I find myself now
in the seventh decade of life still asking two questions
that in one way or another the great majority of my 165
published books have sought to answer: 1.) Who are we as
a species? 2.) What is our destiny?
The basic reason that I
wrote Worlds Before Our Own (G.P. Putnam‘s Sons,
1978; Anomalist Books, 2007) is that I have always found
it incredible that such sophisticated people as we judge
ourselves to be do not really know who we are.
Archaeologists, anthropologists, and various academicians
who play the "origins of Man" game, reluctantly and only
occasionally acknowledge instances where unique skeletal
and cultural evidence from the prehistoric record
suddenly appear long before they should -- and in places
where they should not. These irritating artifacts destroy
the orderly evolutionary line that academia has for so
long presented to the public. Consequently, such data has
been largely left buried in site reports, forgotten
storage rooms, and dusty archives where one suspects that
there is a great deal of suppressed, ignored, and
misplaced pre-historical cultural evidence that would
alter the established interpretations of human origins
and provide us with a much clearer definition of what it
means to be human.
There is now a basic
academic consensus that the "homo" lineage goes back at
least three million years and that an ancestor of modern
man evolved about one million years ago. Homo Sapiens,
the "thinking man," our own species, became the dominant
planetary life form on a worldwide basis about 40,000
years ago.
It is difficult enough
to explain the sudden appearance of Homo Sapiens at that
time, but it is an even more complex question to ponder
why Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man correspondingly
disappeared. And academic warfare rages unceasingly over
whether or not Neanderthal and our ancestors were two
separate species or whether they interbred.
And just as scientists
are adding to a growing body of evidence that humankind
developed in Africa, a Hungarian excavation surrenders a
Homo Sapiens skull fragment in a context more than
600,000 years out of alignment with the accepted calendar
of man's migrations across the planet; hominid fossils
are unearthed in Dmanisi, Georgia, indicative of 1.77
million years old; and a homind tooth found in Niocene
deposits near the Maritsa River in Bulgaria is dated at
seven million years old.
What happens to Darwinian
evolution when there are such sites as the one in
Australia, which yielded Homo Sapiens (modern man), Homo
erectus (our million-year-old ancestor), and Neanderthal
(our Stone Age cousin) in what appears to be a
contemporaneous environment? Then there is the Tabun site
where Homo Sapiens fragments were found in strata below
(which means older than) classic Neanderthal bones. In
August 2007, scientists dating fossils found in Kenya
challenged the conventional view that Homo Habilis (1.44
million years) and Homo erectus (1.55 million years)
evolved one after the other. Dating of new fossil
evidence revealed that the two species lived side by side
in Africa for almost half a million years.
Somewhere, in what would
appear to be a biological and cultural free-for-all,
there must lie the answer to that most important
question: Who are we?
But just as we are trying
our best to fit skeletal fragments together in a manner
that will be found acceptable to what we believe we know
about our origins, footprints are being found in stone,
which, if they are what they appear to be, will make a
total shambles of our accepted evolutionary calendar. In
Pershing County, Nevada, a shoe print was found in
Triassic limestone, strata indicative of 400 million
years, in which the fossilized evidence clearly revealed
finely wrought double-stitching in the seams.
Early in 1975, Dr.
Stanley Rhine of the University of New Mexico announced
his discovery of human-like footprints in strata
indicative of 40 million years old. A few months before,
a similar find was made in Kenton, Oklahoma. At almost
the same time, a discovery of a footprint in stone was
revealed in north-central Wisconsin.
In Death Valley, there is
ample fossil and skeletal evidence to indicate that the
desolate area was once a tropical Garden of Eden where a
race of giants lived and fed themselves with palatable
foods taken from the local lakes and forests.
To speak of a race of
prehistoric giants in what is now the desert sands of
Death Valley is simultaneously to refute the doctrine
which decrees that man is a relative newcomer to the
North and South American continents. While on the one
hand, new radiocarbon dates demonstrate that the Bering
Land Bridge and Cordilleran Ice Corridor were not
passable until 9000 years ago, an increasing amount of
physical evidence indicates that man was surely in this
hemisphere much earlier than that recent date.
For one thing, corn, an
American contribution to the dinner tables of the world,
is said to be, at 9000 years, our oldest domesticated
seed crop. Some agriculturist had to be in the Americas
more than 9000 years ago in order to domesticate the
seed. Ancient squash seeds, peanuts, and cotton balls
dated at 8,500 years old found in Peru’s Nanchoc
Valley constitute additional evidence that New World
farming was well established. Conclusive proof that such
ancient farmers did exist in the Americas was offered
when a Humble Oil Company drill brought up Mexican corn
pollen that was more than 80,000 years old.
The anomalous Indian
blood seration and dentition and the geographic
distribution of the American Indian demands an impossible
genetic time scale in which to transform Asiatic
immigrants to distinctive New World inhabitants. Even if
we attempt to keep some kind of peace with the accepted
theories of New World habitation, we must grant more
evolution in 40,000 years in North America than that
which took place in more than one million years in
Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Skulls found in
California, which are clearly those of American Indians,
have been dated at 50,000 years old. But we are left with
another mystery. A 140,000 year old American Indian type
skull (via metric analysis) has been found at an Iranian
excavation site.
What of the lost
Amerindian civilization of Cahokia, complete with
pyramids and a great wall? One site, near the present
city of St. Louis, may have contained a metropolis of
more than 250,000 North American Indians. And who
constructed the mysterious seven-mile walls of the
Berkeley and Oakland, California, hills?
And which pre-Mayan
peoples engineered an elaborate waterworks in Yucatan to
irrigate crops over 2000 years ago?
The Caracol Tower at
Chichen Itza is a remarkable Mesoamerican observatory
that seems to have correlated its findings with similar
sites in North America, including Mesa Verde, Wichita,
and Chaco Canyon.
One of the most heretical
theories that I suggest in Worlds Before Our Own is that
the cradle of civilization might possibly have traveled
from the so-called New World to the Old. Now, in December
2007, years after Ruth Shady Solis found the ancient city
of Caral, Peru, scientists have accepted the carbon
dating of 2,627 B.C.E., thereby establishing the
civilization in South America to be much older than the
Harappa Valley towns and the pyramids of Egypt. Caral
must now be recognized as “the mother of all
civilizations,” the missing link of archaeology, the
Mother City.
Scientific knowledge has
seemingly been prized by the inhabitants of every
culture, known and unknown. Rock engravings, which may be
as old as 60 million years, depict in step-by-step
illustrations an entire heart-transplant operation and a
Cesarean section. The ancient Egyptians used the
equivalent of contraceptive jelly and had urine pregnancy
tests. The cement used in filling Mayan dental cavities
still holds after 1500 years.
No fabric is supposed to
have been found until Egypt produced cloth material 5000
years ago. How, then, can we deal with the Russian site
which provides spindle whorls and patterned fabric
designs more than 80,000 years old?
Not only did the ancient
Babylonians appear to use sulfur matches, but they had a
technology sophisticated enough to employ complex
electrochemical battery cells with wiring. There is also
evidence of electric batteries and electrolysis in
ancient Egypt, India, and Swahililand.
Remains of a
metal-working factory of over 200 furnaces was found at
what is now Medzamor in Russian Armenia. Although a
temperature of over 1780 degrees is required to melt
platinum, some pre-Incan peoples in Peru were making
objects of the metal. Even today the process of
extracting aluminum from bauxite is a complicated
procedure, but Chou Chu, famous general of the Tsin era
(265-316 A.D.), was interred with aluminum belt fasteners
on his burial costume.
Carved bones, chalk,
stones, together with what would appear to be greatly
ornamented ''coins," have been brought up from great
depths during well-drilling operations. A strange,
imprinted slab was found in a coal mine. The artifact was
decorated with diamond-shaped squares with the face of an
old man in each ''box." In another coal-mine discovery,
miners found smooth, polished concrete blocks which
formed a solid wall. According to one miner's testimony.
he chipped one block open only to find the standard
mixture of sand and cement that makes up most typical
building blocks of today.
A gold necklace was found
embedded in a lump of coal. A metal spike was discovered
in a silver mine in Peru. An iron implement was found in
a Scottish coal-bed. Estimated to be millions of years
older than man is believed to have existed. A metal,
bell-shaped vessel, inlaid with a silver floral design
was blasted out of solid rock near Dorchester,
Massachusetts.
Two hypotheses may
explain the presence of these perplexing artifacts: 1)
that they were manufactured by an advanced civilization
on Earth which, due either to natural or technological
catastrophe, was destroyed before our world's own
genesis; 2) that they are vestiges of a highly
technological civilization of extraterrestrial origin,
which visited this planet millions of years ago, leaving
behind various artifacts.
Even if a highly advanced
extraterrestrial race might have visited this planet in
prehistoric times, it seems unlikely such common,
everyday items as nails, necklaces, buckles and vases
would have been carried aboard a spacecraft deposited in
such widely separated areas; for such artifacts have been
found in North and South America, Great Britain, the
whole of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Mid-East.
In spite of the general
unpopularity of catastrophism, there does seem to be a
number of recently discovered "proofs" of ancient
cataclysmic changes in the Earth's crust which may
account for the nearly total disappearance of these
prehistoric worlds. Geological evidence indicates that
these changes were both sudden and drastic might have
completely overwhelmed and destroyed the early
inhabitants and their cultures.
Perhaps the most
potentially mind-boggling evidence of an advanced
prehistoric technology that might have blown its
parent-culture away is to be found in those sites which
ostensibly bear mute evidence of prehistoric nuclear
warfare.
Large areas of fused
green glass and vitrified cities have been found deep in
the strata of archaeological digs at Pierrelatte in
Gabon, Africa; the Euphrates Valley; the Sahara Desert;
the Gobi Desert; Iraq; the Mojave Desert; Scotland; the
Old and Middle Kingdoms of Egypt; and south-central
Turkey. In contemporary times, such material as fused
green glass has only been known at nuclear testing sites
(where the sand had melted to form the substance). It is
quite unsettling to some to consider it possible that
these sites provide evidence of a prehistoric nuclear
war. At the same time, scientists have found a number of
uranium deposits that appear to have been mined or
depleted in antiquity.
If it is possible that
nuclear annihilation of a global civilization did occur
in prehistoric times, it seems even more urgent to learn
who we really are before we find ourselves doomed to
repeat the lessons left to us by a world before our
own.