Forbidden Archeology: Evidence
for Extreme Human Antiquity and the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis
by Michael A. Cremo
Some researchers in the UFO
field explain the origin of the human species through extraterrestrial
contacts. Generally, the proposed scenarios involve accepting the standard
evolutionary account of hominid evolution, with a relatively late
extraterrestrial intervention giving rise to anatomically modern human beings
within the past few hundred thousand years. It is not my purpose here to directly
discuss specific theories of human origins involving extraterrestrial
intervention. Instead, I will offer a general caution that such theories should
take into account the actual physical evidence for human antiquity.
According to standard ideas,
the human line branched off from the ancestors of the modern chimpanzees about
5 million years ago. The first hominids, or humanlike primates, were the
australopithecines. Further developments led to Homo habilis and Homo erectus.
Finally, at about 100,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans like ourselves
appeared. Scientists say the factual evidence supports this view and no other.
But my research into the history of archeology reveals that archeologists have
found much evidence showing that anatomiclaly modern humans have been present
on this planet for hundreds of millions of years. These results were reported
in Forbidden Archeology (Cremo and
Thompson 1993) and its abridged popular version The Hidden History of the Human Race. These books provoked shockwaves
among mainstream archeologists and anthropologists, as documented in Forbidden Archeology’s Impact (Cremo
1995).
So what kind of evidence are we
talking about? Let’s begin with one example, which is typical of many others
documented in Forbidden Archeology. In
the year 1852, the journal Scientific
American (June 5) carried an intriguing report of a metallic vase blasted
out of solid rock at Dorchester, Massachusetts, near the city of Boston.
Describing the vase, which was about 4.5 inches high, the report said:
"The body of this vessel resembles zinc in color, or a composition metal
in which there is a considerable portion of silver. On the side there are six
figures of a flower or bouquet beautifully inlaid with silver, and around the
lower part of the vessel, a vine, or wreath, also inlaid with silver.” The vase
came from fifteen deep in a layer of rock called “pudding stone.” The "pudding stone" is now known to geologists as the Roxbury
Conglomerate, and according to the United States Geological Survey, this rock
is of Precambrian age, over 600 million years old.
Before moving on to other
examples of evidence for extreme human antiquity, let me explain why I
undertook this research effort. As a member of the Bhaktivedanta Institute,
which is the science studies branch of the International Society for Krishna
Consciousness, I have deeply studied the ancient Sanskrit writings of India for
almost thirty years. Among these writings are the Puranas, or histories. The Puranas
contain accounts of human civilizations existing on this planet for
hundreds of millions of years. During this time,according to these accounts,
human beings like ourselves coexisted with intelligent races of apelike
creatures.
As I mentioned in a paper that
I presented at the World Archeological Congress (Cremo 1999), one can from the Puranic histories make two
predictions about the archeological record. This first prediction is that one
should expect to find a bewildering mixture of human fossils and artifacts,
some appearing quite advanced and others appearing quite primitive, going back
hundreds of millions of years. And in truth, one does find this.
The second prediction is that
this archeological evidence for coexistence of humans and more apelike
creatures will be edited by establishment scientists to conform to their linear
progressive concept of time and evolution, with simple forms existing earlier
and more complex one later. And in fact, one also does find this. Scientists
have indeed selectively suppressed the abundant evidence for the extreme
antiquity of anatomically "modern" humans. This suppression has taken
place by a process of knowledge filtration, whereby reports conforming to
certain preconceived notions are preserved in scientific discourse and reports
not conforming to these preconceived notions are dropped from scientific
discourse. UFO researchers are well aware of how this knowledge filtration
process operates in suppressing evidence in their field of research.
The process of knowledge
filtration in the study of human origins has been going on systematically for
about 150 years. In 1849, gold was
discovered in California. Miners rushed there to extract it, digging mineshafts
into the sides of mountains. Many such mines were opened at Table Mountain in
Tuolumne County. The deposits at Table Mountain are covered by hundreds of feet
of solid basalt, preventing objects from entering from above. The gold-bearing
gravels near the bedrock are said by modern geologists to be from 33 to 55
million years old (Slemmons 1966). Miners recovered human artifacts and human
skeletal remains from mineshafts at this level. Such artifacts and fossils were
also found in gravels from the higher sub-basaltic gravels, which are at least
9 million years old. These objects were found not only at Table Mountain, but
at many other locations in the same region. Among the artifacts discovered in
the mines were obsidian spear points and stone mortars and pestles, such as the
stone mortar and pestle recovered by J. H. Neale 1,500 feet inside the Montezuma
Tunnel mineshaft at Table Mountain. This specimen, found in the gravels near
the bedrock, would thus be between 33 and 55 million years old. All of these
discoveries were collected and reported to the scientific world by Dr. J. D.
Whitney (1880), the state geologist of California, in a book published by
Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Natural History.
So what happened to these very
well documented discoveries, placing human beings in California up to 55
million years ago? William H. Holmes, a very powerful anthropologist working at
the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D. C., used his prestige and
influence to discredit Dr. Whitney and his discoveries. Holmes (1899, p. 424)
wrote: "Perhaps 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 facts do not conform
to the favored theory, then the facts, even an imposing array of them, must be
set aside.
Someone might argue that such
things may have happened in the nineteenth century but not today. Not true. In
February 1996 the California gold mine discoveries and other interesting cases
from my book Forbidden Archeology were featured in an NBC television special called
The Mysterious Origins of Man. It was
produced and directed by Bill Cote and his associates at BC Video. During the
filming of The Mysterious Origins of Man,
I told the producers to contact officials at the Phoebe Hearst Natural
History Museum at the University of California in Berkeley for permission to
film the artifacts stored there. Permission was denied.
Although we were not able to
get the new video images we wanted, we were able to use published photographs
taken of the objects in the nineteenth century. When broadcast, the show was
very popular, and NBC decided to air it again. Establishment scientists, taken
by surprise and outraged at the first
showing, attempted to prevent the program from being rebroadcast. When they
failed, they tried to get the U.S. government to take action against NBC.
(Cremo 1998, pp. 467-534)
On June 17, 1996, Dr. Allison
R. Palmer, president of the Institute for Cambrian Studies, wrote to the
Federal Communications Commission, the government agency that grants licenses
to television broadcasting companies: “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.” (Cremo 1998, pp. 533-534) 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. It is worth noting that copies of Palmer’s letter
were sent to the executives of NBC and were widely distributed on the internet
to scientists, who were invited to send their own letters of support to the
FCC.
In
the 1970s, Virginia Steen-McIntyre was a young geologist working for the United
States Geological Survey. She took part in the dating of an archeological site
in Mexico--at a place called Hueyatlaco near the city of Puebla. Anthropologist
Cynthia Irwin-Williams had recovered advanced stone tools from this site. Tools
of this level of sophistication are normally attributed to anatomically modern
humans. Using four different methods
(uranium series, tephra hydration, fission track, and stratigraphy), Viriginia
Steen-McIntyre and her colleagues obtained dates of over 250,000 years for the
Hueyatlaco site (Steen-McIntyre et al. 1981).
This
was unexpected for two reasons. According to standard views, human beings did
not enter North America until about 25,000 years ago, at most, with
conservative scientists favoring an entry time of 12,000 years. Furthermore,
human beings capable of making such tools did not come into existence until
about 100,000 years ago. The principal anthropologist at the site was quite
unhappy with the dates obtained by Viriginia-Steen McIntyre and her colleagues.
She wanted a date of 25,000 or less, not 250,000 years! Virginia
Steen-McIntyre, however, remained firm in her conviction that the age of
250,000 years was correct. But she paid a considerable price for her
conviction. She found it difficult to get her report published, she was labeled
a publicity seeker within her profession, she lost a teaching position she held
at an American university, and found that her career as a geologist was
blocked.
Describing her experience with
the knowledge filtration process, Virginia Steen-McIntyre 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." (Cremo and Thompson 1993, pp. 364-365).
The case of Virginia
Steen-McIntyre shows the suppression of evidence by very direct means. In other
cases, the process of knowledge filtration is more subtle. It can take the form
of inability to properly evaluate evidence because of strongly held theoretical
preconceptions. For example, in 1979 researchers in Tanzania found sets of
footprints in volcanic ash deposits about 3.6 million years old. According to
Mary Leakey (1979) and other scientists, these footprints are indistinguishable
from modern human footprints. The usual explanation is that the footprints were
made by Australopithecus, the apeman
of that period. But careful study shows that none of the fossil foot bones of Australopithecus fit the Laetoli prints
(Tuttle 1985). Among other things, Australopithecus
had toes much longer than those of modern human beings. As of today, the only
creatures known to science that could make the Laetoli prints are human beings
like ourselves. But most scientists would not even dream of considering this
possibility. They are absolutely convinced that anatomically modern human
beings evolved about 100,000 years ago and could not possibly have been present
3.6 million years ago in Africa.
One might ask if there are any
human skeletal remains of that age, and the answer is yes. For example, such
fossils occur at Castenedolo, in northern Italy, near Brescia. There the
Italian geologist Giuseppe Ragazzoni (1880) collected bones of 4 individuals
from a blue clay formation of Middle Pliocene age--about 3 or 4 million years
old. The skeletal remains show the Castenedolo individuals were anatomically
modern. Some have suggested that the skeletons arrived in their positions by
burial in fairly recent times, but as a professional geologist Ragazzoni was
well aware of this possibility. He carefully inspected the overlying layers of
sediment and found them undisturbed. A skeleton of similar age was found by
other researchers at Savona, Italy, and details of its discovery were reported
to the scientific world by Arthur Issel (1868).
But many influential scientists
opposed such discoveries on theoretical grounds. British archeologist R. A. S.
Macalister provides a good example of such scientific prejudice. In 1921 (p.
183), he wrote about the Castenedolo finds: "There must be something wrong
somewhere." But why? Had not the bones been discovered by a professional
geologist in a layer of undisturbed Pliocene clay? That was not good enough for
Macalister (1921, p. 185), who said: "The acceptance of a Pliocene date
for the Castenedolo skeletons would create so many insoluble problems that we
can hardly hesitate in choosing between the alternatives of adopting or
rejecting their authenticity." Macalister, of course, rejected their
authenticity, and given his prominent position, this rejecting carried
tremendous authority.
Keep in mind that the
Castenedolo fossils show that there were anatomically human beings present in
Italy at the same time that the Laetoli footprints were made in East Africa,
about 4 million years ago. There is also some fragmentary fossil evidence from
Africa itself. In 1965, anthropologists Bryan Patterson and William W. Howells
found at Kanapoi, Kenya, a fragment of a humerus (upper arm bone). Upon examining
it, they found it to be almost exactly like a modern human humerus (Patterson
and Howells 1967). Other researchers have found it to be different from those
of the australopithecines (McHenry and Corruccini 1975). The Kanapoi humerus is
4-5 million years old.
And we can go much further back
in time. The French anthropologist Gabriel de Mortillet (1883, p. 72), in his
book Le Préhistorique, tells of a
complete anatomically modern human skeleton found in a Miocene formation at
Midi de France (at least 5 million years old and perhaps as much as 25 million
years old) and another such skeleton found in an Eocene formation at Delémont,
Switzerland (at least 38 million years old).
There are human artifacts of
similar antiquity, among them the stone tools found by Carlo Ribeiro (1873),
head of the Geological Survey of Portugal, in Miocene formations near Lisbon.
These are about 20 million years old. They were originally displayed by Ribeiro
at the Museum of Geology in Lisbon. Early in the twentieth century, museum
workers changed the labels to indicate younger, acceptable dates, and later the
artifacts were completely removed from display and placed in storage (Cremo
2000). Stone tools were found by Louis Bourgeois (1873) in a Miocene formation
at Thenay, France, and more stone tools
were found by Fritz Noetling (1894), of the Geological Survey of India, in a
Miocene formation in Burma. These discoveries, made in the late nineteenth
century, were published in scientific journals and discussed in scientific conferences.
The only reason for their absence from current textbooks is that they
contradict the idea of a recent human origin.
From the United States comes a
human skeleton found 90 feet deep in coal in Macoupin County, Illinois.
Immediately above the skeleton were 2 feet of unbroken slate rock. The coal in
which the skeleton was found is from the Carboniferous period, making the
fossil about 300 million years old. The report of this discovery was printed in
the December 1862 edition of a scientific journal called The Geologist. The June 11, 1891 edition of the Morrisonville Times newspaper, of
Morrisonville, Illinois, in the United States, carried a report of a gold chain
discovered inside a solid piece of coal. The chain was found by Mrs. S. W.
Culp, wife of the newspaper's publisher, when she was breaking a lump of coal.
According to the Illinois State Geological Survey, the coal containing the
chain is of Carboniferous age, about 300 million years old. In 1897, a coal
miner working in a mine near Webster, Iowa, in the United States, found an
unusual carving on a piece of stone. The Daily
News of Omaha, Nebraska (April 2, 1897) said: "The stone is of dark
grey color and about two feet long, one foot wide and four inches in thickness.
Over the surface of the stone, which is very hard, lines are drawn at angles
forming perfect diamonds. The center of each diamond is a fairly good face of
an old man."
Also of interest is an iron pot
found in a block of coal in the year 1912 by Frank J. Kenwood. The discovery
occurred at the Municipal Electric Plant in Thomas, Oklahoma, where the coal
was burned to generate power. Kenwood wrote in a notarized affidavit: "I
came upon a solid chunk of coal which was too large to use. I broke it with a
sledge hammer. This iron pot fell from the center, leaving the impression of
mould of the pot in the piece of coal" (Rusch 1971, p. 201). The coal was
traced by Kenwood to the Wilburton Mine. According to the Oklahoma Geological
Survey the coal in that mine is about 312 million years old.
Such intriguing discoveries
continue to be made. Over the past several decades, miners in South Africa have
found hundreds of metallic spheres with grooves running around their equators.
One specimen has three such parallel grooves encircling it. The spheres are
composed of a very hard substance. Roelf Marx, curator of the museum of
Klerksdorp, South Africa, wrote about the spheres in a letter dated September 12, 1984: "They are found in
pyrophyllite, which is mined near the little town of Ottosdal in the Western
Transvaal. This pyrophyllite is a quite soft secondary mineral...and was formed
by sedimentation about 2.8 billion years ago. On the other hand the
globes...are very hard and cannot be scratched, even by steel" (Cremo and
Thompson 1993, p. 813). No one has yet come up with a satisfactory natural
explanation for the spheres, which appear to be human artifacts.
I have here mentioned only a
few of the hundreds of well documented cases showing the extreme antiquity of
the human race on this planet. There is a fairly continuous chain of
discoveries going from about 100,000 years ago to over 2 billion years ago.
Hypotheses about extraterrestrial contacts and interventions should be
considered within the framework of this evidence.
References
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(1873) Sur les silex considérés comme portant les margues d’un travail humain
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