is different from the idea of human origins and antiquity supported by the modern followers of Charles Darwin. They say that . . . humans like us came into existence only about 150,000 years ago. And they say all of the physical evidence supports this evolutionary picture of human origins. But when I did eight years of research into the entire history of archeology, I found something different. Over the past 150 years, archeologists have found much evidence showing that humans have existed since the beginning of the history of life on earth. This evidence takes the form of human skeletal remains, human footprints, and human artifacts many millions of years old.

I documented this evidence in my book Forbidden Archeology, with my coauthor Richard L. Thompson.

What is the significance of this evidence? In a letter dated August 10, 1993, William W. Howells, one of the principal architects of the modern theory of human evolution wrote to me, “Thank you for sending me a copy of Forbidden Archeology, which
represents much careful effort in critically assembling published materials. . . . To have modern human beings . . . appearing a great deal earlier, in fact at a time when even simple primates did not exist as possible ancestors, would be devastating . . . to the whole theory of evolution.”

Everything I have said is, of course, controversial, and there are going to be different opinions about it all, and you may not be persuaded to accept my antievolutionary opinions. But I am hoping to persuade you that there are alternative views on the origin of species that can be supported by physical evidence, and that there are some of us who are representing, as I am, these alternative views in the world of science—making presentations at leading scientific institutions, at scientific conferences, and in scientific
publications. If these alternative views are being represented in the world of science, they should also be represented in the classroom.

Now let’s be honest about something. The current alternatives to Darwinism are theistic, in one form or another. Creationists of various kinds are quite open about their theistic perspectives. Supporters of the more recent intelligent design theory are not so open, but almost everyone knows that the designer they talk about is God.

Should theistic alternatives to Darwinism be allowed in science classrooms? One thing that educators and education policy makers should consider before answering a question like this is the beliefs of students and their parents. Education, and here I am talking about state supported education, is a public service, funded by the tax money of all the people. It would seem natural that the opinions of the people should be a factor in making decisions about education policy. Surveys have been done on this topic. Because I am from the United States, I will give the results of a study from there. In 2005, Nature published the results of a survey by the Gallup organization on belief in evolution in the United States among teenagers thirteen to seventeen years old. The
survey found only 18 percent believed humans came about by evolution from apelike beings without God. About 43 percent believed God created human beings by guiding their evolution from apelike beings. We must keep in mind that the idea that God
guided evolution from the beginning to produce humans contradicts the modern scientific idea that evolution is an unguided, natural process relying on random genetic mutations. Finally, the survey found that 38 percent of the teenagers believed that God created humans in the beginning just as they are today (that is the view that I myself favor). What about adults? According to the same Gallup survey, only 35 percent of Americans believe the theory of evolution is well supported by scientific evidence. Educators and education policy makers should take these beliefs of students and their parents into account.

Some educators and education policy makers will naturally raise this question: Should God have any place in the science classroom? In order to answer this question, we should have a clear understanding of the different roles that the concept of God plays in religion, philosophy, and science. In religion, God is an object of worship. And the state should not dictate to people how they should worship God. And of course, religion, worship of God, has no place in science classrooms. In philosophy, God is a metaphysical principle that many philosophers have arrived at through the exercise of logic and reason. Government should not dictate to philosophers that they cannot use logic and reason to come to the conclusion that there is God. Neither should government forbid philosophy teachers in schools and universities to teach about philosophers (like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, etc.) who have come to that conclusion. In science, God is an inference arrived at by study of nature. Historically, many scientists have inferred from their study of nature that there must be a supreme intelligent being responsible for the order and complexity visible to us. And government should not forbid scientists to make that inference. Neither should they forbid teachers from teaching about scientists who have inferred the existence of God, an intelligent designer, from the evidence visible to us.

Some educators and education policy makers are under the impression that there has always been, and always should be, a clear separation between God and science. But the best of modern scholarship in the history and philosophy of science demonstrates that this is not true. I refer you to a recent (2001) volume edited by John Hedley Brooke et al., and published by the University of Chicago Press, titled Science in Theistic Contexts. The University of Chicago Press description of this book tells us: “This new collection shows religious ideas not only motivated scientific effort but also shaped the actual content of major scientific theories.” It is a modern myth that God and science have nothing to do with each other.

So what are the practical implications of all this for education policy? First, education policy makers should recognize that today the vast majority of scientists accept the theory of evolution. This is a fact.  But it is also a fact that some in the world of science, a small number, do not accept the theory and are proposing theistic alternatives, and education policy makers should recognize this.
The proper solution is that the theory of evolution and its supporters should be given most of the time in the classroom and most of the pages in the textbooks. But a small amount of classroom time and a small number of textbook pages should be devoted to neutrally presenting the theistic alternatives to the current theory of evolution. How small? I would suggest 5 percent of the classroom time and 5 percent of the textbook pages. But I will leave it up to you. 

Right now, in many parts of the world, especially the United States, educators and education policy makers are participating in a system of intellectual apartheid that is artificially excluding voices that are opposed to the theory of evolution from the education system. We should end this system of artificial exclusion and give fair, proportionate representation to all the views that are there in the world of science. We cannot pretend that there is no debate about these questions in the world of science. Everyone knows there is a debate. It is going on in the media, in the courts, in the school systems themselves. Educators and education policy makers here in South Africa can take a leading role in resolving this debate in the fairest way for all concerned.

33 Lucy’s Baby: Not My Ancestor

Recently there has been a lot of publicity about the discovery of a fairly complete skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis infant, and several of my correspondents have asked me about its significance. I will comment on that, but first some background.

A preliminary description of the skeleton was published in Nature (September 21, 2006), and since then the media have been abuzz with stories about this hominin (the hominins are the taxonomic group that includes humans and their supposed ancestors). The skeleton was actually discovered in 2000 in Ethiopia. For years, scientists have worked to extract the small, fragile bones from the rock in which they were embedded, and that work is not yet completed. The discoverers have attributed the skeleton to the same species as the famous australopithecine Lucy, hence all the headlines about “Lucy’s Baby.”

For those who accept the Darwinian evolutionary account of human origins, Lucy’s Baby is one more piece to fit into the grand puzzle of the evolutionary account of modern human origins.
First, a few minor points. According to the National Geographic website, Lucy’s Baby (3.3 million years) is older than Lucy (3.2 million years) by about 100,000 years, so the name Lucy’s Baby is not really accurate. It should be the other way around. Lucy is Lucy’s Baby’s Baby. Some scientists, after looking closely at the pelvic structure of Lucy, have concluded that Lucy is actually a male (Science, 24 November 1995, pp. 1297–1298). So perhaps we should be talking about Luke’s Baby rather than Lucy’s Baby. Finally, as I documented in my book Forbidden Archeology (pp. 739–741), many evolutionists, including Richard Leakey, have at times argued that Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis, is an artificial concoction of the bones of two or more hominin species. So maybe Lucy and Lucy’s Baby are representatives of a phantom species.

But for the sake of this discussion let’s stick with the opinions that the species name Australopithecus afarensis really does refer to some hominin type that really did exist 3 million years ago, that Lucy was female, and that the child’s skeleton represents an infant of the same species to which Lucy belonged. Even among evolutionists there are differing opinions about Lucy’s place in our lineage. Some evolutionists believe that Lucy was in the direct line to modern humans, and that would mean Lucy’s Baby was also. This is reflected in the scientific and popular accounts of Lucy’s Baby, which almost all characterize her as “our ancestor.” Indeed, giving these collections of bones names like “Lucy” and “Lucy’s Baby” is a subtle but effective way to humanize them, to make us feel that whatever they might be they are somehow just like us. What’s next? Lucy’s Daddy? Lucy’s Nanny?

Although some Darwinist researchers accept Lucy as a human ancestor, other Darwinist researchers, among them Meave Leakey, wife of Richard Leakey, believe that Lucy and other members of her species Australopithecus afarensis are not human ancestors. They see them as just an evolutionary side branch that died out. Actually, Meave Leakey and her codiscoverers of the hominin called Kenyanthropus platyops, want to put not just Lucy but all the australopithecine species on that extinct side branch. Discoverers of another hominin, the 6 million year old Orrorin tugenensis from Kenya, propose the same thing. A news item about Orrorin tugenensis published in Science (23 February 2001, pp. 1460–1461) says that the discoverers “believe that all australopithecines— . . . which include the famous skeleton Lucy, whose species is thought to be one of our direct ancestors—should be relegated to a side branch in favor of their specimen.” This is nothing new. For decades there have been prominent scientists who have doubted the place of the australopithecines as human ancestors. Among the doubters was the founder of the Leakey dynasty, Louis Leakey.

Those who have characterized Lucy as a direct human ancestor have emphasized her humanlike features. Lucy’s discoverer, Don Johanson, said in his book Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (p. 275) that Lucy and other members of her species had “essentially human bodies.” But over the years, many researchers have pointed to the very apelike features of the A. afarensis anatomy. And the latest discovery of Lucy’s Baby adds more to this apelike picture. In their Nature report, the discoverers said that many features of the anatomy of Lucy’s Baby, particularly the upper body, were apelike. For example, the shoulder blade was like that of a gorilla, the neck was short and thick like that of an ape, the inner ear bones were like those of apes, and the finger bones were highly curved, like those of apes. The hyoid bone, a small bone that attaches to the tongue, turned out to be like that of a chimpanzee. A report on the National Geographic website (www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/dikikababy/) said: “Her brain was small,
her nose flat like a chimpanzee’s, and her face long and projecting.” The website says that the lower body of A. afarensis is humanlike. But some scientists have offered different opinions. For example,  Jack Stern and Randall Susman showed in an article published in American Journal of Physical Anthropology (1983, vol. 60, pp. 279–318) that the A. afarensis hip had features that “enabled proficient climbing” and that the thighbone had apelike features that allowed for “movement in the trees.” As of yet, the scientists have not extracted the foot bones from the rock in which the skeleton was found. Those footbones will provide key evidence. My prediction is that the foot will turn out to have apelike features, such as a long big toe that can move out to the side and function in grasping like a human thumb. This would not be surprising, because the foot bones of an Australopithecus from the Sterkfontein Cave in South Africa already show this feature.

Thus far I have been concentrating on the disagreements about Lucy and Lucy’s Baby among supporters of the theory of evolution. Some say Lucy was a man, some say Lucy was a woman. Some say the bones of Lucy represent a single species, and others say the bones represent the individuals of many species. Among those who say Lucy and her kind represent a single species, some say that species is on the direct line to humans and some say it is a side branch that went extinct. It’s enough to make your head spin. Those who see Lucy and Lucy’s Baby as human ancestors tend to emphasize whatever vaguely humanlike features they can spot in their bones, whereas those who do not see them as ancestors emphasize the very obvious apelike features of their bones. 

Those who support Lucy and Lucy’s Baby as human ancestors will argue that they are just what one would expect from the evolutionary point of view. They present a mixture of apelike and humanlike features, with the apelike features indicating tree climbing abilities, and with the humanlike features indicating upright bipedal walking abilities.

Those who, like me, favor the idea that various forms of life were created simultaneously would also expect to find bodies exhibiting combinations of apelike and human features, adapted for different kinds of walking and climbing abilities. For me it is not remarkable that there should be bodies of animals that are capable only of walking on four legs on the ground (turtles), bodies of animals that are capable of walking on four legs on the ground and climbing trees (squirrels), bodies of animals that are adapted to just climbing in trees (sloths), bodies of animals that are adapted to walking on two legs and climbing in trees (australopithecines), bodies of animals that are adapted only for walking on two legs on the ground (humans), bodies of animals that are capable of walking on four legs, walking on two legs, and climbing in trees (apes and monkeys). Engineers today design all kinds of machines with abilities to function in different environments, and some of these machines have combinations of motor functions. Some can move on land and water, some can move only on land, some can move on the land and in the air, some can move on the land, in the air, and in the water. Similarly, God could have designed different kinds of animals for moving in different ways.

Some will say that the fossil evidence shows an evolutionary progression. But those who say that are not taking all of the fossil evidence into consideration. As documented in my book Forbidden Archeology, there is a substantial amount of fossil evidence that humans like us existed at the same time as our so-called australopithecine ancestors. For example, the Italian geologist Giuseppe Ragazzoni found anatomically modern human skeletons at Castendelo Italy, in Middle Pliocene formations 3–4 million years old. In 1979, Mary Leakey found footprints in solidified volcanic ash deposits about 3.7 million years old. In her original National Geographic (1979, no. 155) report she characterized the footprints as indistinguishable from those of modern humans. Of course, partisans of evolution will try to dispute this evidence, but that is to be expected. Like all fossil evidence, the evidence for extreme human antiquity can be interpreted in different ways, as can be seen by the wildly varying interpretations of the A. afarensis evidence among modern evolutionists. Disagreement is part of the game. 

So what is the significance of Lucy’s Baby? For me, not much. She’s not my ancestor.

34
Forbidden Paleontology

My book Forbidden Archeology documents archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity. This evidence contradicts the current evolutionary theories of human origins, which tell us that humans like us came into existence between 100,000 and 150,000 years ago. The evidence is also consistent with the histories of humankind recorded in the ancient Sanskrit writings of India, particularly the Puranas, which tell us that humans have existed since the very beginning of life on earth. I have given lectures on the archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity at many scientific conferences and universities around the world. One question I often get is: “You have presented archeological evidence showing that the history of human life on earth goes back further in time than the current evolution theory allows. But what about other species? Is there any evidence that the history of other species goes further back in time than the current evolutionary theory allows?” Yes, there is such evidence. It comes from what we might call “forbidden paleontology.”

Let’s look first at the history of plant and insect life on earth. Some years ago, when the region was a little more peaceful, I visited the Salt Range Mountains in Pakistan, where some interesting discoveries had been made a few decades ago. I flew from New Delhi to Islamabad on Pakistan Airlines. Before taking off on most airlines, you get announcements from a flight attendant about fastening your seatbelt, placing your luggage in the overhead bins, and how to put on your lifejacket. I got that on Pakistan Airlines, but the flight attendant also recited a prayer from the Koran, asking Allah to protect travelers from harm. I thought that was nice.  When I got to Islamabad (the prayer worked it seems), I checked in to my hotel. The next day I hired a car and driver to take me to the Salt Range Mountains. Starting in the foothills of the Himalayas in northeastern Pakistan, the Salt Range Mountains run about 150 miles in a westerly direction, roughly parallel to the Jhelum river until it joins the Indus. The Salt Range Mountains then extend some distance beyond the Indus. The southern edge of the eastern Salt Range Mountains drops steeply two or three thousand feet to the Jhelum River plain. It is a spectacular view from the top. We proceeded to the Khewra Gorge.

 I especially wanted to visit the salt mine in the Khewra Gorge, because in the 1930s and ’40s geologists and paleobotanists working with the Geological Survey of India made some interesting discoveries there. Deep in the salt mine, scientists such as paleo-
botanist Birbal Sahni found evidence for the existence of advanced flowering plants (angiosperms), conifers (gymnosperms), and insects in the early Cambrian period, about 600 million years ago.
The evidence consisted of pollen and woody fragments characteristic of angiosperm and gymnosperm plants, along with recognizable fossils of insects. The fossils were found in layers of sediment that ran through the salt formations. According to standard evolutionary ideas, no land plants or animals existed in the early Cambrian period. Flowering plants, conifers, and insects are thought to have come into existence hundreds of millions of years later. The first primitive land plants supposedly came into existence in the Silurian period, about 430 million years ago. The first gymnosperms came into being in the Devonian, about 400 million years ago.
The first insects supposedly came into existence shortly after that. And finally, the flowering plants, the angiosperms, came into existence in the early Cretaceous period, about 120 million years ago.

The fossils of the flowering plants, conifers, and insects were found in layers of salt positioned below layers of rock (the Purple Sandstone) belonging to the early Cambrian period. To explain the evidence some geologists proposed that there must have been a massive overthrust, by which Eocene layers (about 50 million years old) containing fossils of flowering plants, evergreens, and insects, were thrust under Cambrian layers, over 550 million years old. That would explain how the layers containing the fossils of flowering plants and insects got into a position that contradicted the normal history of life on earth. Others pointed out that there was no geological evidence for an overthrust. According to these scientists, the layers bearing the fossils of the advanced plants and insects were found in normal position, beneath strata containing trilobites, the characteristic fossil of the Cambrian.

One of the scientists doubtful of an overthrust, E. R. Gee, a geologist working with the Geological Survey of India, proposed a novel solution to the problem. In the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of India for the year 1945 (section B, v. 16, pp. xlv–xlvi), paleobotanist Birbal Sahni noted: “Quite recently, an alternative explanation has been offered by Mr. Gee. The suggestion is that the angiosperms, gymnosperms and insects of the Saline Series may represent a highly evolved Cambrian or Precambrian flora and fauna! In other words, it is suggested that these plants and animals made their appearance in the Salt Range area several hundred million years earlier than they did anywhere else in the world. One would scarcely have believed that such an idea would be seriously put forward by any geologist today.” For someone who accepts the current evolutionary timeline, such a proposal would indeed be difficult to take seriously. But I find Gee’s proposal quite reasonable.

Afterwards, other scientists found more fossils of advanced plants in Cambrian formations in the Salt Range Mountains and elsewhere in the Indian subcontinent (see for example, Ghosh, A. K., and Bose, A., 1947, “Occurrence of Microflora in the Salt
Pseudomorph Beds, Salt Range, Punjab.” (Nature, 160: 796–797). 
In the 1950s the controversy gradually faded, without being resolved conclusively.

In the 1990s, petroleum geologists, unaware of the earlier controversy, restudied the area. They determined that the salt deposits below the Cambrian deposits containing trilobites were early Cambrian or Precambrian (see for example Baker et al. 1988 in Geology, vol. 13, pp. 3–7). In other words, they found no evidence of an overthrust. The salt deposits were in a natural position below the Cambrian deposits. This supports Gee’s suggestion that the plant and insect remains in the salt deposits were evidence of an advanced fauna and flora existing in the early Cambrian. So, in short, there is fossil evidence that  contradicts not only the Darwinian account of the evolution of humans but of plants and insects as well.

What about animals? Until recently, most paleontologists believed that the mammals existing during the time of the dinosaurs were all quite small, about the size of mice. But in recent years, paleontologists in China have made some interesting discoveries. They have found in Early Cretaceous formations the skeletons of large carnivorous mammals (Nature, January 13, 2005). One of the animals, called Repenomamus robustus, was about the size of a large cat, and scientists found that its stomach contained bones of small dinosaurs. A larger animal, about the size of a large dog, was also found. It was called Repenomamus giganticus. It was about twenty times larger than the mammals previously discovered in formations from the age of the dinosaurs. Zhexi Luo, of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History of Pittsburgh, is a paleontologist working in China. He said (AP, January 12, 2005), “This size range really has surprised everybody. It dispels the conventional wisdom.” One of the authors of Nature’s report on the discoveries, paleontologist Meng Jin of the American Museum of Natural History, said, “This new evidence gives us a drastically new picture.” 

However, the picture could be even more drastically different than Meng Jin imagined, as shown by other discoveries from China. After the Nature report on the dinosaur-eating big mammals came out, the journal Science (February 24, 2006) published
a report about a beaverlike mammal (dubbed Castorocauda lutrasimilis) that existed in the middle Jurassic, about 164 million years ago. The animal had a flat tail and webbed feet, like those of modern beavers and otters. According to current understanding, aquatic mammals first came into existence over 100 million years later.

Chinese scientists led by Qiang Ji of Nanjing University in China and his colleagues wrote in their Science report, “Based on its relatively large size, swimming body structure, and anterior molars specialized for [fish] feeding, Castorocauda was a semiaquatic carnivore, similar to the modern river otter.” In a commentary on the report by the Chinese scientists, mammalogist Thomas Martin of the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, wrote: “We stand at the threshold of a dramatic change in the picture of mammalian evolutionary history.” The change may be even more dramatic than Thomas Martin can imagine, if we take into account the evidence for extreme human antiquity documented in Forbidden Archeology. This evidence, in the form of human bones, human artifacts, and human footprints, goes back to the very beginnings of the history of life on earth.

35
Evidence for Extreme Human Antiquity in Greece

How long have humans been present in Greece? We know quite a bit about the classical Greek civilization. But what about before that?

In Timaeus, Plato tells how the famous Greek lawmaker Solon visited Egypt. And there he began to speak to an Egyptian priest about the ancient history of the Greeks. He spoke of Phoroneus and Niobe. According to some ancient Greek writers, Phoroneus was one of the primordial humans and Niobe was his consort. Solon also spoke of  Deucalion and Pyrrha. Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha were the sole human survivors of a deluge unleashed by Zeus. They repopulated the earth, by throwing over their shoulders stones from mother earth (Gaia). The stones thrown by Deucalian became men, the stones thrown by Pyrrha became women. We are their descendants. As Solon spoke about these events, which he regarded as quite ancient, the Egyptian priest laughed and said the Greeks were not really old. They were just like children. In the vast course of time, there had been many devastations of fire and water, and the Greeks remembered only the last of them. But before that they had a history far, far more ancient than they imagined. They had, however, forgotten it because any records had been lost. But the Egyptians had managed to preserve their own records, and thus had a better idea of the history of the Greeks than the Greeks themselves.

Today scientists say the oldest evidence for a human presence in Greece can be found at the Petralona site, where human bones and artifacts (attributed to archaic Homo sapiens) go back to between 200,000 and 500,000 years ago. But, taking the role of the Egyptian priest, I might say to these modern Solons that the history of a human presence in Greece goes further back in time than they might imagine.

The Greek scientist who reported the Petralona discovery, A. N. Poulianos, has announced further discoveries far more ancient than Petralona man. The discoveries go back to the Pliocene (the geological period that extends from 2 million to 5 million years
ago). The website of the Anthropology of Museum of Perdikkas gives this information: “In 1977, Isaak Pandelidis, the owner of a sandpit not far from the village of Perdikkas, chanced upon the remains of a large animal. He informed the Greek Anthropologi-
cal Society, and the excavations directed by the anthropologist Aris Poulianos brought to light the skeleton of a mammoth (Archidiskodon meridionalis) approximately 3,000,000 years old . . . Though the entire skeleton was found, the bones were not in their proper place, evidently because the beast had been killed here by hunters, who had then dismembered it in order to eat it . . . All that is missing is the tusks, which must have been taken away. The skeleton was accompanied by some 30 tools, mostly of quartz, which were used to cut the mammoth up and which came from other parts of the province of Eordaia.” The mammoth skeleton can still be seen, as it was found in the ground, in the museum at Peridikkas.

According to current understanding, the only hominins (the group that includes modern humans and their direct ancestors) in existence 3 million years ago would have been creatures of the Australopithecus type. The australopithecines have anatomical features (like long arms, and curved finger bones) that suggest they spent a lot of time in the trees, like apes. So we might speculate that perhaps the Perdikkas discovery could be explained in this way: the mammoth died naturally and some primitive apemen used stone tools to scavenge the carcass. If one chose to do that, then one would have to say that the australopithecines were the first hominins to leave Africa. At the moment, most archeologists believe that Homo erectus, who came into existence about 2 million years ago, or a little earlier, was the first hominin to leave Africa.

But there is evidence that humans like us were already in existence in southern Europe during the Pliocene. Some of the evidence comes from nearby Italy. In the late nineteenth century, the Italian geologist G. Ragazzoni found anatomically modern human skeletons in undisturbed Pliocene formations at Castenedolo, as reported in Commentari dell’ Ateneo di Brescia (April 4, 1880).  Another anatomically modern human skeleton was found in Pliocene formations at Savona, as reported in the proceedings of the 1871 meeting of the International Congress for Prehistoric Anthropology and Archeology in Bologna. Further evidence of a human presence in the Pliocene, in the form of butchered whale bones and stone tools, was found at other locations in Italy, as reported in the proceedings of the 1876 meeting of the International Congress for Prehistoric Anthropology and Archeology in Budapest.

But let’s get back to Greece. Evidence for butchered animal bones goes back even further in time in Greece than the Perdikkas discovery. In the 1870s, at a place called Pikermi, Baron von Dücker found bones of animals such as Hipparion (an extinct horse) that showed definite signs of having been deliberately split in order to extract marrow. Von Dücker stated all the bones bore “more or less distinct traces of blows from hard objects.” The fossils were found in formations of the Turolian era of the Early Miocene, which would give them an age of at least 5–8 million years.
In his report given at the meeting of the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archeology in Brussels in 1872 (pages 104–107 in the conference proceedings), Von Dücker reported, “I also found among the bones a stone of a size that could readily be held in the hand. It is pointed on one side and is perfectly adapted to making the kinds of marks observed on the bones.”

Of course, here again it may be argued that it was not humans like us who broke the bones, but rather some kind of apeman like the australopithecines. But perhaps not. In the Aegean Sea region, there is evidence that humans like us were already existing in the Miocene. The evidence comes from the Dardanelles, the strait near the ancient city of Troy.

In the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1874, vol. 3, p. 127), Frank Calvert wrote, “I have had the good fortune to discover, in the vicinity of the Dardanelles, conclusive proofs of the existence of man during the Miocene period. . . . From the face of a cliff composed of strata of that period, at a geological depth of eight hundred feet, I have extracted the fragment of a bone of either a dinotherium [extinct elephant] or mastodon, on the convex side of which is deeply inscribed the unmistakable figure of a horned quadruped. . . . There are also traces of seven or eight other figures. . . . I have found in different parts of the same cliff, not far from the site of the engraved bone, a flint flake, some bones of animals, fractured longitudinally, obviously by the hand of man for the purpose of extracting marrow.” The kind of artistic activity represented here—the carving of the figure of an animal—is something that archeologists normally attribute to humans of our kind. As for the age of the site, Calvert wrote: “There can be no doubt as to the geological character of the formation from which I disinterred these interesting relics.
The well known writer on the geology of Asia Minor, M. de Tschihatcheff, who visited this region, determined it to be of the Miocene period; and the fact is further confirmed by the fossil bones, teeth, and shells of the epoch found there.” Calvert sent
drawings of some of these fossils to experts in England who confirmed that they were indeed from the Miocene. So at this Dardanelles site near Troy, a city famous in ancient Greek times, we have further evidence for extreme human antiquity, evidence that allows us to posit that humans of our kind were responsible for the archeological remains found at Perdikkas and Pikermi in Greece.

So that Egyptian priest who talked to Solon had it right. He had access to ancient Egyptian historical records that recorded a far more ancient human history than to be found in the Greek archives (or our modern textbooks today). Unfortunately, those Egyptian records appear to have been lost, in events such as the destruction of the library at Alexandria. Fortunately, however, ancient accounts of extreme human antiquity survive in other texts, such as the ancient Sanskrit writings of India, especially the Puranas (histories), which have been the major inspiration for my forbidden archeology work. The Puranas tell us that humans like us  have been present since the beginning of life on earth. But over vast periods of cyclical time, during which catastrophes periodically devastate human civilization, after which the earth is repopulated. This has happened time and time again. 

36
The Nampa Image

In 1889, workers were drilling a water well near Nampa, in southwest Idaho. In his book Origin and Antiquity of Man (1912, pp. 266–267), geologist George Frederick Wright (1838–1921) reported, “The record of the well shows that . . . they had penetrated first about fifty feet of soil, then about fifteen feet of basalt, and afterwards passed through alternate beds of clay and quicksand . . . down to depth of about three hundred feet.” One of the owners of the drilling company, Mark A. Kurtz, was checking the material brought up by a sand pump from a layer of clay over 300 feet down in the well boring. A strange object came into his hands. On washing it, he found it was a small human figurine. Kurtz later showed the figurine to Charles F. Adams, president of the Union Pacific Railroad, who happened to be passing through Idaho. Adams, who had recently read a book by Wright, wrote to Wright about the discovery. Wright, from the East Coast of the United States, wrote to Kurtz, requesting a photograph of the artifact. Kurtz replied that there was no way for him to make a photograph, so he sent Wright the figurine. Wright noted (p. 267): “The object is about an inch and a half long, and remarkable for the perfection with which it represents the human form.” He added, “It was a female figure, and had the lifelike lineaments in the parts which were finished that would do credit to the classic centers of art.”

The object was not of recent manufacture. It was deeply colored with the iron oxides characteristic of the deposits from the 300 foot level. Wright showed the object to archeologist F. W. Putnam of Harvard University. Wright (p. 267) says that Putnam “at once directed attention to the character of the incrustations of iron upon the surface as indicative of a relic of considerable antiquity.” Wright gave the object to a professor of natural history, A. A. Wright, and a chemist F. F. Jewett, at Oberlin University in Ohio to see if they could duplicate the object with its old appearance. They could, to some extent, but it required laboratory equipment and chemicals. Jewett wrote in his report, reproduced in the Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History (January 1, 1890 general meeting, vol. 24, p. 448): “A careful examination of the Nampa image, and experiments made upon clay taken from the same well, lead me to the conclusion that the image must be of considerable age. I cannot account for the accumulation of the oxide of iron upon the grains of sand, lying between the body of the image and its arms, except by supposing it to have been the result of the slow decomposition of substances containing iron, in its immediate vicinity.”

Furthermore, it was not possible that the object, assuming it to be recent, could have fallen into the well boring from some higher level. Wright stated (1912, p. 270): “The well was six inches in diameter and was tubed with heavy iron tubing, which was driven down, from the top, and screwed together, section by section, as progress was made. Thus it was impossible for anything to work in from the sides.”

When I first learned about this case, I asked my research assistant to inquire from the United States Geological Survey about the age of the deposits at the 300 foot level at the location where the figurine was found. In a letter dated February 25, 1985, a government geologist replied that the clay layer at the 300 foot level was “probably of the Glenns Ferry Formation, upper Idaho Group, which is generally considered to be Plio-Pleistocene Age.” This would give the object an age of about 2 million years.

According to current Darwinian theories of evolution, figurines like the Idaho image are made only by humans of our type, who came into existence only about 200,000 years ago. The oldest statues of human figures of a degree of artistry similar to that of the Nampa image only go back to the Late Paleolithic period of Europe, about 20,000 or 30,000 years. According to the ancient Sanskrit writings of India, however, humans have been present since the beginning of life on earth. There are figures of gods and goddesses in Indian temples that, according to traditional sources, are as old as the Nampa image and older.

One of my critics, Michael Brass, proposed in his book Antiquity of Man (2002, pp. 46–47) that the figurine would have been destroyed by the drilling. But Brass neglected to carefully study the reports about the discovery of the Nampa image that I provided in my book Forbidden Archeology (pp. 802–805). This is typical of the sloppy work done by skeptical debunkers, who are skeptical about everything except the theory of evolution. G. F. Wright noted in his book (p. 270): “The drill was not used after penetrating the lava deposits near the surface, but the tube was driven down, and the included material brought out from time to time by use of a sand pump.” Wright also noted that the sand pump “brought up numerous clay balls, some of them more than two inches in diameter.” These were larger than the figurine. So it is a false assertion that the drilling in this case would have destroyed the figurine if it really came up from the 300-foot level. Brass proposed that the figurine must have been tossed into the well from the top, but Wright showed that if an object had been thrown in from the top, the sand pump would have destroyed it. Only if it had been sucked up from below would it have come out undamaged.

As often happens in cases like this, there was a report that someone had carried out a hoax. A Mr. McGee said that a famous geologist came to the area right after the find. According to McGee, the finders showed the figure to the unnamed geologist, and the geologist allegedly recognized it as a doll of the kind made by local Indians. One of the finders supposedly admitted the discovery was a hoax and supposedly said to the geologist, “Don’t give me away; I’ve fooled a lot of fellows already, and I’d like to fool some more.” Upon investigating the story, Wright found that the geologist was Major John Wesley Powell, of the U.S. Geological Survey. Powell wrote to Wright, saying that he had seen the figurine, but did not say that the men who showed it to him said they had hoaxed the discovery. This is recorded by Wright in the second edition of his book Man and the Glacial Period (1894, pp. xix–xx).

The discovery of the Nampa image came to the attention of William H. Holmes, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Holmes was a supporter of the Darwinian theory of evolution. In his Handbook of Aboriginal American Antiquities (1919, p. 70) Holmes wrote that “the apparent improbability of the occurrence of a well modeled human figure in deposits of such great antiquity has led to grave doubts about its authenticity.” This is how what I have called the knowledge filtering process works in the world of science. Evidence that contradicts evolutionary preconceptions about the antiquity of the human species is often rejected, just for that reason alone.

Of course, once such a discovery has been rejected on theoretical grounds, scientists will often go to great lengths to make up some story in order to explain it away. Holmes was no exception. Rather than repeating the by then discredited hoax story, he wrote (p. 70): “It is not impossible that an object of this character could have descended from the surface through some crevice or water course penetrating the lava beds and have been carried through deposits of creeping quicksand aided by underground waters to the spot tapped by the drill.” Such powers of imagination! But offering such speculative tales cannot be taken as serious scientific explanations. If Holmes could have demonstrated that he could in that area find some place where he could drop a figurine and have it go down into the ground by some natural pathway through a fifteen-foot layer of basalt, and further down to the 300 foot level, that might constitute some real evidence in support of his fantastic idea. But no such evidence was provided. We also have to take into account the testimony of Dr. Putnam and Dr. Jewett that the object was of considerable antiquity.

Another reason why it is extremely unlikely that the figurine could have been a recent artifact that worked its way down from the surface in recent years is given by Holmes himself (p. 70): “Forms of art closely analogous to this figure are far to seek, neither the Pacific slope on the west nor the Pueblo region on the south furnishing modeled images of the human figure of this character or of equal artistic merit.” This contradicts speculations by some, such as geologists D. G. Brinton and John Wesley Powell, that the figurine must have been a doll made by local Indians (Science 1892, vol. 20, p. 249).

What we have here is a quite credible case of archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity. Today the Nampa image is kept in storage at the Idaho State Historical Society in Boise, Idaho. 

37
Kanapoi Humorous

One of my favorite songs from the late 1960s had the title and refrain “I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in.” It was a hit for the First Edition, with Kenny Rogers singing the lead and Glenn Campbell playing lead guitar, which is a bit strange, considering that the song became a psychedelic anthem and a favorite of Jimmy Hendrix. Both Rogers and Campbell went country (nothing wrong with country—I like that, too—but these artists arrived there from a different place). As for me, I was just intrigued by the philosophical implications of   “dropping in to see what condition one’s condition is in” for psychology and consciousness studies. But what’s this got to do with forbidden archeology?

Let’s make the connection. My book Forbidden Archeology, from one point of view, is a manifestation of the state of my intellectual condition at the time I wrote it, and it remains part of my intellectual condition up to this day. The book is out there in the world, and one of the places it can be found is on commercial bookselling websites, like Amazon.com. One of the features of such websites is that readers can put up their reviews of the book, giving it from one to five stars, with five being the highest positive rating. Reviews are constantly being added, so the mix of positive and negative reviews is always changing. So you could say the “condition” of the totality of reviews is always changing.

So sometimes I just drop in to Amazon.com to see what condition (in terms of reviews) my condition (as manifested in Forbidden Archeology) is in.

I don’t expect everyone to approve of the book. I like the five stars, but I also kind of like it that a good number of reviewers give it one star and sometimes lament that it is not possible to give it zero stars. That’s really great. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. But I have to say it is annoying to see reviews that misrepresent the book. Let me give an example. There is currently up on the site a one-star review that focuses on a particular case in the book—that of the Kanapoi humerus.

Here’s some background. The humerus is the upper arm bone, the bone between the elbow and the shoulder. The discovery of a lower (distal) humerus at the Kanapoi site in Kenya was announced by scientists in 1967. It was found in a Pliocene formation, about 4 million years old. The researchers found that the humerus was morphologically like that of modern humans and different from that of various apes and monkeys, as well as that of known australopithecines.

On Amazon.com, the anonymous (at least I have the courage to sign my name to what I write) reviewer says: “The authors [Cremo and Thompson] make early reference to the distal end of a humerus (KNM-KP 271) that was recovered from the west side of Lake Turkana in Kenya, at the Kanapoi site. The authors went on to quote from Henry McHenry’s early work that the Kanapoi humerus was ‘barely distinguishable from the modern Homo,’ thereby suggesting that modern humans were at least 4 million
years old. However, other researchers (Patterson and Howells) in addition to McHenry note that ‘it is difficult to identify the family from the distal end of the humerus [alone],’ and that, in general, scientists are not able to distinguish between human and chimp populations based on the humerus alone. Subsequent research (prior to the release of the author’s book) by Meave Leakey has shown that the remains in question belong to Australopithecus anamensis not Homo sapiens.”

Okay, so here’s what I’ve got to say about it. Yes, in Forbidden Archeology my coauthor Richard L. Thompson and I did accurately quote McHenry (and his coauthor Corruccini) as stating that the Kanapoi humerus is barely distinguishable from modern Homo. Actually, Patterson and Howells also say the same thing. They said, “there are individuals in our sample of man on whom measurements . . . of Kanapoi Hominoid I [the humerus] can be duplicated almost exactly.” Although it may be “difficult” to make identifications on the basis of the distal humerus, it is not impossible, because both Patterson and Howells (Science 1967, 156: 64–66) and McHenry and Corruccini (Folia Primatologica 1976, 23: 227–244) do make such identifications. Patterson and Howells measured seven features on forty human humeri, forty chimpanzee humeri, and the humerus of an australopithecine, and found that the Kanapoi humerus was “strikingly close to the means of the human sample.” The study by McHenry and Corruccini also
compared the Kanapoi humerus with the humeri of all species of anthropoid apes (i.e. chimpanzees, gorillas, etc.) and a sample of human humeri and found that the Kanapoi matched the human sample. So the anonymous review of Forbidden Archeology is very misleading. The authorities that the anonymous reviewer cites do in fact make identifications of the Kanapoi humerus that characterize it as humanlike and distinguish it from anthropoid apes, including the chimpanzees. As for the paper by Meave Leakey
(Nature, 1995, 376: 565–571) identifying the Kanapoi humerus as belonging to Australopithecus anamenis, the paper merely includes the Kanapoi humerus in a list of about twenty supposedly A. anamensis fossils from two widely separated sites in Kenya (Alia Bay and Kanapoi), and with widely varing dates. Meave Leakey and her coauthors offer no justification for attributing the Kanapoi humerus to A. anamensis. They just put it in the list. Here is the only substantive mention of KNM KP 271 (the Kanapoi humerus) in the paper: “The distal humerus, KNM-KP 271, was originally seen to be humanlike, and it does show many derived hominoid features, including a marked median anterior capsular ligament tubercule.” The authors make no attempt at all to show any nonhuman or particularly australopithecine features. In fact, they simply acknowledge, without contradiction, the original research showing it is humanlike, giving a citation to the relevant papers. It is clear that the authors included the Kanapoi humerus in the list of fossils attributed to A. anamenis simply because it was found in the same region and was about the same age as the other fossils.

This is another example of how what I call the “knowledge filtering process” operates in human origins studies. Scientists with evolutionary preconceptions try to make all the evidence fit those preconceptions. In this case, the scientists involved could not admit the possibility that humans like us could have been present in the Pliocene, so they attributed the humanlike Kanapois humerus to some kind of human ancestor, an australopithecine, without a hint that there is another possible interpretation of this discovery.

So the Kanapoi humerus is human in morphology, and everyone that the author of the anonymous Amazon.com review cited as authorities admitted it. That said, I do want to point out that in Forbidden Archeology, I made only a limited claim about the meaning of the Kanapoi humerus. I acknowledged that the original researchers (Patterson and Howells), who characterized it as having a human form, would not have dreamed of saying that humans like us were present in Pliocene times about 4 million years ago in Africa. They would explain the bone in another way: perhaps there was some kind of Pliocene apeman who just happened to have a humerus that was like that of a modern human, while the rest of the body remained somewhat apelike. “Nevertheless,” I wrote in Forbidden Archeology (p. 685), “if an anatomically modern human had died at Kanapoi 4.0–4.5 million years ago, he or she might have left a humerus exactly like the one they [the original discoverers] found.” That is a possibility that must be considered. It cannot be ruled out.

What makes it really credible that a human like us might have been present at Kanapoi in the Pliocene is the abundance of human fossils from Pliocene formations elsewhere. And these discoveries, documented in Forbidden Archeology, include more than just a fragment of humerus. For example, in the nineteenth century the Italian geologist G. Ragazzoni found several human skeletons in Pliocene formations at a place called Castenedolo, Italy. Ragazzoni carefully studied the stratigraphy and determined that the skeletons were found in natural position and were not intrusive into the Pliocene formation through burial or earth movements. A human skeleton of Pliocene age was also found in an excavation at Savona, Italy. Also in the nineteenth century, an anatomically modern human jaw was found in a Pliocene formation at Foxhall, England. In the early twentieth century an anatomically modern human jaw fragment was found at Miramar, in Argentina. It is also interesting that Mary Leakey found dozens of footprints in Pliocene formations at Laetoli, Tanzania, characterizing them as indistinguishable from those of modern humans. All this makes it credible that the Kanapoi humerus could have belonged to a human like us.

Anyway, I find this humerus stuff all very humorous. Oh, one more thing. Next time you drop in to Amazon.com to see what condition my Forbidden Archeology is in, please consider contributing your own review or comment (five stars or one star preferred).

38
Habs and Habs Nots

In the second week of August, my email inbox started filling up with copies of newspaper articles, sent to me by my readers, about a new fossil find in Africa. Actually, one of the articles was sent to me by Doug Kenyon, the editor of Atlantis Rising. I took that as a hint he would like to see me devote a column to the story. So here goes.

Is the ancient apeman Homo habilis (let’s call him Habs for short) a human ancestor or not? That is the question.

According to scientists connected with the recent fossil find in Africa, the answer to that question is no. That is quite something, because for a long time, we have seen Habs taking his proud place in the line of little apemen that get progressively bigger and more humanlike in museum displays and textbooks all over the world. Probably those displays and textbook illustrations will remain uncorrected for a long time, but if the latest discovery is accepted, Habs no longer belongs in the direct line of human ancestors.

What exactly is this new discovery? In 2000 (as reported in the August 9 issue of Nature), Meave Leakey and some other researchers found an upper jaw of Homo habilis east of Lake Turkana in Kenya. The jaw turned out to be about 1.44 million years
old. The most recent Homo habilis bones previously discovered were 1.65 million years old. That fit in nicely with the idea that Homo habilis gave rise to Homo erectus, who gave rise to modern humans. According to most researchers, Homo erectus emerged in Africa about 1.8 million years ago. So the new discovery shows that Homo habilis and Homo erectus coexisted for almost half a million years. And in The New York Times (August 9), Meave Leakey says, “Their co-existence makes it unlikely that Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis.”

But if that is true, what about the whole theory of human evolution? Scientists were quite defensive about the new discovery,  which tends to show that evolution is on shaky ground and is in danger of losing whatever public support it still enjoys (Gallup
surveys have shown the vast majority of the American people do not accept the theory of evolution as it is taught by its scientific proponents). In an Associated Press report by Seth Borenstein (August 9), Susan Anton, an anthropologist at New York University, said she thought anti-evolutionists would be mistaken to seize on the admission that the evolutionary link between Homo habilis and Homo erectus no longer exists. I think not. Anton added, “This is not questioning the idea at all of evolution.” Oh yes it is, Susan. 
“It is refining some of the specific points.” Oh sure. Removing one of the major links in the human evolutionary chain is just a “refining” of a specific point!

In a report from MSNBC.com (August 8), we find Bill Kimbel, of the Institute for Human Origins at Arizona State University, striking a similar note: “All the changes to human evolutionary thought should not be considered as a weakness in the theory of evolution,” Kimbel said. “Rather, those are the predictable results of getting more evidence, asking smarter questions, and forming better theories.”

Well, let’s look at the current state of affairs in human evolution. It is a huge mess. Some scientists think that modern humans arose once in Africa, and spread from there all over Eurasia, replacing all the other Neanderthals and Homo erectus populations already there. Another group of scientists says different groups of modern humans evolved separately from Homo erectus and the Neanderthals in different parts of the world, more or less simultaneously. Some scientists say that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals, and others say they did not. Some say that Homo habilis gave rise to Homo erectus, and now some say that Homo habilis did not give rise to Homo erectus. Going back further, some scientists say that Australopithecus gave rise to the genus Homo and others suggest that another hominin, Kenyanthropus platyops (discovered by Meave Leakey) may have been the ancestor of Homo.

In light of this, let me suggest something. If scientists working with a certain theory find as time goes on that new evidence results in further and further complications and contradictions, one might consider that there is something wrong with the basic
theory that humans evolved from more primitive apelike ancestors. Scientists are finding as they discover more and more fossils that the evolutionary picture breaks down, and instead we find more and more examples of coexistence. Many scientists used to think humans evolved from Neanderthals. Now most of them believe humans coexisted with Neanderthals. Many believed that Homo erectus evolved in a linear way from Homo habilis. Now they are saying the evidence shows that Homo habilis and Homo erectus coexisted in the period from about 1–2 million years ago. The basic pattern that emerges is one of coexistence rather than evolution.

And if we really look at all the evidence, we find examples of fossils that show that humans like us coexisted in Africa with both Homo habilis and Homo erectus. In other words, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Homo sapiens were all coexisting. Let me give a few examples from my book Forbidden Archeology  (FA), in which you can find the detailed reports, complete with bibliographical references.

In the year 1914 the German scientist Hans Reck announced the discovery of a fairly complete human skeleton, of modern type, in Bed II of Olduvai Gorge (see FA, pp. 628–649). According to modern geologists, Bed II of Olduvai Gorge is from 1.15–1.7 million years old. This is within the age range for both Homo habilis and Homo erectus. Reck’s original report says the skeleton was found solidly embedded in the rock of Bed II, with no sign of intrusion from some higher more recent level. The skeleton was taken to a museum in Germany. Most of the skeleton, except for the skull, was lost during bombing raids in World War II. In 1974, the German archeologist Reiner Protsch published a radio-carbon age for a bone fragment he claimed was from the original skeleton. The age was about 16,000 years. There are three problems with this age: (1) it is not certain that the bone fragment really was from Reck’s skeleton, (2) the method Protsch used did not adequately take into account the problem of contamination of the bone with recent carbon, which would cause the test to yield a falsely young age, and (3) a few years ago, Protsch was removed from his position at a German university after it was shown that he had falsified dozens of radiocarbon dates over the course of his career.

In 1973, Richard Leakey published a report about two femurs (thigh bones) found at Lake Turkana in Kenya. Richard Leakey said in the science journal Nature (1973, vol. 242, p. 450)  that the thigh bones (the ER 1481 and 1472  femurs) “cannot be readily distinguished from H. sapiens if one considers the range of variation known for this species.” It was given an age of about 1.8 million years. In 1977, French researchers announced the discovery of a humerus (upper arm bone) at the Gombore site in
Ethiopia. According to the report, the site was about the same age as lower Bed II at Olduvai Gorge (about 1.7 million years). This is within the date ranges of both Homo habilis and Homo erectus.
B. Senut said in a paper published in the book Primate Evolutionary Biology (1981, p. 91) that the Gombore humerus “cannot be differentiated from a typical modern human.”

 Evidence for an anatomically modern human presence goes back even further in Africa. At Laetoli, in Tanzania, Mary Leakey found dozens of footprints arranged in three parallel tracks. In her original report, published in National Geographic (1979, vol. 155, p. 453) Mary Leakey said the footprints were “exactly the same as ours,” an opinion later confirmed by other researchers such as footprint expert Louise M. Robbins and physical anthropologist Charles Oxnard. In 1967, Bryan Patterson and W. W. Howells
announced the discovery of a humerus (upper arm bone) at the Kanapoi site in Kenya. The bone was found in Pliocene lake sediments about 4.5 million years old. In a report published in Science (1967, vol. 156, pp. 64–66), Patterson and Howells characterized the Kanapoi humerus as like that of a modern human being, a judgment later upheld by other researchers such as Henry M. McHenry and Robert S. Corruccini who said in a report published in Folia Primatologica (1975, vol. 23, p. 240) that “the Kanapoi humerus is barely distinguishable from modern Homo.”

A final blow: There have always been some scientists who do not believe that Homo habilis deserves to exist as a taxonomic species. For example, anthropologist C. Loring Brace said in a paper published in the book Primate Ecology and Human Origins, edited by I. S. Bernstein and E. O. Smith (1979): “Homo habilis is an empty taxon inadequately proposed and should be formally sunk.” T. J. Robinson argued that Homo habilis derived from a mixture of skeletal elements belonging to Australopithecus africanus and Homo erectus, according to Bernard Wood (Nature, 1987, vol. 327, p. 187).

 Poor Habs. Not only is he not a human ancestor, but he may not even exist at all.

39
The Forbidden Zone:
Archeology and Archeologists In Planet of the Apes

In September 2007, I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists. This year, it was held in Zadar, a beautiful old town on the Adriatic coast of Croatia. I gave the paper in a section on “invented civilizations” and what they can tell us about the practice of archeology. I chose to speak on the invented civilization depicted in Planet of the Apes.

In the 1968 film version of Planet of the Apes, an American astronaut named Taylor, played by Charlton Heston, crash lands with his crew in a lake on an unknown planet. They escape from their sinking spaceship, taking a raft to the shores of a desolate mountainous desert, seeing no sign of life. After crossing the desert, they come to a green, semi-forested area, where they observe humans foraging for food in lush agricultural fields. The astronauts join the speechless humans, who appear to be on the level of animals, feeding on fruits and vegetables. Suddenly, the humans begin to flee, pursued by bands of gorillas, clad in dark military dress, riding on horses and armed with rifles. Some of the humans, including Taylor, are captured and taken to an ape city. In his captivity, Taylor learns that the ape population has three classes—the gorillas, who serve as soldiers and laborers; the orangutans, who serve as administrators; and the chimpanzees, who serve as research scientists and intellectuals. Speechless humans, of a low level of culture, are treated as animals. Mostly they live in the wild, but some are kept as research animals.

In his captivity on the planet of the apes, Taylor is studied by Dr. Zira, a chimpanzee scientist who does research in animal psychology. Taylor is one of her lab animals. During his capture, Taylor’s throat was wounded, and he lost his ability to speak. So at first he appeared to Zira like an ordinary speechless human animal. By writing messages on pieces of paper, Taylor convinces Zira that he is able to use language. This contradicts one of the main doctrines of ape science, namely that humans are incapable of language.
Zira tells her chimpanzee colleague and fiancé Dr. Cornelius, an archeologist, about Taylor’s remarkable abilities. Cornelius himself has made some remarkable discoveries related to the history of humans and apes. In a cave in the Forbidden Zone, the desert wasteland where Taylor’s spaceship crashed, Cornelius had found archeological evidence for an advanced human culture preceding that of the apes. So Zira and Cornelius have two categories of evidence that challenge the orthodox views of ape science on humans. They have evidence that humans can speak and that humans with a culture superior to that of the apes had once existed on their planet.

These ideas about advanced human intelligence and past cultural superiority of humans to apes are quite dangerous to the established ape civilization. Dr. Zaius, an orangutan, who serves as the ape minister of science, cautions Zira and Cornelius. When they persist in trying to draw his attention to the abilities of Taylor, they are called along with Taylor before a government tribunal, which includes Dr. Zaius. Taylor is dismissed as a freak of nature (Zaius threatens to have him neutered and sent to a brain research lab for a lobotomy), and Zira and Cornelius are accused of scientific heresy.

Here a particular scientific party (represented by Zaius) maintains its views with the aid of the state over other scientific views (represented by Zira and Cornelius), with the aim of upholding an ape society that depends on keeping humans, including Taylor, in the status of subordinate animals. We see things like this happening on earth today. A dominant scientific party committed to a particular theory of ape-human relationships (the Darwinian theory of human evolution) seeks to maintain its authority and power by identifying its interests with those of the state and by using the compliant state to suppress alternative views. In recent years in the United States, Darwinist scientists have used the state’s judicial system to suppress even the slightest expression of alternative views, such as creationism and intelligent design, in the state education systems. 

To escape repression by the combined forces of orthodox ape science and the ape state, Zira, Cornelius, and Taylor (with a human female named Nova) escape to the Forbidden Zone. They go to the cave site that had been discovered by Cornelius.

As soon as Taylor, Nova, Zira, and Cornelius arrive outside the cave, which is situated high above them on a seaside cliff, they are intercepted by a squadron of gorilla soldiers led by Dr. Zaius. But Taylor manages to capture Zaius. Together, Zaius, Taylor, Nova, Zira, and Cornelius go into the cave. Cornelius, the ape archeologist, shows them the excavations. He points out a location where he found ape bones with primitive stone tools. He explains that below that level he had found human bones with signs of a culture much more advanced than that of the ancient apes. At one point, Taylor starts going through some of the objects, and finds some eye glasses and also some metal rings that he recognizes as part of an artificial heart. But the key artifact is a doll, in the form of a human female infant. It has a voice mechanism and speaks. The archeological evidence challenges the whole orthodox ape science view of the relationship between humans and apes. It turns out that humans of the past could not only speak but were once superior to apes, thus shaking the ideological foundations of the ape state and culture.

Emerging from the cave, Taylor ties up Dr. Zaius. Then Taylor and Nova, on horseback, decide to journey further into the Forbidden Zone. Taylor asks Zira and Cornelius to come with them, but they refuse. They are part of the ape civilization and do not want to leave their culture behind. As Taylor and Nova ride away, Zira and Cornelius release Dr. Zaius, who orders the gorilla soldiers to blow up the cave, destroying the archeological evidence. 

So what lesson can archeologists learn from this popular invented civilization? One big lesson is that there might be the equivalent of an archeological forbidden zone on this planet, with evidence contradicting current theories of human origins and antiquity.

A few years ago, I was a consultant for a television documentary called The Mysterious Origins of Man. Produced by Bill Cote, it aired on NBC. The program featured, among other things, material from my book Forbidden Archeology, and both my coauthor and I appeared in the show. The show was hosted by Charlton Heston, who said in one of the opening scenes: “What happens when we find a modern human skull in rock strata far beneath even the oldest of man’s ancestors? In their controversial book,
Forbidden Archeology, Michael Cremo and Dr. Richard Thompson have documented hundreds of these anomalous artifacts.” Here we find echoes of Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston was still speaking like Taylor, and I was put into a role like that of Cornelius, speaking about forbidden archeological evidence that challenges conventional accounts of human origins.

Then some characters like Dr. Zaius entered the scene. As far as I know, the broadcast of The Mysterious Origins of Man by NBC in February of 1996 was the first time a major American television network had aired a program challenging Darwinian explanations of human origins. This apparently caught the orthodox scientific community in the United States by surprise. They thought they “owned” the mainstream media. 

Although evolution scientists in America were outraged when the program was first shown, they became even more upset when they learned NBC was going to show it again. Scientists organized attempts to influence NBC not to show the documentary again. When these attempts failed, these scientists, like Dr. Zaius on the planet of the apes, wanted to convene a state tribunal to set things right. On June 17, 1996, Dr. Allison R. Palmer, president of the Institute for Cambrian Studies, wrote to the Federal Communications Commission: “This e-mail is a request for the FCC to investigate and, I hope, seriously censure the National Broadcasting Company.” Palmer continued: “At the very least NBC should be required to make substantial prime-time apologies to their viewing audience for a sufficient period of time so that the audience clearly gets the message that they were duped. In addition, NBC should perhaps be fined sufficiently so that a major fund for public science education can be established.” Palmer’s attempt to get the FCC to punish NBC failed, but the very fact that such an attempt was made should tell us something. Palmer’s letter was widely circulated to scientists, who were asked to send letters of support to the FCC. This is reminiscent of the efforts of Dr. Zaius to suppress the archeological finds of Cornelius. So perhaps in this respect, as Taylor found in the final scene of the 1968 film, the planet of the apes is really our planet.

40
Platypus Carvings Of Extreme Antiquity

The platypus, with its ducklike bill and beaver tail and webbed feet, is easily one of the strangest animals on earth. When the first (dead) taxonomic specimens arrived in England from Australia, the scientists who examined them thought they had been put together from parts of different animals as a hoax. But there is something else strange about the platypus. It seems human beings were carving images of platypuses on rocks in Australia millions of years ago.

I learned about this when I read a report by anthropologist Herbert Basedow, titled “Aboriginal Rock Carvings of Great Antiquity in South Australia,” published in 1914 in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (vol. 44, pp. 195–211).

In 1906, Basedow first saw some ancient aboriginal carvings of various animals and birds on rocks in south central Australia, south of the dry Lake Eyre basin. He reported on them in a paper given at the Anthropological Society of Berlin in 1907. In 1910 Basedow returned to the sites and in 1911 visited them again.

One of the sites was at Red Gorge. There Basedow found a carving of a species of platypus (Ornithorhyncus anatinus) on the surfaces of stones. The carving was very realistic. Basedow (p. 205) wrote: “The prolonged snout or ‘duck-bill,’ the head, the plump body, the stumpy tail and the short legs may be recognized; even the claws of the right hind limb are visible.” Basedow noted the platypus no longer lives in that part of Australia. Basedow wrote, “Consequently, one explanation of the picture being upon the rocks would be that, in the days when the aboriginal artist carved its form the habitat of the platypus extended inland into those regions.”

After reading Basedow’s report, I went online to the website of the Australian Museum at Sydney and put in a scientific research request, asking about the times platypus was present in the Lake Eyre region. On June 23, 2007, I received the following re-
ply from Fran Dorey, an “interpretive officer” at the museum. “The only platypus material from the Lake Eyre region is Obdurodon insigni. . . . The area around Lake Eyre at this time (i.e. about 20 million years ago) was probably lush rainforest and woodlands, with fauna similar to the contemporary Oligo-Miocene at Riversleigh in Queensland. Salinity was steadily increasing after the mid-late Miocene, which had a huge impact on the local fauna.” Especially the platypus.

In another letter, Fran Dorey wrote, “Please let me know if you need anything else. We have one of the experts here on fossil platypuses (Dr. Musser), so I can ask her specific questions if you have any.” I replied, “Well, you could ask her what she thinks the absolute latest is that platypus could have existed in the Lake Eyre region (the part north of Adelaide, around Deception Creek. Pliocene? Early Pleistocene? Middle Pleistocene? Late Pleistocene?”

Dorey replied on July 1, 2007, “I have spoken to Dr. Musser and she confirmed exactly what I wrote to you in the email. The only fossil evidence for platypus around Lake Eyre is the Obdurodon dated to about 20 million years. The next dated fossil evidence for a platypus is from Riversleigh about 17–20 million years old.” As for the latest date that platypus could have existed at Lake Eyre, Dorey wrote, “They may have lived there 20–25 million years ago, or may well have lasted up to about 10–15 million years ago. The fact that no platypus live there now is because of the salt. This means that it is highly likely that the increasing salinity of this region led to the disappearance of platypus from Lake Eyre. . . . they cannot cope in any salt water (salt affects their
electro-receptors).” The electro-receptors allow the platypus to detect the presence of prey in the water, because the movements of the prey generate tiny electrical signals.

So the basic idea is that in the Early Miocene, Lake Eyre was a huge freshwater lake, supporting a platypus population. But during the Middle Miocene, the climate changed. The lake started to dry up, and thus the salinity of the lake’s water increased to such an extent that the platypus could no longer survive there.

I still have this case under study, but from the preliminary information at my disposal it seems that the platypus disappeared from the Lake Eyre region about 10–15 million years ago, in the Middle Miocene period (which extends from 5–20 million years ago). This suggests that the realistic carvings of platypus found in the Lake Eyre region are older than 10–15 million years. Archeol-ogists and anthropologists believe carvings and paintings of animals to be the work of humans of our type. Such artwork requires cognitive abilities beyond those of apemen.

Basedow mentions in his report some additional evidence for a very ancient human presence in Australia, including “a petrified human calvarium [skull] from the Pliocene or Pleistocene mammaliferous drifts of Tennant’s Creek in Central Australia.” The boundary of the Pliocene and Pleistocene periods is about 2 million years ago.

Today, conventional archeologists believe that humans of our type first came into existence between 100,000 and 150,000 years ago. Interestingly enough, such archeologists would therefore find it hard to believe that humans could have existed in Australia either 2 million years ago (as the Tennant’s Creek skull suggests) or perhaps as much as 10 or 20 million years ago (as the platypus carving suggests). But there is further archeological evidence that humans existed in the Miocene period in various parts of the world.

In 1874, in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (vol. 3, p. 127), Frank Calvert described a discovery he made in Turkey: “I have had the good fortune to discover, in the vicinity of the Dardenelles, conclusive proofs of the existence of man during the Miocene period. . . . From the face of a cliff composed of strata of that period, at a geological depth of eight hundred feet, I have extracted a fragment of the joint of either a dinotherium [Deinotherirum] or a mastodon, on the convex side of which is deeply incised the figure of a horned quadruped, with arched neck, lozenge-shaped body, straight forelegs, and broad feet. There are traces of seven or eight other figures. . . . I have found in different parts of the same cliff, not far from the site of the engraved bone, a flint flake and some bones of animals, fractured longitudinally, obviously by the hand of man for the purpose of extracting marrow, according to the practice of all primitive races.”

Calvert gave some additional information about the date: “There can be no doubt as to the geological character of the formation from which I disinterred these interesting relics.” An expert on the geology of the region, Pierre Alexandrowitsch de Tchi-
hatcheff visited the site. Calvert said “he determined it to be of the Miocene period,” adding that “the fact is further confirmed by the fossil bones, teeth, and shells of the epoch found there.” Calvert sent detailed drawings of the fossils to British scientists who “identified amongst them the remains of dinotherium, and the shell of a species of melania [a kind of snail], both of which strictly appertain to the Miocene epoch.”

In my book Forbidden Archeology, I document many more cases of discoveries of human bones and artifacts in Miocene formations on all continents except Antarctica. The discoveries were made in the nineteenth century or early twentieth century. In East Asia, stone tools were found in Miocene formations in Burma. These were reported by paleontologist Fritz Noetling in 1894 in the Record of the Geological Survey of India. Several discoveries of human artifacts were made in the Miocene formations of Europe. For example, in Portugal, geologist Carlos Ribeiro found stone tools in Miocene formations about 20 million years old. He displayed them in the Museum of Geology in Lisbon, but after he died his colleagues in the museum wrote new labels for them,
giving them far younger ages. Then the next generation of officials put the whole collection away. In France, L. Bourgeois found human artifacts in Miocene formations at Thenay and gave reports about them at several scientific conferences. In 1905, Max Verworn found stone tools in Miocene formations at Aurillac in France. At several places in France (Billy, Sansan, Clermont, Pouancé), researchers found animal bones with cut marks on them in Miocene formations. In Greece, Baron von Dücker found bones of Hipparion (a kind of horse) with butchering marks on them in Miocene formations at Pikermi. In North America, the geologist Clarence King found a stone pestle in a Miocene formation at Table Mountain in Tuolumne County, California. Several other discoveries of human artifacts were made in Miocene formations elsewhere in the gold mining region of California. And in South America, in the early twentieth century, Florentino Ameghino found signs of a human presence in Miocene formations there. 

Against the background of this evidence for a human presence in the Miocene around the world, it is not surprising that evidence for a human presence should also be found in the Miocene of Australia.

41
Who’s Anatomically Modern?

In my book Forbidden Archeology, I often made use of the phrase “anatomically modern human” to describe skeletal remains. In terms of skulls, that meant features such as a large brain case, no brow ridges, a high forehead, and a prominent chin. In terms of the rest of the skeleton, it meant gracile features—bones that appear longer and thinner than the bones of earlier human ancestors.

According to most archeologists and anthropologists today, “anatomically modern” humans, defined as above, came into existence between 100,000 and 150,000 years ago. In Forbidden Archeology, I showed there is fossil evidence that such anatomically modern humans existed more than 100,000 to 150,000 years ago. For example, early in the twentieth century, an Argentine scientist named Florentino Ameghino reported the discovery of an “anatomically modern” human skull at Buenos Aires (Forbidden Archeology, pp. 413–418). It was found in a formation over 1 million years old. In other parts of the world, skeletal remains of other humanlike creatures were found, with skulls with more robust features such as prominent brow ridges. So in discussing these cases in Forbidden Archeology I would say that there is evidence that “anatomically modern” humans coexisted with various kinds of apemen, with more robust features, like Homo erectus or the Neanderthals. 

However, in recent years, I have begun to change my understanding of what it means to be an “anatomically modern human.”

Studies have shown that among living humans we can find a great deal of variation in the morphology of skeletons, especially in terms of the skull’s size and shape. For example, in 1995, physical anthropologist Marta Mirazon Lahr did a study of recent Indian skulls from the Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego regions of South America (Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, vol. 38, pp. 163–198). Lahr found that almost all the skulls displayed brow ridges rather than smooth foreheads. The brow ridges took different forms. Some skulls had arched brow ridges over each eye but not joined above the nose. Others skulls had arched brow ridges, joined over the nose. Yet other skulls had a solid horizontal bar of bone that went straight across the forehead, over the nose and the orbits of the eyes. This is called a supraorbital torus. Lahr found that 57 percent of the Fuegian-Patagonian skulls had very pronounced arched brow ridges joined at the nose, and 8 percent had a torus! All of the skulls in the collection had some kind of brow ridge, making the collection similar to collections of human skulls from certain groups of people living in North Africa and Australia (at present and during the recent past).

Pronounced curved brow ridges and barlike supraorbital tori are generally considered typical of Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Neanderthals. So if scientists find skulls with these features, they generally classify them as something other than anatomically modern human, especially if they are found in geological formations considered too old for modern humans.

Another feature of apemen is sagittal keeling. This feature is visible as a ridge running along the midline of the top of the skull, from the back of the skull to the front of the skull. But this feature is also found in living human populations, such as Eskimos, the Ainu of Japan, and Fuegians. Lahr and others point out that the human skull remains somewhat soft until early adulthood. They say that some of the “primitive” features of the skull like sagittal keeling may be the result of cultural practices that involve using
the jaws for clamping, as in leather working, for example. Anthropologist Richard G. Klein says in his book The Human Career (1989, pp. 281–282), “Biomechanically, the forces exerted by persistent, habitual, nonmasticatory use of the front teeth could ac-
count in whole or in part for such well-known Neanderthal features as the long face, the well-developed supraorbital torus, and even the long, low shape of the cranium.”

Another feature considered “modern” is a well-developed chin. Many fossil mandibles (lower jaws) of apemen are chinless. But we see that many living people do not have well-developed chins. Fossil mandibles of humans considered “modern” in terms of age (i.e. less than 100,000 years old) also show a wide variety of chin development. In their book Race and Human Evolution (1997, p. 332), physical anthropologists Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari (1997, p. 332, figure ) show photos of a fossil human mandible, from the Klassies site in South Africa, with a well-developed chin. It is considered “modern.” But they also show a mandible from the Dar es Soltane 2 site in Morocco, which is about 35,000 years old. It is considered early modern African. But there is no chin development, although a chin is normally considered a modern feature. In short, both are modern, but one has a chin and another does not. So there is a considerable amount of variation in “modern” skeletal samples.

Features such as prominent brow ridges, sagittal keeling, and the absence of a developed chin are found in many of the skulls of the apemen that modern scientists call Homo erectus. One of the most well-known populations of Homo erectus was found at Zhoukoudian near Beijing in the 1920s and 1930s. The first reports on these Beijing Man fossils came from Davidson Black, who gave the species its official name Sinanthropus pekinensis. In the 1940s, some scientists wanted to include Sinanthropus in the species Homo erectus (which today is the general practice). Franz Weidenreich, one of the scientists involved in the discovery and description of Beijing Man, objected to calling Beijing Man Homo erectus. He did not like the name Sinanthropus either. He actually preferred to call the Chinese fossils Homo sapiens erectus pekinensis, thus making Beijing Man a variety of Homo sapiens. “Otherwise it would appear as a proper ‘species’ different from ‘Homo sapiens’ which remains doubtful to say the least,” said Weidenreich in 1943, in his report “The skull of Sinanthropus pekinensis” (p. 246).

Weidenreich went on to propose that all varieties of fossil human ancestors known at that time should be included in the species Homo sapiens. This would have included the Java apemen (Pithecanthropus erectus, now classified as Homo erectus), Beijing
Man (Sinanthropus pekinesis, now also classified as Homo erectus), and the Neanderthals, as well as varieties of early Homo species like Homo heidelbergensis. Weidenreich did not consider Australopithecus to be a human ancestor.

Weidenreich’s view that all apemen from Homo erectus up to the Neanderthals should be considered part of the same species as modern humans (Homo sapiens) is shared by some modern anthropologists such as Wolpoff and Caspari. They say (1997, p. 345): “[It is] impossible to arrive at a definition [of modernity] that simultaneously includes the variation of all living people and excludes all members of archaic groups. . . . Any definition of moderns, therefore, must include many ancients and make it seem as though for long periods of time archaic and modern people were coexisting not just on the same continent or in the same region, but in many cases within the same family.”

Of course, I have been saying for a long time that anatomically modern humans have coexisted with other species such as Homo erectus and Neanderthals. Here’s the difference—now I am prepared to say that we should also consider many of these Neanderthals and Homo erectus individuals to also belong to the “modern” human species.

Physical anthropologist Erik Trinkaus said in a paper published in Natural History (vol. 87, no. 10, p. 58): “Detailed comparison of Neanderthal skeletal remains with those of modern humans have shown that there is nothing in Neanderthal anatomy that conclusively indicates locomotor, manipulative, intellectual, or linguistic abilities inferior to those of modern humans.”

After examining skulls of Homo erectus, Richard Leakey concluded in a paper published in the book Human Origins, edited by J. R. Durant (1989, p. 57): “I am increasingly of the view that all of the [skeletal] material currently referred to as Homo erectus should be placed within the species sapiens [which would] project Homo sapiens as a species that can be traced from the present back to a little over two million years.”

The idea that a single species can accommodate populations with greatly different physical appearances may seem strange. But actually it is a fairly common thing. Dogs, for example, all belong to the same species, Canis familiaris. But the dog species includes Great Danes, English bulldogs, chihuahuas, and many more varieties. If millions of years from now, paleontologists who were not aware of the actual history of dog breeding were to find skeletons of the many kinds of dogs, they would be most unlikely to conclude that skeletons of dachshunds and Great Danes should be placed in the same species. But they do belong to the same species.

Today, humans with skulls with no brow ridges, with no sagittal crests, and with developed chins coexist with humans with skulls with heavy brow ridges, with sagittal crests, and with no chins. They all belong to the same species. When we look into the past, we also see skulls with no brow ridges, with no sagittal crests, and with developed chins from the same time periods as skulls with heavy brow ridges, sagittal crests, and no chins. So unless we want to say that modern humans with these different features belong to separate species, we should conclude that ancient skulls with these different features also all belong to the same species, Homo sapiens.

42
First Europeans

In early April, my email inbox began to fill with messages calling my attention to some new discoveries made at the Spanish site of Atapuerca. The site has been around for some time. In the 1990s, archeologists recovered bones and artifacts at Atapuer-
ca, which they attributed to a creature that they called Homo antecessor. Those discoveries were given an age of about 800,000 years. But the new discoveries, reported in the March 26, 2008 edition of Nature, are 1.2 million years old, extending the age of Homo antecessor by about 400,000 years. Scientists began to call Homo antecessor “the first European”.

In speaking about Homo antecessor, scientists have thrown the word “human” around very loosely. Many of them have called Homo antecessor human. When most ordinary people hear the word “human,” they think the scientists mean humans like us today, Homo sapiens. But if the bones found in Spain really are human in that sense, then why not call them Homo sapiens? In this case, I think that would be the proper thing to do. If we look at the visual reconstructions that scientists have made of Homo antecessor, we find that this creature very much resembles humans like us (Homo sapiens), as can be seen in the accompanying illustrations. In these pictures, you do not see anything you could not see among people walking the streets today. In terms of height, Homo antecessor was between five and six feet tall, according to the researchers who discovered the fossils. Most humans today are that height. Also, some researchers say they believe that Homo antecessor could produce the same range of sounds as modern humans, which means they probably had human speech, as well as the capacity for symbolic thought.

But most scientists today are evolutionists, and they believe that humans like us, modern Homo sapiens, appeared only about 100,000 years ago. They believe that archaic Homo sapiens may have existed up to a few hundred thousand years ago. But before that, they believe there were no Homo sapiens of any kind. Therefore when scientists who believe in evolution find humanlike fossils older than a few hundred thousand years, they exaggerate minor differences from modern human bones, or they claim to see such minor differences when there really are none. And then they  go on to give the creatures to whom the bones belonged names of species other than Homo sapiens (such as Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo ergaster, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo antecessor, etc.), thus creating an illusion of evolutionary progression.

Let’s consider some of the ways that Homo antecessor is supposed to be different from Homo sapiens. The average brain capacity of Homo antecessor is said to be between 1,000 and 1,100 cubic centimeters. Although this is below the modern human average of about 1,350 cubic centimeters, it is still well within the modern human range which goes from about 900 cubic centimeters to about 1,800 cubic centimeters. Another thing to consider:
one of the Atapuerca skulls (Cranium 4) has a brain volume of 1,390 cubic centimeters, which is just above the modern human average. As far as the shape of the skull is concerned, some scientists point out that Homo antecessor has an occipital bun. The occipital is the bone that forms the rear part of the skull. An occipital bun is a pronounced protrusion of the middle of the occipital, forming a “bun” on the back of the head. The occipital bun is found in many skulls of Homo erectus and the Neanderthals. But anthropologist Daniel Lieberman pointed out in the PBS special Neanderthals on Trial (2002): “There are lots of human populations that have occipital buns. . . . There are some recent people in Europe who have them. If you’re a Lapp or a Finn, you’re more
likely to have the occipital bun. But Bushmen from South Africa often have occipital buns. And Australian aborigines often have occipital buns.” Scientists say that Homo antecessor had a low forehead. But many humans today also have low foreheads. Scientists say that Homo antecessor did not have a chin, but there are many living humans who also do not have developed chins. So if you add it all up, the features found in Homo antecessor are not different from those found in modern human populations. So why should we give this creature a name that indicates it is a species different from our own? At most it is a variety, a subspecies. So we should either call it Homo sapiens, plain and simple, or, if you like, Homo sapiens antecessor. But I would prefer calling it simply Homo sapiens.

So in reality the discoveries at Atapuerca provide evidence that Homo sapiens, humans like us, were present 1.2 million years ago in Europe. The scientists involved in the discoveries say that this dating is quite secure, because the date was arrived at by the convergence of three different dating methods—paleomagnetism, cosmogenic nuclides, and biostratigraphy.

But that does not make the Homo sapiens found in Spain the earliest Europeans. There are human skeletal remains older than that from Europe.

In 1855, an anatomically modern human jaw was discovered at Foxhall, England, by workers digging in a quarry. Robert H. Collyer, an American physician then residing in London, acquired the fossil. He noted that the bed from which the jaw was said to have been taken was sixteen feet below the surface, in the Red Crag formation (H. F. Osborn, Natural History, 1921, vol. 21, p. 567). The condition of the jaw, thoroughly infiltrated with iron oxide, was consistent with incorporation in this bed. The sixteen-
foot level of the Red Crag formation at Foxhall is the same from which J. Reid Moir later recovered stone tools and signs of fire. Anything found in the Red Crag formation would be at least 2.5 million years old.

In December of 1879, a landowner at Castenedolo, Italy, noticed some human bones in an excavation. Professor Giuseppe Ragazzoni, a geologist at the Technical Institute of Brescia, traveled to Castenedolo and collected the bones, which included pieces of the skull, some teeth, and parts of the backbone, ribs, arms, legs, and feet. More bones were found over the next few weeks. On February 16, a complete anatomically modern human skeleton was discovered. Ragazzoni journeyed to the site and supervised the excavation. The skeleton, enveloped in a mass of blue clay, turned out to be that of an anatomically modern human female. “The skeleton,” said Ragazzoni in his original report (Commentari dell’ Ateneo di Brescia, 1880, April 4, p. 123), “was found in the middle of the layer of blue clay. . . . The stratum of blue clay, which is over one meter [three feet] thick, has preserved its uniform stratification, and does not show any sign of disturbance.” He added, “The skeleton was very likely deposited in a kind of marine mud and not buried at a later time, for in this case one would have been able to detect traces of the overlying yellow sand and the iron-red clay called ferretto.” Modern geologists place the blue clays at Castenedolo in the Astian stage of the Middle Pliocene, which would give the discoveries from Castenedolo an age of about 3–4 million years.

Another Pliocene find comes from Savona, a town on the Italian Riviera, about thirty miles west of Genoa. In the 1850s, while constructing a church, workmen discovered an anatomically modern human skeleton at the bottom of a trench three meters (ten feet) deep. The layer containing the skeleton was the same age as the layer containing the skeletons at Castenedolo (de Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, 1883, p. 70), i.e. Middle Pliocene, about 3–4 million years old. Arthur Issel communicated details of the Savona find to the members of the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archeology at Paris in 1867. He declared that the Savona human “was contemporary with the strata in which he was found” (de Mortillet 1883, p. 70). Some suggested the skeleton was recently buried in the place where it was found. But a report given at the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archeology at Bologna in 1871 pointed out that above the dark layer of clay in which the skeleton was found was an upper layer containing white sand. If the skeleton had been buried, white sand should have been mixed with the clay. But the layer of clay in which the skeleton was found was unmixed. Also the cavities of the bones of the skeleton were filled with the unmixed clay. This could have happened only when the clay was soft, during the Pliocene period millions of years ago. Also, the skeleton was found at a depth of three meters (ten feet), rather deep for a burial.

De Mortillet (1883, p. 72) also mentions a human skeleton found in a Late Eocene formation at Delemont, Switzerland (that would be about 30 million years old) and a human skeleton found in a Miocene formation at Midi de France (that could be up to 20 million years old). Anyways, when we look at all the evidence, we see that the human bones recently found at Atapuerca, which are 1.2 million years old, are not really those of the oldest Europeans.

43
High-Tech Microfossils And Other News from Russia

In the fall of 2007, I toured Russia to promote the Russian edition of my book Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory. My audiences included academic audiences at universities, and the general public, which I reached through lectures and media interviews. I began the tour in Moscow in November, and it ended in December in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. Because my home base is Los Angeles, I am not used to cold weather. But Siberia was not as bad as I thought it would be. The winter forest, seen during long train rides, can be quite beautiful, in a starkly mysterious way. And in the end, I was happily taking Russian saunas and rolling in the snow before going back in for more heat and beatings with bundles of birch twigs.  

After I spoke at the Russian Government Library for International Literature in Moscow one evening in November, Alexander Rudenko, a former Russian naval officer approached me. He had come from St. Petersburg especially to meet me. He wanted to show me information about an interesting discovery he made. So we sat down in the lobby of the library, and he brought out a disc of pictures to show on a laptop computer. We talked until the library closed. In 1987, Rudenko had found a piece of amber on a beach near a Russian military base on the Baltic Sea, in the region of Kalinin. Kalinin is a Russian enclave, detached from the territory of Russia, between Lithuania and Poland. The main city is Kaliningrad, which used to be Konigsberg, a part of Germany. After a spring storm, Rudenko had gone for a walk on the beach, between Donskoye and Yantornoye, to search for pieces of amber. Amber is the fossilized resin of trees. Ninety percent of the world’s amber comes from the Kalinin region. Sometimes amber contains insects or other inclusions. Rudenko came upon a piece of amber with an unusual inclusion. Inside the piece of amber was a tiny piece of woven fabric. He showed me photographs of the piece of amber along with photographs of the piece of fabric under high magnification. The threads of the woven fabric in the amber had a high-tech look to them. The amber in the Baltic Sea region formed during the Oligocene (25–38 million years ago) and Eocene (38–55 million years ago). 

If the fabric is of human manufacture, this would be quite amazing. According to modern scientific ideas, humans like us only came into existence between 100,000 and 150,000 years ago. And weaving supposedly came into existence about 10,000 years ago, during the Neolithic (around the same time as the supposed beginning of agriculture and settled village life). So evidence for manufacture of woven fabric in the Eocene radically challenges mainstream ideas about human origins and antiquity.

There is other evidence from other parts of the world, showing a human presence in the Eocene. Among this evidence are the California gold mine discoveries. These involve human bones and artifacts found in ancient Eocene river channels buried beneath hundreds of feet of solid volcanic deposits at Table Mountain in Tuolumne County, California. The discoveries were reported to the scientific world by Dr. J. D. Whitney, the chief government geologist of California, in a report published by Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1880 (The Auriferous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California).

The fabric in the amber is reminiscent of some other microtechnology artifacts from Russia, reported by German researcher Hartwig Hausdorf. In the 1990s, Russian geological researchers found tiny screwlike spirals of tungsten, molybdenum, and copper. They appeared to have been intelligently manufactured. They were found in deposits on the banks of the rivers Narada, Kozim, and Balbanyu in the eastern Urals region of Russia. According to researchers, the objects are between 100,000 and 300,000 years old.
  Several other interesting events happened during my visit to Russia. While I was in Moscow, I gave an interview on Talk Moscow, one of the city’s most popular radio talk shows. I also appeared on a couple of national TV news programs, including Vesti. My publisher tells me that after these media events, representatives from the office of Vladimir Putin (then president of Russia, and now prime minister) purchased eight copies of my book Human Devolution from a Moscow bookstore. Jokingly, I asked, “Is that a good thing?” I was told it was. The office of the mayor of Moscow also purchased a copy.

In the city of Yaroslaval, professors at a university there had invited me to give a lecture. But at the last moment the rector, or president, of the university cancelled the lecture, because of pressure from outside organizations that objected to my antievolutionary ideas and my connection with the Hare Krishna movement. The professors tried to get the president to change his mind, but he refused. The professors therefore arranged for me to speak at an auditorium close to the university. The lecture was packed with students and professors from the university. More people came than would have come if the lecture had been held as scheduled at the university.

The same thing happened in Tyumen, a city in Siberia. Professors at the university had arranged for me to speak there, but at the last moment, the president of the university cancelled the lecture. So the professors arranged for me to speak at an institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In terms of prestige, this was a more important place than the university. The director of this institute said no one would influence him to cancel my lecture. And nobody did. Buses brought students and professors from the university to the institute. The lecture hall was full, with all chairs occupied and dozens of people standing in the remaining space. Professors told me that the lecture was the talk of the university. After the president cancelled the lecture, everyone wanted to hear what I had to say.

To some extent, I think the opposition to my lectures was based on a mistaken idea that science and religion are two different things and cannot be mixed. But this is a modern myth. In 2001, the University of Chicago Press published an academic book called Science in Theistic Contexts. Edited by the Oxford University historian of science John Hedley Brooke, the book contains essays by the world’s leading historians of science. The cover of the book says: “It is a widely shared assumption that science and religion are fundamentally opposed to each other. Yet, recent historiography has shown that religious belief needs to be added to the social, economic, political, and other cultural factors that went into the making of modern science. This new collection shows religious ideas not only motivated scientific effort but also shaped the actual content of major scientific theories.”

Even Charles Darwin mixed God and science. The actual question Darwin addressed in his book The Origin of Species is this: Did God create each species separately, or did God create one or a few species in the beginning and let the rest evolve? Darwin answered the question in this way: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that . . . from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved” (The Origin of Species, sixth edition, pp. 462–463). His language is a little complicated, but what he says is that originally the Creator breathed life into one or a few species and let the rest evolve. So if we want to say that in a university we cannot allow speeches by researchers who mix God with their scientific ideas, then if Charles Darwin had come to talk at the universities in Yaroslavl and Tyumen he should also have been banned. The point is that in the real world of science, some scientists do mix God with their science. What makes such things scientific rather than purely religious is that their ideas are justified not on the basis of scripture but on scientific evidence. That is exactly what I do, and in my opinion, there is nothing in the Russian constitution or Russian laws that prevent a university from allowing a researcher to lecture on religiously inspired ideas, as long as the ideas are presented in terms of scientific evidence and reasoning.

The incidents in Yaroslavl and Tyumen were not representative of the whole tour. I went to ten cities, and in most cases, my lectures at universities and other places went on without any interference. But I am a dissident intellectual, and I do expect to get banned in some places. That’s why this column is titled “The Forbidden Archeologist.”

44
Was Lothal a Vedic City?
The Evidence from Vastu

My main interest is archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity. But I am also interested in other questions. One of them is the history of the Vedic culture in India. By Vedic culture, I mean the culture based on the Vedas, the original Sanskrit books of knowledge, and the books derived from them. The current opinion among mainstream scholars is that Vedic culture came into the Indian subcontinent around 3,500 years ago, from the northwest. But the traditional opinion among followers of Vedic culture is that it has always been present in the Indian subcontinent. In this article, I want to consider some archeological evidence that favors the latter point of view. It appears that ancient urban centers in the India subcontinent, which are more than 3,500 years old, show signs they were designed according to a Vedic system of architecture called vastu.

One of the earliest mentions of this system of architecture is found in the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, which according to the text itself was composed about 5,000 years ago in India (modern secular scholars give it an age of 3,000 years). Vastu can be used in the construction in individual structures, but it is also used for urban design. A main element of vastu is the concept of the vastu purusha, the personal form of vastu. There are various accounts of the origin of the vastu purusha. One goes like this: At the beginning of creation, there was an asura (demon) who opposed the demigods. The demigods led by Brahma pushed the demon down onto the earth’s surface, and the demigods took their places on his form to hold him there. Brahma named the demon vastu purusha. Offering the vastu purusha a kind of redemption, Brahma ordained that anyone building any kind of residence would have to pacify him with sacrifice and worship.  

The form of the vastu purusha is depicted graphically in the vastu purusha mandala. The mandala, or diagram, is square. The square form represents the divine order whereas the circle represents unordered material reality.  The purusha is depicted as a male, lying  face down. The head occupies the northeast part of the mandala, and the feet are in the southwest. The right knee and right elbow meet in the southeast corner. The left knee and left elbow meet in the northwest corner. The form of the vastu purusha is thus contorted to fit in the confines of the square. The main square of the mandala is divided into 64 (8 x 8) or 81 (9 x 9) squares. Each square is inhabited by a demigod, each one taking its place on the form of the body of the vastu purusha.

Vastu was used in city design. The first step in the construction of a new town is to level the ground. After the site is leveled, the vastu purusha mandala is drawn upon it, and this forms the basis for the design. A very common form of this mandala is the square. Many Indian cities, like Jaipur, show signs of vastu design.

Over the past century, many ancient towns have been excavated in India, dating to 4,000 or 5,000 years ago. The most famous of them are in the Indus Valley region (now part of Pakistan), including Mohenjo Daro and Harappa. The latter site is generally used by scholars for the whole culture that produced these towns (the Harappan). Scholars have different opinions about the exact nature of the culture. Some say the culture was Vedic, the culture of the majority of Indians today. Others say that the culture was not Vedic, and that the people of Vedic culture entered India in much later times, no earlier than about 3,500 years ago. One problem is that the script of the Harappan culture has not been deciphered to the satisfaction of all scholars. Some have proposed Vedic decipherments and others have proposed non-Vedic decipherments. While this matter continues to be debated (I myself support a Vedic decipherment in principle), it may be useful to look for archeological evidence about the nature of the culture. In the spring of 2008, I went to India to investigate the design of the “Harappan” city of Lothal, in Gujarat, India, which dates to the third millennium B.C.E., to determine whether or not the design conforms to vastu principles. The answer to this question has implications for our understanding of the people who built Lothal. If the city was designed according to vastuprinciples, that would signify it is likely the people were part of the Vedic culture.

At Lothal, I looked at the site and the site plan for Period A, which goes back as far as 4,400 years ago, supposedly 1,000 years before people of Vedic culture entered India. The plan shows that Lothal was laid out in square form, with sides oriented to the cardinal directions. This corresponds to one of the standard vastu grids.  According to vastu principles, an ideal site for a town is higher in the west and south than in the north and east. At Lothal, there is a definite elevation in the south, sloping down to the north and east. Experts in vastu say that houses facing the cardinal directions (north, south, east, west) are good, while those facing the corner points are exposed to evil influences. At Lothal, all the buildings face the main directions. Roads are oriented north to south, and east to west, another feature of vastu town design. According to vastu texts, waste water should drain to the north or east. I found that the main water drainage system at Lothal, in the area of the citadel, did drain to the east, as also noted in the site report.

According to vastu principles, the four social classes (workers, merchants, rulers, and priests) should occupy the western, southern, eastern, and northern sides of a town respectively. Workshops are found primarily on the western side of Lothal. The southeastern corner, Lothal’s center of trade, is occupied by a structure identified as a warehouse. The site plan shows the acropolis, identified as the residence of the town’s rulers (kshatriyas), extending from the central part of the site to the site’s eastern side. In the middle of the northern boundary of Lothal is a structure identified as a public fire altar, which would likely have been attended by priests (brahmanas). So the structures identified with the four classes seem to be located in the appropriate directions. The principal deity of the northern side of the vastu purusha mandala is Soma, the moon, and the quarter over which the moon rules is known as the “quarter of men.” The Lower Town of Lothal, which includes most of the residences, is in the northern half of the site, whereas the southern half of the town is occupied by the warehouse trade area, acropolis government area, and the workshop areas.

The Lothal site plan shows a cemetery outside the northwestern boundary wall, and S. R. Rao, the archeologist who excavated the site, said that the number of skeletons found there is quite small for a town the size of Lothal. He estimated the population
at 15,000. So he considered it likely that cremation was the most common form of dealing with dead bodies. The deity of the northwest corner of the 81-square vastu purusha mandala is Roga, disease; just below Roga is Papayakshman, consumption; and just below Papayakshman is Shosha, emaciation. A possibility that deserves consideration is that the northwest cemetery burials could represent cases of special burial for persons who suffered from diseases considered particularly inauspicious. Such persons might have been judged not fit for cremation. Based on the vastu purusha mandala, one might venture an archeological prediction, namely that a cremation ground might be found outside the southwest corner of the Lothal settlement walls, near the bank of the now-dry river that once ran there. The southern side of the vastu purusha mandala is ruled by Yama, the lord of death. The southwest corner specifically is occupied by Pitarah, the lord of the ancestors, or Nirritih, the lord of dying, exiting from life. This would make sense because the river flowed from north to south, and typically in Hindu towns, the riverside cremation grounds are usually located so that the river carries contaminated water away from the inhabited areas of the town.

In examining Lothal, a Harappan city in India, we see that it is laid out in a manner consistent with vastu principles. This city is from the third millinenium B.C.E. Vastu, which is mentioned in the Mahabharata,  is considered a part of Vedic culture. So this would indicate that the city was part of the Vedic culture. It also suggests that the Mahabharata may be traced back to the same period of time. 

45
Why Only Stone Tools?

In late November of 2008, I was in Dubai to speak at the International Conference on Ancient Studies, held in the Raffles Hotel there. I gave a talk  about my book Forbidden Archeology. Afterwards, a member of the audience asked me a familiar question. “If human beings like us have been present for tens of millions, hundreds of millions, of years, as you say, then why is most of the evidence that you present confined to stone tools, and things like that? What about evidence for high technology or advanced civilization?”

That is a good question, one that deserves an answer. One thing to keep in mind is that I believe human civilizations have risen and fallen many times over those many millions of years. So there may have been times in the distant past when civilizations
like ours existed, and long periods of time when the human populations were smaller and lived in ways we would consider more primitive. So what would happen to the remains of the advanced civilizations like ours during the times of depopulation? We tend
to assume that our skyscrapers and machines are very durable and long lasting. But this is not really true. Scientists who study these things understand that many of our monuments and machines will not last very long when exposed to the uncontrolled forces of nature.

This scientific truth has been brought home to a wider audience by television documentaries like Life After People, which aired on the History channel early in 2008. It turned out to be the most popular show ever on History. A similar program, called Aftermath: Population Zero, aired on the National Geographic channel in March 2008. The premise of these programs is simple. Let’s assume that human beings disappear from the earth today. What would happen to the physical remains of our civilization over time, starting from day one? Author Alan Weisman has also explored what would happen to the physical remains of our civilization if human beings were to suddenly become extinct in his book The World Without Us, which generated its own television special.

From these sources we get a picture like this: Within about seventy-five years, most machines, such as cars and airplanes and boats, except perhaps in some very dry places, would be corroded beyond recognition. Plants would start growing in the cities. Without maintenance, roads would be covered with plants, and would be broken up, and gradually disappear. Unchecked wildfires would burn through many towns and cities. Because dams and levees would no longer be maintained, they would gradually break down. Thus there would be flooding of many cities, especially in coastal cities and cities on rivers and streams. That would include most cities. Wooden houses, if not burned by fires, would be consumed by rot or termites. Plant growth and rains would gradually destroy masonry and bricks. Paints that protect steel structures would wear away, exposing the metal to oxidation. The steel frames of concrete buildings would gradually rust away. Within a few hundred years, bridges would fall into the rivers. Skyscrapers would collapse into rubble, which would be subjected to floods, fires, earthquakes, as well as degradation by plant life. By about 1,000 years from now, our huge urban centers like New York would be unrecognizable. Heaps of rubble would be covered by plant life and forests. There would be almost no signs of a past human civilization. After 10,000 years, the only sign of a human presence might be stone structures like the Pyramids of Giza. Hurricanes, typhoons, and tornadoes will remove most signs of human habitation from huge areas of the earth, as will earthquakes and volcanoes. New ice ages will also scour the earth with glaciers. Extend these processes over tens or hundreds of millions of years, and we can understand that not many visible signs of our high-tech civilization would be left.

This may be one reason why much of the evidence for extreme human antiquity that I talk about in my book Forbidden Archeology consists of stone tools and things of that sort. Of course there are some exceptions. For example, in 1871, William E. Du-
bois, a researcher for the Smithsonian Institution, reported on a copper coinlike object found in a well boring at Lawn Ridge in Marshall County  in the state of Illinois in the United States. The round copper object had on one side two human figures and an inscription in an unknown language. The report was published in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (1871, vol. 12, no. 86, pp. 224–228). The case is also discussed in the book Sparks from a Geologist’s Hammer (1881) by A. Winchell.

From these sources, my research assistant and I were able to get the drilling record of the well boring, which consisted of a list of the strata the boring had gone through to get to the level that yielded the coinlike object, at about 114 feet. At that level the deposits are of clay, which could explain why the coin was preserved.
A coating of clay would protect the coin from oxidation. We wrote a letter to the Illinois State Geological Survey, inquiring about the age of the deposits at that depth of 114 feet. We were informed that the deposits were from the Yarmouthian Interglacial period,
between 200,000 and 400,000 years ago. This is quite astonishing, because according to the currently dominant theories, humans like us did not exist at that time. Actually, the first coins are supposed to have been used in the eighth century in Lydia, in what is now Turkey. Similar coins are supposed to have come into use around the same time in China and the Indus Valley. But the discovery at Lawn Ridge shows that coins may have been used long before that, as much as 400,000 years ago. Of course, coins presuppose a civilization with a developed economy and government.

But it is a fact that many of the cases I talk about are from the category of stone tools. I should point out that stone tools can be just as much a sign of a human presence as a computer. For example, the stone mortars and pestles found in Early Eocene formations (about 50 million years old) in the California gold mines are a kind of artifact attributed by archeologists only to humans like us, not any kind of apeman. These discoveries were originally reported to the scientific world by Dr. Josiah D. Whitney, the state geologist of California, in his monograph The Auriferous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California, published by Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1880. And some of the artifacts are still in the collection of the Museum of Anthropology of the University of California at Berkeley.

But let’s imagine that 50 million years ago, people in California were using not only stone mortars and pestles but also laptop computers, skyscraper buildings, and automobiles. What would remain after 50 million years? Not much. Most of our high-tech stuff would not survive very well over the course of millions of years. Stone tools are much more likely to survive the ravages of time.
So even though humans with high technology may have been existing at the same time as more primitive people 50 million years ago, only the stone tools may have survived.

I am not saying that there would be no signs at all of high-tech civilizations in the record of the rocks, but I am saying they might not be as common or as easily recognizable as we might think. A few years ago I was monitoring some exchanges by archeologists on an internet discussion group. I did not participate in the conversation myself. They were discussing this question: What if there were a human civilization like ours that existed 100 million years ago? What signs of it would we see today? They concluded we would not see very much, perhaps just some thin bands of multicolored gravel. And we would not even notice them unless we were specifically looking for such things.

This is a big problem. Scientists tend to find what they are looking for. And today not very many scientists are actually looking for evidence of high-tech civilizations in the distant past. So one purpose of my work is to inspire a new generation of archeologists, paleontologists, and geologists to start looking for these things. If they did, then perhaps when they encountered some strange looking band of gravel, they might test the materials, and perhaps find mineral compounds that do not occur naturally, thus showing the existence of ancient people who had the technology to make such compounds.

I look at the evidence presented in my book Forbidden Archeology as just the beginning. In any case, questions about the level of human civilization, be it high or low, presuppose the existence of human beings. Whether we look for evidence of high-tech human civilizations or low-tech human civilizations, the first thing is that human beings had to be there. And at least I have shown that humans like us have existed for hundreds of millions of years on earth. As for all the details about their levels of technological advancement over those vast periods of time, that is a topic for further research.

46
Bolivian Footprints From the Deep Past

I first learned of the extremely old Bolivian footprints, which are attracting international attention, at the Earth Transformation Conference on the Kona coast of the Big Island of Hawaii in May of this year (2008). I had been invited there to speak about my book Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory. It was my first visit to Hawaii in about fifty years.

Last time I was there, I was about eight years old, and my family was on vacation. We went to Kilauea, the volcano that is the home of the Hawaiian fire goddess Pele. Our Hawaiian guides had me offer some fruit into the fire pit of the volcano, and then they gave me a Pele amulet and told me Pele would protect me whenever I went into the realm of volcanoes.

About fifteen years later, I found myself at a US Navy weather station in Iceland. That was in 1972. I heard that the volcano Hekla was erupting, so a buddy of mine and I rented a Land Rover and drove across black sand deserts and glacial streams to get to Hekla. During the Middle Ages, Hekla was considered the gateway to hell, and later Jules Verne made it the site of his novel Journey to the Center of the Earth. Anyways, we parked our Land Rover and hiked about a mile to a lava flow. We looked around for awhile. Then we climbed to the top of a small hill by the flow and started to eat lunch from our backpacks. Just then the earth started to shake, and we ran off the hill all the way back to our vehicle. Then we turned, looked, and saw the hill on which we had been sitting explode with fountains of lava as a plume of ash rose into the air. It was a minor eruption, but nevertheless pretty awe inspiring. My buddy looked at me and said, “We were lucky. We could have been killed.” Remembering Pele, I said, “Maybe it wasn’t luck.” I told the story as part of my lecture, in which I also mentioned some of the archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity.

The next day, May 17, I heard Luis Fernando, a UFO researcher from Bolivia, give a lecture titled “Extraterrestrial Guides: The Great White Brotherhood in the Andes and Lake Titicaca.” Luis spoke in Spanish, using a translator. During the talk, he mentioned that in Bolivia he had recently learned of some discoveries that were very much in line with my forbidden archeology work. Some researchers in Bolivia had discovered footprints like those of modern human beings near Lake Titicaca. They were many millions of years old. That evening I had dinner with Luis and some other people from the conference at the home of the gentleman who had translated for him. On the patio, overlooking the Kona coast, I heard some more from him about the discoveries.

When I returned to Los Angeles, I began to receive press reports about the Bolivian footprints, in English, Spanish, and Italian. On May 29, 2008 the Bolivian Agency of Information (ABI) published a report (translated into English) that gave some important details about the discovery. These details were announced by researchers at a press conference held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in La Paz, Bolivia. Thus far I have learned the following:
The footprints were originally discovered by villagers near Lake Titicaca. They called them footprints of the Incas. A woman named Fanny Pimentel, described as a consultancy worker, took photographs of the prints, and gave them to researchers. Researcher Jorge Miranada said one of the footprints is 29.5 centimeters (11.6 inches) long and could have belonged to a human being 1.7 meters (5.6 feet) tall, weighing about 70 kilograms (154 pounds). According to the researchers, the footprints were found in a Miocene formation, about 10–15 million years old. The Miocene extends from about 5–25 million years ago.

If the initial reports hold up, the Bolivian footprints are a significant addition to our understanding of the antiquity of the modern human species. According to most scientists today, humans like us came into existence about 150,000 years ago in Africa, having evolved from more primitive, apelike ancestors.
The Bolivian evidence joins a huge body of contrary evidence showing that humans like us have in fact existed for far longer periods of time. We have to keep in mind also that most scientists now believe that humans like us did not leave Africa until about 60,000 years ago, and that modern humans first entered the Americas about 15,000 years ago. So the evidence from Bolivia not only contradicts mainstream scientific ideas about the origin of the human species, but also contradicts current mainstream ideas about the peopling of the Americas.

The Bolivian footprints join a large body of evidence showing that humans have existed in the Americas for many millions of years. I will give some examples (detailed discussions can be found in my book Forbidden Archeology). The oldest North American evidence goes back hundreds of millions of years. Scientific American (1852) reported that a beautiful metal vase was found fifteen feet deep in solid rock as workmen were excavating a foundation for a building near Dorchester, Masschusetts. According to modern geologists, the age of the formation in which the object was found is about 600 million years. In 1968, William Meister was splitting open pieces of shale, searching for fossils near Antelope Springs, Utah. As he split open one piece, he found inside a print that exactly resembled a human shoeprint, complete with a heel worn in the appropriate place. The print contained a trilobite, a fossil characteristic of the Cambrian period. According to modern geologists, the age of the formation in which the shoeprint was found is over 500 million years. In the year 1862, a scientific journal called The Geologist reported that an anatomically modern human skeleton was found ninety feet below the surface of the ground in Macoupin County, Illinois. The formation in which the skeleton was found is about 300 million years old. According to the report, above the skeleton was a thick unbroken layer of slate rock. That the rock layer was unbroken indicates that the skeleton could not have come down from some higher, more recent level. Interestingly enough, according to the Morrisonville Times (June 11, 1891) a gold chain was found in a piece of coal about the same age, 300 million years old. In 1880, Josiah D. Whitney,  chief government geologist of California, stated in a report published by Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (The Auriferous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California), that numerous human bones and artifacts had been discovered in the California gold mines, in formations that modern geologists say are up to 50 million years old (Early Eocene). In 1886, workers in Buenos Aires, Argentina, found an anatomically modern human skull in an excavation, about thirty-six feet below the surface. Above the skull was a thick layer of limestone rock. This layer of rock was unbroken, which means the skull cannot have come from some higher, more recent level. According to modern geologists, the age of the formation in which the skull was found is between 1.0 and 1.5 million years. At around the same time that the Buenos Aires skull was discovered, a collector for the Museum of La Plata found a human vetebra, of modern type, in Early Pliocene formations (3–5 million years old) at Monte Hermoso, Argentina. In 1909, the discovery was reported in a scientific publication by the respected Argentine paleontologist Florentino Ameghino. In 1889, a small human figurine was brought up from a depth of over 300 feet as an artesian well was being drilled near Nampa, Idaho. The formation from which the figurine came is about 2 million years
old. In 1915, Carlos Ameghino announced the discovery of artifacts characteristic of those made by modern humans at the Miramar site in Argentina. The objects were found in layers of rock about 3 million years old. In 1921, a human jaw fragment was
found in the same formation. Just a couple of years ago, archeologist Silvia Gonzalez reported that human footprints were found near the Valsequillo Reservoir in central Mexico. According to geologist Paul Renne (2005), radiometric dating gave an age of about 1.3 million years for the layer of volcanic rock containing the footprints. I could go on and on, but I think that’s enough to make the point. 

The recently discovered Bolivian footprints fit into a whole pattern of evidence showing the extreme antiquity of a human presence in the Americas. And there is much more evidence from other parts of the world as well. Unfortunately, all of this evidence is absent from current textbooks of anthropology and archeology because of an ongoing process of knowledge filtration that operates in the world of science.

47
Happy Birthday, Charlie

This year, 2009, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, credited with founding the theory of evolution by natural selection. It is also the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book The Origin of Species. Darwin was a theology student who never graduated from university, never got a Ph.D., and never worked as a professional scientist. He was an amateur naturalist. Nevertheless, his books and papers came to the attention of the scientific world, and became quite influential. 

I spent Darwin’s birthday (February 12) giving a lecture against Darwin in Copenhagen, Denmark. An abridged version of my book Forbidden Archeology, which documents archeological evidence that contradicts the Darwinian evolutionary account of human origins, has been published in the Danish language. Many years ago, a friend of mine jokingly said to me that perhaps I am a reincarnation of Charles Darwin, and I have had to take birth again to correct my mistake. I thought it was funny, so I started using the line in my lectures, including the one in Copenhagen.

On the two evenings before my lecture in Copenhagen, I was in Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city, giving lectures at the University of Aarhus. Some professors at the university were very upset that I had been allowed to speak there. This had come to the attention of one of the Aarhus newpapers, the Aarhus Stiftstidende, one of Denmark’s largest. So they ran a big article about me, with a headline asking, “Is This Man Dangerous?” One of the professors was quoted as saying I was. But the article also quoted me as saying a university should be a place for the free exchange of ideas. The theory of evolution should not have a monopoly in the education system. Students should be exposed to some opposing ideas. Apparently, students felt the same way. My lectures at the university were packed with students. I talked for about an hour, and then opened things for discussion. The discussion sessions lasted longer than the lecture. I was very pleased with the turnout and the kinds of questions that were asked.

After the lecture that I gave on forbidden archeology on Darwin’s actual birthday in Copehagen, an archeologist from the University of Copenhagen tried to raise some doubts about the evidence I had printed for extreme human antiquity. The objections he raised were typical of those raised by other evolutionists. All he could really do was give a long series of possible reasons why the human bones and artifacts I talked about could be younger than the strata in which they were found. For example, perhaps there were animal burrows through which artifacts came down from higher, more recent layers to lower, older layers. Or maybe there was a fissure. Or maybe this, maybe that. I pointed out that this is not a very scientific way in which to proceed, given that the discoverers of the bones and artifacts had considered such possibilities and ruled them out. I suggested that if he wanted to raise such doubts, he should be able to demonstrate that the things he mentioned actually were true of the sites. For example, if he
claimed it is possible that an artifact or bone slipped into some ancient layer of rock through an animal burrow, he should be able to show that at the actual site there was in fact some animal burrow penetrating from the surface into the older layer of rock, at the place in the rock where the artifact was found. That would be an actual scientific objection. It is not enough to raise possibilities. Anything is possible. To make my point, I said, “For example, it is possible that you are a robot programmed by some skeptics’ society to play back a recording.” That got a supportive laugh from the audience.

Anyways, although I disagree with Darwin on some points, I agree with him on others. Some of his insights are in some ways similar to the insights on the origin of species that I get from the ancient Sanskrit writings of India, which I have applied to the
origin of the human species in my latest book Human Devolution:
A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory. In his Origin of Species, Darwin was arguing against the Christian doctrine of special creation, which holds that God individually creates each species. This implies that each species should be designed in a unique and different manner. But Darwin took note of the common anatomical features of living things that suggested they all came from some common ancestor. For example, if we look in detail at the skeletons of humans, other mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish we see they all have limbs with five digits. This suggests a common ancestor.

My ideas about alternatives to evolution come from the ancient Sanskrit writings of India. These writings also claim that the forms of all living things come from a common ancestor. According to Darwin, the common ancestor was some tiny single-celled organism, the simplest form of life. But according to the ancient Sanskrit writings, the first living thing in the material universe was not the simplest but the most complex. This first living thing is called Brahma. He is the first demigod.

According to Darwin, species are produced from his version of the common ancestor by a process of reproduction with modification. The same is true of the account of the origin of species found in the ancient Sanskrit writings of India. Brahma, the first demigod, is the common ancestor of all living things. He produces from his own mind and body other demigods, called prajapatis, or generators of population. By their reproductive activities with demigoddesses, these prajapatis produce the forms of the plants
and animals we observe on our level of reality. Once produced, they go on to reproduce themselves. These bodies are vehicles for souls who have fallen from the spiritual world because of misuse of their God-given free will.

Darwin was not completely hostile to the concept of God.
In his book The Origin of Species, the actual question he tried to answer was this: Did God create each species separately, or did God create one (maybe a few) species in the beginning and then let them evolve. His answer was that “the Creator” breathed life into one or a few and let the rest evolve. So I agree with Darwin that God has something to do with the origin of the life forms we see around us. But I disagree with the evolution part of his answer.

I do, however, accept a different kind of evolution—the evolution of the conscious self, or soul, if you like that word, through the various kinds of material bodies in the course of reincarnation. In the beginning, when conscious selves first come to the world of matter, they are provided with a whole range of vehicles to accommodate conscious selves with different desires and qualifications. Each conscious self is placed in the vehicle it most deserves. We notice, however, that we inhabit these vehicles for only a limited amount of time. What happens then? There is something called transmigration, or reincarnation. If a conscious self maintains material desires, it remains in the world of matter, and is placed in another material body, according to its karma, the totality of its desires. In the cycle of reincarnation, it is possible for a self placed in a more limiting vehicle (the body of a plant or animal) to gradually improve its position, lifetime after lifetime, until it receives a human vehicle. This is a kind of spiritual evolution. The vehicles, or bodies, do not evolve one from the other. Rather one evolves through the vehicles until one gets the one with the most capabilities, the human vehicle. And in the human vehicle it can, if it properly uses the human vehicle, become free from the whole cycle of birth and death, and return to the level of the cosmos dominated by pure consciousness.

I’ve explained all this in great detail, in my book Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory. We do not evolve up from matter, as Darwin believed. Instead, we devolve, or come down from the level of pure consciousness and are placed in vehicles, bodies, designed for us by higher intelligence. We can evolve through the different kinds of vehicles, until we finally get a human vehicle, in which it is possible for us to re-evolve back to our original position as beings of pure consciousness, existing in harmony with the source of all conscious beings and all other conscious beings.

I wonder where Charles Darwin is today in that process.
Somehow I have the feeling that after his life in England, he went down into an animal vehicle. Perhaps that of an ape or monkey. And now he is evolving back up through the species, until he will once again inhabit a human vehicle. I hope he makes better use of it than he did the last time.

48
Kenya Believe It?
Scientists Misinterpret New Footprint Evidence

In my book Forbidden Archeology and in the lectures and in-
terviews I give about the book, I often mention cases of archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity from the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. My critics, and even some of my supporters, question this evidence. They would prefer to hear reports of more recent evidence.

To such people, I reply that evidence for extreme human antiquity is evidence for extreme human antiquity no matter when it was reported. The doubting of “old” evidence is based on the questionable idea that “new” evidence is better. Science, it is claimed,
has made considerable advancement since the old days.

If this assumption is accepted, what will be the status of current “new” evidence in one hundred years? Will it suddenly become untrue? Does scientific evidence have an expiration date, after which it automatically becomes invalid? I think not. If that
were true, the only way to get reliable evidence would be to project oneself forward to the end of time, if there is such a thing. The last facts would then be the real ones, all past evidence being consigned to the oblivion of falsity. 

But in reality we do not consistently make judgments like that. People are very selective in their judgments about “old” evidence. Archeological textbooks are full of discoveries from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as the original Ne-
anderthal discoveries (reported in 1857), the original Homo erectus discoveries (reported in 1893), the original Australopithecus discoveries (reported in 1925), and many others. Because these discoveries support the now dominant theory of human evolution, they are not subjected to the charge of being “old” evidence. But evidence that contradicts the dominant theory of human evolution is held to a different standard. If such evidence is from the nineteenth century or early twentieth century, it is dismissed as “old,” and hence unreliable.

But it simply is not true that all science done before midnight January 1, 1950 is automatically outdated. The theory of relativity was proposed by Einstein in 1905. It is still accepted today. Hundreds of other examples could be given.

Furthermore, what I proposed to do in my forbidden archeology research was to conduct an historical survey of all the archeological evidence discovered from the time of Darwin up to the present. So of course I could not confine my research to just the most recent evidence. I had to deal with the whole archeological record. And when I surveyed the entire history of archeology, what I found is that archeologists, and other earth scientists, have at different times and places reported abundant evidence for extreme human antiquity.

Although this evidence for extreme human antiquity is present in the primary scientific literature, the reports by original investigators published in the professional scientific literature, this evidence is largely absent from the secondary scientific literature, such
as textbooks and survey studies. Why is that? I proposed it is because of a process of knowledge filtration, whereby evidence that supports the dominant theories passes through this intellectual filter and evidence that radically contradicts the dominant theories does not pass through it. And it is significant that this process has been operating for a long time. And it is still operating now.

If people want current examples of evidence for extreme human antiquity, I can give them such examples, as I have often done in this column in the past, and as I will now do again in this present column.

Here is the most recent example that has come to my attention: Earlier this year, researchers, including lead author Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom, announced in the February 27, 2009 issue of the journal Science the
discovery of footprints at Ileret, Kenya. The footprints were excavated by paleontologists working under John K. Harris of Rutgers University in cooperation with the National Museum of Kenya. The footprints were found in layers of rock 1.5 million years old. The age was established by study of volcanic deposits in the footprint layers. The footprints were found in two layers of rock. The upper layer contained three trails of footprints (two trails of two footprints each, and one set of seven footprints, along with some individual footprints). The lower layer contained one trail of two prints, and one individual footprint. 

Dr. Bennett made three-dimensional images of the footprints. He also made digital images of the footprints of local modern people. He found the ancient and modern footprints to be remarkably similar. The researchers stated that the ancient footprints displayed all the features of the anatomically modern human foot. Of course, the researchers, being evolutionists, did not believe that humans like us were present 1.5 million years ago to make those prints. So how did they explain the prints? They at-
tributed the footprints to Homo ergaster, an African variety of the apeman Homo erectus.

 But no one knows what the feet of Homo erectus were like, because no one has ever discovered any foot bones of Homo erectus. Actually, the only creature known to science today who has a foot exactly like a modern human foot is a human being like us.
So, from the strictly scientific point of view, the best thing to do would be to attribute the footprints to human beings like us. That would extend the age of the modern human species from the currently accepted 150,000 years to 1.5 million years.

And there is other evidence from Africa to support this. In 1913, at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, the German researcher Hans Reck reported finding an anatomically modern human skeleton solidly embedded in upper Bed II of Olduvai Gorge. This would give the skeleton an age of at least 1.1 million years, and it could be as much as 1.7 million years old. At Lake Turkana in Kenya, Richard Leakey reported that a femur (the ER 1481 femur) found in formations 1.9 million years old was exactly like a modern human femur.

The researchers who reported on the Kenya footprints in Science said they “provided the oldest evidence of an essentially modern humanlike foot anatomy.” This is not true. In 1979, Mary Leakey reported the discovery of footprints at a place called Lae-
toli, in Tanzania. The footprints were found in layers of solidified volcanic ash 3.7 million years old. The dating was done using the potassium-argon method. In her original report, published in National Geographic, Mary Leakey said that the Laetoli footprints
were indistinguishable from anatomically modern human footprints. Paleontologist Tim White said, as quoted in Don Johanson’s book Lucy, “Make no mistake about it. They are like modern human footprints.” And physical anthropologist Russell Tuttle wrote in a scientific publication (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London) in 1981 that “the shapes of the prints are indistinguishable from those of striding, habitually barefoot humans.” 

The case of the Kenya footprints provides a recent example of how the knowledge filtering process operates in human origins studies. Evidence for extreme human antiquity can be staring researchers directly in their faces, but unable to accept the true implications of the evidence, the researchers do whatever is necessary to make it fit their evolutionary theories of human origins. In this case, they attributed the Kenya footprints to a prehuman hominin, Homo erectus, although there is no real justification for doing so, other than blind commitment to the current theories of human evolution.

Another recent example of such knowledge filtering is provided by some footprints discovered near the Valsequillo Reservoir in central Mexico. Geoarcheologist Sylvia Gonzalez in 2005, announced in Nature the discovery of many footprints in volcanic deposits there. She said the footprints were like those of modern humans, and were about 40,000 years old. Subsequently, scientists from the University of California at Berkeley led by Paul Renne did radiometric studies of the age of the volcanic deposits, and
conclude in a report in Nature that they were about 1.3 million years old. According to the scientists who did the dating, and other scientists, this ruled out the possibility that the footprints were made by humans like us.

Chris Stringer, head of human origins studies at the Natural History Museum in London, said, “The new dating is far beyond any credible evidence of humans in the Americas. Some experts had questioned whether the prints were indeed human, and this issue will now have to be reexamined very carefully.” (Epoch Times, Dec. 7, 2005)  The most likely explanation was that they were not really footprints, but were impressions in the rock that resembled footprints.

To such suggestions, Silvia Gonzalez replied, “Even if we are wrong and the ash is indeed 1.3 million years old, that is not automatically a reason to disregard interpretation of the features reported as footprints, simply because they are not in agreement with the established models for the settlement of the Americas.” (Epoch Times, Dec. 7, 2005)

I agree with Sylvia Gonzalez. I believe the most scientifically justifiable conclusion is that the footprints are human and that they are 1.3 million years old, just about the same age as the Kenya footprints.

49
Nature’s IQ

Some years ago, I was in Europe, speaking about my book Forbidden Archeology in seminars and lectures. At a seminar in Belgium, a young Hungarian scientist, a cultural anthropologist named Istvan Tasi, approached me. Like me, he was a member of the Krishna consciousness movement. He asked if I could come to Hungary and give lectures about my work there. I said I would be happy to do so, but I had some conditions. First, my book had to be published there in the Hungarian language. After that, when it came time for me to come, the tour should include not only lectures for universities and scientific associations, but also for the general public. And there should also be media interviews. Istvan returned to Hungary. He found a publisher who would bring out a Hungarian edition of the abridged version of Forbidden Archeology. And he also arranged an author tour exactly as I had asked. So I came to Hungary and executed the tour. There was a good response from university audiences, the general public, and the media. Istvan accompanied me all around the country and served as my translator for lectures and interviews. Istvan was somewhat surprised to see what an impact a Vedic antievolutionist like me could have. Of course, there was also some opposition to what I presented, but the controversy just seemed to generate bigger audiences and more media interviews.

Istvan told me he wanted to follow in my footsteps in challenging the theory of evolution. I told him it was possible, but advised him he should first write a book. A book would give him credibility, and create opportunities for lectures and interviews. So Istvan and another young Hungarian scientist and member of the Krishna consciousness movement, biotechnologist Balasz Hornyanszky, began researching and writing a book called Nature’s IQ. The book is about animal behaviors that defy explanation by the theory of evolution by natural selection. Istvan asked me to write a foreword to the book, and I was happy to do it. The book was first published in Hungarian, and as expected, it attracted attention within the scientific world and the general public there. Istvan was launched into a whole series of lectures and interviews in his homeland, and the book sold well. Then I brought the book to the attention of my publisher Alister Taylor of Torchlight Publishing, and now the book is available in English translation.

In a novel departure, the authors apply the principles of intelligent design not to biological form but to animal behavior. Applied to biological form, intelligent design theory claims that some biologically complex structures are composed of interacting parts that must all be present simultaneously in order for the complex structure to perform any useful function for the organism. Therefore, these complex biomolecular structures cannot have arisen gradually step by step in the manner that evolutionary theory re-
quires. They must have been designed. Similarly, many animal behaviors are complex. They are composed of several behavioral elements that must all be present simultaneously for the behavior to be carried out and be of survival value to the organism. These behaviors thus appear to be irreducibly complex, and therefore they cannot have come about gradually step by step as evolutionary theory requires. They must have come about by the arrangement of higher intelligence, which in Vedic cosmology is called the Supersoul, who resides in the hearts of all living things.

Let me give one of the hundreds of examples documented in the book, which is beautifully illustrated with numerous full-color photos on every page. In Australia, there is a bird called the mallee fowl (Leipoa ocellata). In order for the birds to successfully reproduce, their eggs have to be kept at the ideal temperature of 93.2 degrees Fahrenheit for nine months after they are laid. If the temperature of the eggs deviates from the ideal temperature by only a few degrees, the eggs will not hatch. So the male mallee fowl keeps the temperature of the eggs within a range of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, plus or minus, from the ideal temperature. How the male bird does this involves complex behavior.

In the winter, a mating pair of birds digs a hole five feet deep and fifteen feet in diameter in the earth. They fill the hole with twigs, leaves, and other plant remains. These soak in rain water. Then the birds cover the vegetable material with sand. The fin-
ished mound is about five feet high, with a hollow egg-laying chamber inside. In the spring, the female mallee fowl lays some eggs in the chamber. Then the male covers it up. The eggs will hatch because of the heat coming from the rotting vegetation, but the temperature must be kept close to the ideal temperature of 93.2 degrees.

To check the temperature, the male bird sticks its beak into the mound and uses its long tongue as a thermometer. In spring, as the weather grows warmer, the heat from the rotting vegetable material can drive the temperature of the eggs to a dangerously high level. At such times, the male bird removes sand from the top of the mound to allow the heat to dissipate. In summer, the hot sun becomes the cause of dangerously high temperature. So the mallee fowl adds more soil to the top of the mound to bring down the temperature of the eggs. In the fall, the weather turns colder and the heat from the vegetation also decreases. During the day, the male mallee fowl removes the upper layers of the mound so that the sun warms the eggs, and during the night he again covers the egg chamber to retain the heat.

If the male bird does his job, the eggs eventually hatch. The male chicks eventually grow up and automatically engage in the same temperature-maintenance behavior when they mate, without having learned it. This means the behavior is somehow encoded in the genes. Supposedly the mallee fowl evolved from some bird that did not have this complex behavior, but instead just sat on its eggs to keep them warm. Some might suggest there were intermediate steps. But intermediate steps would not be of any survival value to the organism. All parts of the complex behavioral system must be there for the birds to reproduce. From the point of view of the male bird, the following elements have to be there: knowledge how to dig a hole of appropriate depth and width; knowledge to fill the bottom of the hole with vegetable matter that will eventually rot and produce heat; knowledge to cover the vegetable matter with soil; knowledge to build an egg-laying chamber; knowledge not to let the female in to lay the eggs until the chamber is at the right temperature; knowledge of the proper temperature for the egg; knowledge to restructure the mound in complex ways to keep the egg temperature constant during daily and seasonal changes of temperature. Pretty amazing. It seems the elaborate nesting behavior was built into the birds when they were created by higher intelligence.

There are other intriguing behaviors. The Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus) throws stones to break open one of its favorite foods, ostrich eggs. The eggs have thick, hard shells and are quite big, and the vultures cannot open them with their beaks. The vulture throws stones at the eggs until they break. Could it be that the vultures learn this behavior? That is not the explanation, because experiments have shown that young vulture chicks raised alone will manifest this behavior. When the chick observes an ostrich egg, it searches around for a suitable stone, brings it to the egg, and throws it at the egg repeatedly. So the behavior must be coded in the genes of the vulture.

The usual textbook explanation is that the behavior somehow evolved step by step in vultures that did not originally possess this ability, by chance mutations and natural selection. According to the theory of evolution, each step would have to be beneficial to the animal’s survival. The authors of Nature’s IQ say, “The phenomena that constitute the feeding behavior of the Egyptian vulture—the search for stones upon seeing the ostrich egg, the retrieval of the stones, and the repeated casting of the stones upon
the egg—would only be meaningless and useless if all of them were not present and fully developed at the same time. . . . Therefore we can conclude that the stone-throwing behavior of the Egyptian vulture is a system of irreducible complexity that could not have evolved gradually.”

In my own work, I have concentrated on showing that there is archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity that contradicts the theory of evolution. I am happy that there are other researchers showing there are other problems for the theory.

Readers interested in the subject matter of this book

are invited to correspond with the author at:

Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing Inc.

3764 Watseka Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90034

Or visit http://www.humandevolution.com

First printing 2010

Copyright © 2010 by Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, by any means, including

mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without

the prior written consent of the publisher.

Published by Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing, Inc. Science Books Division

(BBT Science Books) for the Bhaktivedanta Institute.

Exclusively distributed by Torchlight Publishing, Inc.

P. O. Box 52, Badger, CA 93603

www.torchlight.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cremo, Michael A., 1948–

The forbidden archeologist : the Atlantis rising columns of Michael Cremo.—

1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-89213-337-6

1. Anthropology, Prehistoric. 2. Human evolution. 3. Civilization, Ancient.

4. Excavations (Archaeology) 5. Archaeology—Philosophy. 6. Archaeology

—Political aspects. 7. Archaeology—Social aspects. 8. Cremo, Michael A.,

1948—Travel. I. Atlantis rising. II. Title.

GN741.C73 2010

930.1—dc22

2009043179

Table of Contents

Introduction

1 Lucy vs. Flat Face: The Leakeys’ Secret War Against Australopithecus

2 The China Connection: Conspiracy, Archeology, and the Rockefeller Foundation

3 Bear Foot in the Park at Vertesszölös, Hungary: Some Mysterious Footprints

4 In the Depths of Antiquity: Fraud and Suppression Of Information in Archeology

5 The Godzilla Artifacts Of Boncelles, Belgium

6 With Apologies to Columbus: A Report on the ISAC Annual Conference

7 Czech Please! The Forbidden Archeologist In Prague

8 Christian Creationism, Krishna Creationism, and the Origin of the Human Species

9 The Sunken City in the Gulf of Cambay, India: Will It Sink The Aryan Invasion Hypothesis?

10 Toumai: One Hominid Revolution Too Many

11 Adventures in the Ukraine

12 Investigations into the Antiquity of the Ranganatha Temple In South India

13 The Forbidden Archeologist Goes to Russia

14 Beyond Stones and Bones: Alfred Russel Wallace And the Spirit World

15 Having a Ball in Bulgaria

16 At the World Archeological Congress

17 Extraterrestrial Archeology Goes Mainstream

18 A Trip to Bali

19 Encountering New Realities in Montreal

20 Morphing My Genetic Fields in Montreal

21 Moving in the Right Circles At the Glastonbury Symposium

22 In Memory of Dr. John Mack

23 A Tour of Brazil

24 The Flores Island Hominin: Old Hobbits Are Hard to Break

25 California Dreaming: The State Highway 54 Mastodon Blues

26 Folk Archeological Traditions in India

27 Your Man in Beijing

28 Fancy Footwork in Mexico

29 Reck’s Skeleton: The First Olduvai Gorge Discovery

30 Doing Forbidden Archeology

31 Sterkfontein: The Cradle Of Humanity or Cradle of Lies?

32 Forbidden Archeology And Education Policy

33 Lucy’s Baby: Not My Ancestor

34 Forbidden Paleontology

35 Evidence for Extreme Human Antiquity in Greece

36 The Nampa Image

37 Kanapoi Humorous

38 Habs and Habs Nots

39 The Forbidden Zone: Archeology and Archeologists In Planet of the Apes

40 Platypus Carvings Of Extreme Antiquity

41 Who’s Anatomically Modern?

42 First Europeans

43 High-Tech Microfossils And Other News from Russia

44 Was Lothal a Vedic City? The Evidence from Vastu

45 Why Only Stone Tools?

46 Bolivian Footprints From the Deep Past

47 Happy Birthday, Charlie

48 Kenya Believe It? Scientists Misinterpret New Footprint Evidence

49 Nature’s IQ