Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization

2 Evolution vs. Creation

Is the Debate for Real?

David Lewis

Genesis, the biblical story of creation, tells us that God created the universe in six days. He made Adam, the first man, the Bible tells us, from the dust of the earth, an event many Christians believe took place in the Garden of Eden six thousand years ago. Scientists and religious scholars call this scenario “creationism.”

In 1859, Charles Darwin came up with another idea. He said man’s existence could be explained within the context of material creation alone, through evolution and natural selection—that is, “the survival of the fittest.” According to Darwin, man evolved from the apes, an idea distinctly at odds with the biblical scenario.

The debate over human origins has raged ever since. It surfaced recently in Abbotsford, British Columbia, where a school board dominated by Christians requires the teaching of “intelligent design,” a form of creationism, along with the theory of evolution. Reports Maclean’s magazine, “The issue they are debating is a large one . . . arguably the biggest question of them all: how did life begin . . . with a Big Bang or a Big Being?”

Critics of the Abbotsford policy fear the school board would place the Book of Genesis on a par with Darwin’s Origin of Species. They accuse the board of imposing their religious beliefs on students, while some Christians believe that teaching Darwinism amounts to the same thing, the imposition of a de facto religious belief system.

Recent studies show, however, that adherents to both sides of this wrangle would do well to rethink their positions. A reexamination of old and new research reveals that the creationism-versus-Darwinism debate may be missing the mark entirely.

Richard Thompson and Michael Cremo, coauthors of Forbidden Archeology (and its condensed version, The Hidden History of the Human Race), have assembled a body of evidence that testifies to the existence of modern man millions of years before his supposed emergence from southern Africa 100,000 years ago.

On “The Mysterious Origins of Man,” an NBC documentary that aired in February of 1996, Thompson and Cremo make their case along with other experts. The evidence they reveal suggests man neither evolved from apes nor rose from the dust of the earth just four thousand years before the time of Christ. The implications are profound and may force a reevaluation of the entire issue of human origins.

Narrated by Charlton Heston and drawing on evidence largely ignored by the scientific establishment, “The Mysterious Origins of Man” steps outside the usual Bible-versus-Darwin debate. At issue are human footprints discovered in Texas, side by side with dinosaur tracks; stone tools dating back fifty-five million years; sophisticated maps of unknown antiquity; and evidence of advanced civilization in prehistory.

Based on research assembled as Darwin began to dominate scientific thought at the turn of the nineteenth century, and also upon more recent archeological discoveries, “The Mysterious Origins of Man” exposes a “knowledge filter” within the scientific establishment, a bias that favors accepted dogma while rejecting evidence that does not support conventional theory.

As a result, fossil evidence indicating that man is far more ancient than conventional theory allows, and that he did not evolve from apes, has gathered dust for over a century. It has been suppressed, in effect, because it conflicts with an entrenched belief system, the NBC documentary reveals. Moreover, scientists who challenge accepted dogma can find themselves not only on the outside of the debate, but also unemployed.

Thompson, the science investigator Richard Milton, and other experts trace the problem to “speculative leaps” made by researchers too eager to find the missing link in human evolution, the long-sought-after ancestor of both man and apes. “It seems any missing link will do,” Milton says, regarding the 120-year effort to prove Darwin’s theory.

In the case of the so-called pithecanthropus ape-man (aka Java Man, Homo erectus), the anthropologist Eugene Dubois found, in Indonesia, a human thighbone and the skullcap of an ape separated by a distance of forty feet. The year was 1891. He pieced the two together, creating the famous Java Man. But many experts say the thighbone and skullcap are unrelated. Shortly before his death, Dubois himself said the skullcap belonged to a large monkey and the thighbone to a man. Yet Java Man remains to this day, to many, evidence of man’s descent from the apes, having been featured as such in New York’s Museum of Natural History until 1984.

In the case of Piltdown Man, another missing link wannabe, this one “discovered” in England in 1910, the find proved to be a sophisticated fraud perpetrated, in all likelihood, by overly zealous Darwinists. And even the crown jewel of alleged human ancestral fossils, the famous “Lucy,” found in Ethiopia in 1974, is indistinguishable from a monkey or an extinct ape, according to many anthropologists.

The physical anthropologist Charles Oxnard and other scientists have drawn a picture of human evolution that is radically at odds with the conventional theory, a fact usually ignored by universities and natural history museums. Oxnard placed the genus Homo, to which man belongs, in a far more ancient time period than standard evolutionary theory allows, bringing into question the underpinnings of Darwin’s theory. As reported in Cremo and Thompson’s Forbidden Archeology, Oxnard says, “The conventional notion of human evolution must now be heavily modified or even rejected . . . new concepts must be explored.”

What pains other opponents of standard evolutionary theory is its inability to account for how new species and features originate—the supposition that the innumerable aspects of biological life, down to the pores in human skin, and a beetle’s legs, and the protective pads on a camel’s knees, came about accidentally through natural selection. The notion of intent, or inherent purpose, within creation does not fit in to the Darwinian version of reality.

Life, to a Darwinist, can exist only in the context of absolute materialism: a series of accidental events and chemical reactions that are responsible for everything in the universe. Even common sense seems to take a backseat to scientific dogma. In the case of the human brain, for instance, its advanced capacities (the ability to perform calculus, play the violin, even consciousness itself) cannot be explained by the “survival of the fittest” doctrine alone.

WHAT ABOUT THE BIBLE AND CREATIONISM?

The creationist argument derives from orthodox religious doctrine, rejecting allegorical and metaphorical interpretations of the Book of Genesis. It is a belief system many Christians do not accept literally and which the Bible itself may not support. It also lacks scientific support, in that fossil records reveal that man has existed on Earth for far longer than six thousand years. The six days of creation scenario, moreover, taken literally, bears no resemblance to the time it took for the universe to be born.

The more commonsense notion of intelligent design (creationism without the dogma) strikes a more palatable note, even among some scientists who find it hard to deny that an inherent intelligence exists within the universe. The problem with creationism lies, then, not in the idea of intelligent design, but in its dogmatic and inflexible interpretations of the Bible with regard to the debate over human origins.

NEW GROUND OR ANCIENT WISDOM?

Evidence for extremely ancient human origins will lead many into foreign territory, terrain some would rather avoid. But to others, the standard creationism versus evolution debate was wanting all along. Once looked upon with raised eyebrows, and still facing dogged opposition, the “catastrophist” point of view has made headway of late in the scientific community. This theory holds that sudden disruptions in the continuity of planetary life have taken place, altering the course of evolution. (“Gradualism,” on the other hand, a Darwinist tenet that assumes all life evolved slowly and without interruption, has fallen out of favor in some circles.)

Indeed, it has become clear that all sorts of catastrophes have taken place on the globe and in the universe at large. A well-known catastrophist theory proposes that the extinction of the dinosaurs resulted from a huge meteor crashing into the planet with the force of thousands of hydrogen bombs. Other catastrophic theories have to do with drastic changes in climate, seismic upheavals and fluctuations, and even reversals in Earth’s magnetic field.

The catastrophism versus gradualism debate, while revealing how little science knows for certain about prehistory, also exposes a distinct prejudice within the scientific community—an antipathy, dating to the time of Darwin, toward anything remotely resembling biblical catastrophes such as the Great Flood, even if the connection has to do only with sudden rather than gradual changes in the course of evolution.

Catastrophism, though, avails another scenario regarding human origins and prehistory. As presented in Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization and in Rand and Rose Flem-Ath’s When the Sky Fell: In Search of Atlantis, a sudden, catastrophic shifting of the earth’s lithosphere, called “crustal displacement,” may have occurred at some time in the past. Lent credibility by Albert Einstein, the theory suggests that the earth’s outer crust may have suddenly (not gradually, as in continental drift) shifted on the surface of the globe, causing continents to slide into radically different positions.

Drawing on the work of Charles Hapgood, who developed the theory with Einstein’s assistance, the Flem-Aths explain that this may be the reason carcasses of hundreds of woolly mammoths, rhinos, and other ancient mammals were found flash-frozen in a “zone of death” across Siberia and northern Canada. Remarkably, the stomachs of these mammals contained warm-weather plants, the implication being that the very ground upon which the animals grazed suddenly shifted from a temperate to an arctic climate. Hapgood and Einstein theorized that a sudden shifting and freezing of the continent of Antarctica, which may have been situated two thousand miles farther north than it is now, could have occurred as a result of crustal displacement.

Ancient maps accurately depicting Antarctica before it was covered in ice also support the idea that the continent was situated in a temperate climate in recent prehistory. Copied from source maps of unknown antiquity, the Piri Ri’is, Oronteus Finaeus, and Mercator maps derive, Graham Hancock and the Flem-Aths propose, from some prehistoric society with the capacity to calculate accurately longitude and chart coastlines, an accomplishment that did not take place in recorded history until the eighteenth century.

As outlined in the Flem-Aths’ and Hancock’s books, the maps, along with a body of evidence, testify to the existence of a sophisticated prehistoric civilization. Charlton Heston, narrating NBC’s “The Mysterious Origins of Man,” likens this scenario to Plato’s description of the lost continent of Atlantis.

LOST CIVILIZATIONS, THE REAL MISSING LINK?

Examining stonework at ancient cites in Bolivia, Peru, and Egypt, Hancock argues that these megalithic marvels could not have risen from the dust of nomadic hunter-gatherers, which is what conventional science would have us believe. The magnificent city of Tiahuanaco, Bolivia, said by the Bolivian scholar Arthur Poznansky to date to 15,000 B.C.E., emerges as a case in point. Precision stone cuttings performed on immense blocks at Tiahuanaco, and at the other sites, to tolerances of one fiftieth of an inch, and then the transporting of these blocks over long distances, reveal technical capabilities that match or surpass those of modern engineers.

How supposedly primitive people transported these megaliths to the summit of Machu Picchu in Peru, for instance, remains a great mystery and is a feat that conventional science is at a loss to explain. Hancock asserts that even if we accept the later dates most archeologists ascribe to these structures, the knowledge and technical abilities of the builders would had to have been the product of a civilization that evolved over a long period of time, pushing the appearance of civilized man to the predawn of recorded history.

“My view,” Hancock says, “is that we are looking at a common influence that touched all of these places, long before recorded history, a remote third-party civilization yet to be identified by historians.”

A wide range of natural evidence and recorded human experience points to the existence of such a civilization. Etymology, the study of word origins, postulates that a prehistoric Indo-European language must have existed to account for the deep similarities in the world’s languages. Could this have been the language of Hancock’s prehistoric civilization?

Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission through Myth, written by M.I.T. professor of science Giorgio de Santillana and University of Frankfurt professor of science Hertha von Dechend, is a study of how ancient myths depict the procession of the equinoxes. As such, it weighs in on this common-language issue also, testifying to the existence of advanced knowledge proliferated among prehistoric peoples. Discussing myths that originate in the mists of antiquity, and the numerical values and symbology recorded therein, Santillana and von Dechend reveal that the ancients of many cultures shared a sophisticated knowledge of celestial mechanics, knowledge that has been matched only recently, with the help of satellites and computers.

The proliferation of closely related biological species on continents separated by vast oceans, a phenomenon that puzzles Darwinists, can also be explained by the existence of an advanced, seafaring civilization in prehistory. An entire body of evidence, in fact, supports man and civilization having existed at a far earlier date than orthodox science or religion concedes is the case. Could the existence, then, of such a civilization be the real missing link in human history?

WHY LIMIT THE DEBATE TO WESTERN MODELS?

The conventional debate over our origins, as we find it characterized in the major media, ignores concepts of human and cosmic origins that are shared by a large portion of the world’s population: those of the mystic East. Einstein himself entertained such ideas because they supported his belief in a universal intelligence. More recently, the physicist and Nobel laureate Brian Josephson and others have drawn parallels between Eastern mysticism and modern physics. Fritjof Capra, in The Tao of Physics, harmonizes Vedic, Buddhist, and Taoist philosophy with the subtleties of quantum theory.

The Vedas, in fact, present a scenario similar to the expanding and contracting universe of modern physics, the Great In breath and Out breath of creation, the projection of omnipresent consciousness, Brahman, the essence of which remains intrinsic to all things as creation evolves. Taoism, on the other hand, offers an understanding of conscious reality that closely resembles Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” wherein perspective, or consciousness, shapes objective reality.

To Einstein, especially in his later years, the idea of consciousness-based reality—the awareness of a universal, conscious presence inseparable from identity and creation—became naturally apparent, as it does now to others in the fields of physics, philosophy, and religion. “As I grow older,” Einstein said, “the identification with the here and now [his famous space-time] is slowly lost. One feels dissolved, merged into nature.”

The greatest minds, then, of our time and of the greatest antiquity reject Darwin’s often unstated premise, his belief in absolute materialism, which holds that all life evolved from primitive matter, accidentally, without purpose or design. At the same time, consciousness-based creation offers an alternative to strict biblical interpretations and the concept of an anthropomorphic creator separate from man and nature.

Establishment science, though, has had a hands-off approach to consciousness, never daring to explore what, by definition, cannot be explained by matter-based beliefs about the origins of life. An article by David Chalmers, in the December 1995 issue of Scientific American, “The Puzzle of Conscious Experience,” emphasizes the point.

“For many years,” Chalmers says, “consciousness was shunned by researchers . . .The prevailing view was that science, which depends on objectivity, could not accommodate something as subjective as consciousness.” Chalmers goes on to say that neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers are only recently beginning to reject the idea that consciousness cannot be studied. He proposes, while insisting that consciousness is materially based, that “[it] might be explained by a new kind of theory . . . [that] will probably involve new fundamental laws [with] startling consequences for our view of the universe and of ourselves.”

The eminent physicist Steven Weinberg, in his book Dreams of a Final Theory, puts it another way. He says the goal of physics is to develop a “theory of everything” that will tell us all there is to know about the universe—a law or principle from which the universe derives. So stating, Weinberg exposes the limitations of scientific materialism, while at the same time trying to transcend it, as he butts up against an Absolute, a Logos, if you will, that cannot exist within the context of matter-based creation. The real problem, he admits, is consciousness, because it is beyond what could have derived from material processes alone.

Darwinism, therefore, which depends upon the assumption that all existence is matter-based, cannot account for the most human characteristic of all, consciousness, which cannot derive from the process of natural selection in a random, mechanistic creation—the capacity of the human mind being far beyond what is necessary for mere survival. And strict creationism, when pitted against a Darwinism that ignores the origin of consciousness along with other crucial factors, appears to be merely a foil that Darwinists use to make themselves look good.

To understand human origins, then, and to develop a “theory of everything,” a true scientist must not only evaluate the tangible evidence presented in Forbidden Archeology and in Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods, he also must study consciousness, without which he neglects the most basic capacity of human beings—the ability to think creatively. He would have to experiment in the internal, subjective world, delving into what the scientific establishment considers a forbidden realm. He would have to devote himself, independent of any dogma, to the essence of his own conscious existence, as well as to the study of material creation. Like Einstein, he would see this pursuit as the essential goal of both science and religion, the search for knowledge in its purest sense, or sciere in the Latin, from which the word science derives. By so doing, science might arrive at a theory of everything.