Ancient
rabbinical texts state that "worlds upon worlds there
were before Adam was.”
Before its recent
rebirth at Anomalist Books, my book Worlds Before Our Own
had a rather bizarre publishing history. When the book
was first released in October of 1978, the initial
reviews were the most scathing that I have ever received.
One reviewer was so offended by my arguments for a global
prehistoric civilization and my presentation of
mysterious "man-made" artifacts found in the deepest,
most primordial geological strata that he called for the
book to be burned.
Previously, I had
dealt with religious fundamentalist critics who denounced
me as an agent of the devil for my explorations into the
paranormal and UFOs, but I could not comprehend how a
book that presented the evidence for a prehistoric,
pre-Homo sapiens civilization could possibly upset a book
reviewer to the extent that he would call for a book to
be burned. Others followed suit and angrily declared that
I had no right to write about archaeological anomalies,
because such discoveries, if acknowledged, would demolish
the traditional time-tables of human evolution.
It seemed that a
host of critics were highly offended by my listing sites
of exposed strata of the Paleozoic era that bore clearly
defined sandal prints and foot prints, thus making those
"human" imprints 250-million years old. If these were not
hominid tracks, then such prints certainly appear to have
been made by some bipedal creature with a very human
looking foot.
Fossilized
footprints such as this have been found throughout the
planet--but perhaps especially in the southwestern United
States. In addition, humanlike footprints have also been
found in situ with the tracks of three-toed dinosaurs,
thereby causing no end of controversy in the halls of
orthodox science, for the conventional calendar of epochs
has the great reptiles disappearing 60 million years
before humankind's nearest ancestors even began their
evolutionary trek.
Certainly, any
attempt to solve the puzzle of humankind's origins is
very difficult.
In April, 1997,
word was released of a discovery of four finely crafted
hunting spears dated at 400,000 years ago that were found
in a coal mine sixty miles from Hanover, Germany. The six
and one-half foot spears, superbly made and weighted for
precision throwing, are, according to archaeologist
Hartmut Thieme, "the oldest and most complete hunting
weapons ever found."
The difficulty with
this discovery is that orthodox and conventional
scientists have previously argued that humans did not
begin hunting until 40,000 years ago.
On November 17,
2007, paleoanthropologist David Lordkipanidze’s
excavations at Dmanisi, Georgia, yielded skeletons of
small-framed early humans 1.77 million years old. Easily
the earliest hominid fossils to be discovered in Europe,
the enigma of how these ancestors of humankind made their
way from Africa’s Great Rift Valley to the highlands
at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains will not be a
simple one to solve. In fact, the whole “out of
Africa” theory of human migration may have to be
rethought.
The world that
permits you to read this article, watch television, surf
the Internet, drive an automobile, and ride in an
airplane is said to have begun in Sumer 6000 years ago
when a dying star's flaring brilliance caught the
attention of a primitive neolithic people and made them
receptive to the advent of cultural stirrings.
Almost "overnight"
the tribes that for centuries had been contented to fight
and club their way around the Mesopotamian valley somehow
became skilled in the arts of civilized living. They left
the risky rewards of hunting and gathering and became
farmers, tending the soil and irrigating the land. They
became experts in metals, ceramics, and hundreds of other
skills. They constructed permanent homes, temples,
towers, and pyramids where scant decades before there had
been only crude tents and huts.
Berossus, the
Babylonian priest-historian, credits Oannes, an
amphibious half-man creature that emerged from the
Persian Gulf as the teacher of enlightenment who nursed
the once primitive Sumerians into creating the cradle of
civilization and who guided them in writing the first
love song, formulating the first school system, compiling
the first directory of pharmaceutical concoctions,
fashioning a balanced law code, and instituting the first
parliament. Before the advent of Oannes, Berossus stated,
the Sumerians "lived like beasts in the field, with no
order or rule."
Sumerian
astronomers became so accurate in their science that
their measurements on the rotation of the Moon is off
only 0.4 from modern, computerized figures.
Was the mysterious
Oannes simply the symbol of the advent of sudden
civilization--or was he among the survivors of a strange
and alien world that existed on this planet for hundreds
of thousands, if not millions, of years before
Sumer?
At the height of
the Greek Civilization, the highest known number was
10,000. After that sum, the Greek mathematicians could
only fall back on "infinity." Centuries before the
Greeks, the Sumerians had become master mathematicians
who had achieved a series of remarkable accomplishments.
A tablet found in the Kuynjik hills some years back
contained a 15-digit
number--195,955,200,000,000.
Sumerian
astronomers charted the stars with a precision worthy of
our modern scientists. One pictograph depicts the planets
revolving around the Sun--something that Copernicus and
Kepler postulated only 500 years ago.
Other Sumerian
drawings show humanlike beings with helmets of stars.
Some figures are drawn zooming through the skies on
celestial, starred discs or spheres.
Conventional
historians have a habit of dismissing myths and legends
about the origin of civilizations and nations, and they
have discarded the Sumerians' own account of how their
remarkable city-state was established.
In their
collaborative work Intelligent Life in the Universe, Dr.
Carl Sagan and Dr. Joseph S. Shklovski discuss the
ancient Sumerian tablets known as Ancient Fragments, as a
possible firsthand account of how civilization began:
“...Ancient writers present an account of a
remarkable series of events. Sumerian civilization is
depicted by the descendents of the Sumerians themselves
to be of non-human origin. A succession of strange
creatures appears over a course of several generations.
Their only apparent purpose is to instruct mankind.
Oannes and the Apkallu (strange creatures) are described
variously as "animals endowed with reason," as "beings,"
as "semi-demons," and as "personages."
The task of
solving the mystery of human origins would be even more
difficult for contemporary researchers if they truly
stopped to analyze and date the archaeological digs that
I wrote about in Worlds Before Our Own. There have been
excavations in the United States that have produced the
remains of primitive men and women over seven feet tall;
hominids with horns; giants with double rows of teeth;
prehistoric people with sharply slanting foreheads and
fanged jaws, pygmy cultures far smaller in height than
any known groups.
In July 1895, a
party of miners working near Bridal Veil Falls,
California, found the tomb of woman whose skeletal
remains were six-feet-eight inches in length. The miners
had found the Amazon behind a wall of rock that had been
shaped and fitted together with an apparent knowledge of
masonry. When they had broken through the wall, they
hoped that they had stumbled upon some ancient treasure
trove. Instead of gold or jewels, the miners remains of a
woman whose skeletal frame measured six-feet-eight inches
in height. The mysterious madonna had been wrapped in
animal skins and covered with a fine gray powder. She
clutched the remains of a child to her breast.
Scientists in Los
Angeles agreed that the mummy was that of a woman from a
race that had flourished on the continent long before any
of the Native American tribes had become dominant. Their
learned consensus was that she would have stood over
seven feet tall in life, thereby making the males of her
kind at least eight feet tall.
In 1898, H. Flagler
Cowden and his brother Charles unearthed the fossil
remains of a giant female, who they speculated was a
member of a race of large primitive people who had
vanished from the face of the earth some 100,000 years
ago. Astonishingly, the Cowdens found their giant woman
in Death Valley, an area that, while desolate in modern
times, may have been an inlet for the Pacific Ocean in
prehistoric times. In the same stratum with the female
skeleton were the remains of extinct camels, elephants,
palm trees, towering ferns, and fish life.
Perhaps the
Cowdens' estimate of 100,000 years ago may have been
excessive, even though the brothers based their
conclusion on the amount of silica in the soil and the
sands and by the state of petrification of the skeletal
remains, along with the crystallization and opalization
of the bone marrow.
The giant female
was seven-feet-six inches tall. Assuming the same kind of
height ratio which exists in contemporary times, the
males of the vanished valley paradise would likely have
been eight feet tall.
The Cowdens
discovered a number of anomalous physical appendages and
attributes not found in contemporary humans. To cite two
of the most dramatic examples, the Cowdens noted that the
woman had canine teeth twice the size and length of
contemporary humans. She also had a number of extra
"buttons" at the base of her spine, "and every indication
betrayed the evidence that the woman and her people were
endowed with tail-like appendages."
A newspaper account
dated April 4, 1874, tells of a veritable catacomb of
giant skeletal remains that was unearthed when workmen
were opening a way for the railroad between Wildon and
Garrysburg, North Carolina: “The skulls were nearly
an inch in thickness; the teeth were filed sharp...the
enamel perfectly preserved; the bones were of wonderful
strength, the femur being as long as the leg of an
ordinary man, the stature of the body being probably as
great as eight or nine feet....The bodies were found
closely packed together, laid tier on tier....The mystery
is, who these were, to what race they belonged, to what
era, and how they came to be buried there.…”
The North American
continent has supported lost civilizations of tiny folk,
as well as rugged giants.
Harper's Magazine,
July 1869, tells of several burying grounds in Tennessee
for tiny men and women, the tallest of whom was nineteen
inches tall. These wee folk from an unknown culture were
all buried in stone coffins, their heads to the east,
their hands folded across their chests. In the bend of
the left arm of each skeleton lay a pint vessel made of
ground stone or shell of a grayish color. The skeletons
were all strong and well set, and their basic structures
were well formed.
As more and more
these anomalous discoveries in the geological strata of
North America are unearthed, it begins to seem as though
the continent served as some vast living laboratory of
genetic experimentation. Perhaps we might consider the
possibility that the progenitors of our species may have
been guided around some evolutionary dead ends and that
even the monster-humans of mythology might have been
abortive experiments by prehistoric genetic engineers
from some forgotten world before our own.