Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative To Darwin's Theory

The Hidden History of the Human Race

Upon hearing the proposal that human beings are devolved spirits rather than the modified descendants of extinct apelike creatures, one might ask: Has not science, using physical evidence, demonstrated beyond doubt that we did in fact evolve, by natural selection, from more anatomically primitive hominids? There is certainly a lot of talk and writing to that effect. But in the 932 pages of Forbidden Archeology, Richard Thompson and I documented abundant physical evidence contradicting the current evolutionary theory of human origins. Forbidden Archeology (also available in abridged form as The Hidden History of the Human Race) is thus the indispensable prelude to Human Devolution. In this chapter, I will summarize the essential points made in Forbidden Archeology. But there is no substitute for reading the entire book and seeing for oneself the massive amounts of evidence that contradict the idea that anatomically modern humans evolved within the past 6 million years from very apelike hominid ancestors. This evidence confirms that we really do require an alternative to the present theory.

William W. Howells, emeritus professor of physical anthropology at Harvard University, and one of the chief architects of the modern theory of human evolution, wrote to me on August 10, 1993: “Thank you for sending me a copy of Forbidden Archeology, which represents much careful effort in critically assembling published materials. I have given it a good examination. . . . Most of us, mistakenly or not, see human evolution as a succession of branchings from earlier to more advanced forms of primate, with man emerging rather late. . . . 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 not only to the accepted pattern. It would be devastating to the whole theory of evolution.” Yes, and it would demand an alternative hypothesis. Howells went on to say, “The suggested hypothesis would demand a kind of process which could not possibly be accommodated by evolutionary theory as we know it, and I should think it requires an explanation.” Human Devolution provides the explanation Howells requested, the explanation of a process that lies outside the range of current evolutionary theory. But first, we should understand exactly why such a new hypothesis is in fact required.

Problems with Current Theory

Mainstream physical anthropologists agree among themselves that hominids, the biological group that includes today’s humans and their supposed ancestors, split off from the African apes around 6 million years ago. There is, however, little agreement about the identity of the very first hominids. In the last decade of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century, physical anthropologists and archeologists uncovered fragmentary remains of a variety of new hominid species. From some of these early hominids came Australopithecus. There are, we are told, many species of Australopithecus. The earliest of these came into existence about 4 or 5 million years ago. From one of them arose Homo habilis, the first toolmaker. Next came Homo erectus, the first hominid to use fire. Then came early modern humans and the Neandertals. Finally, anatomically modern humans arrived on the scene about 100,000 years ago. It all sounds so perfectly clear when you hear a teacher say it, when you read it in a book, or when you see it in a museum display or on television. But behind the scenes, there are major ongoing disputes about each stage of this progression.

When scientists say that humans came from apes, they do not mean the modern apes we see in zoos, such as gorillas and chimpanzees. They mean the extinct dryopithecine apes of Africa. These apes, supposedly the common ancestors of both modern apes and modern humans, lived in the Miocene period, from about 5 to 20 million years ago. The human line (the hominids) and the modern ape line supposedly split off from their common dryopithecine ancestor about 6–7 million years ago. There are many species of Dryopithecus, however, and scientists cannot yet say exactly which of these extinct apes is our primeval ancestor. Nor can they tell us much about the very first hominids, the ones that existed before Australopithecus. Their fossil remains, mostly discovered after the publication of Forbidden Archeology in 1993, are fragmentary and subject to multiple interpretations.

Lemonick and Dorfman (2001) give a good review of the current confused state of early hominid paleontology. In 1994, researchers uncovered bones that they attributed to a creature called Ardipithecus ramidus, who lived in Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago. In 2001, researchers from America and Ethiopia announced the discovery of more Ardipithecus bones, this time 5.8 million years old. Ardipithecus had roughly the same size and body structure as a chimpanzee, with an important exception. The researchers found a toe bone with a humanlike structure, indicating Ardipithecus walked upright. But Donald Johanson, director of the Institute for Human Origins at the University of Arizona, pointed out that the toe bone was found ten miles from the other bones and was several hundred thousand years older. It was therefore not clear that the highly significant toe bone belonged to Ardipithecus. Perhaps it belonged to actual humans present millions of years ago in Africa? That is not impossible, because there is plenty of evidence that anatomically modern humans did exist millions of years ago in Africa and elsewhere. In any case, the Ardipithecus researchers proposed that the line of human origins went through the older Ardipithecus at 5.8 million years to the younger Ardipithecus at 4.4 million years to Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) at 3.2 million years and then on to the first members of the genus Homo at around 2 million years ago.

In the year 2000 a team of French and Kenyan researchers led by Brigitte Senut and Martin Pickford uncovered some bones of a creature they called orrorin tugenensis, popularly known as Millenium Man. Senut and Pickford said that Ardipithecus is simply an ape, with no direct place in the human lineage. They also denied that Australopithecus afarensis was a human ancestor. The bones of Millenium Man were 6 million years old. Senut and Pickford believed the bones showed that Millenium Man walked upright on two legs, a key human trait, but other researchers such as Meave Leakey remained unconvinced. Furthermore, Bernard Wood (Culotta 1999), of the George Washington University, questioned the whole idea that early primates with skeletal remains indicating bipedalism should automatically be considered human ancestors. Maybe they were just apes that happened to walk on two legs and had no connection with humans.

In late 2001, Meave Leakey introduced even more confusion into an already confused picture. She announced in nature (Leakey et al. 2001) the discovery of a new hominid. Leakey and her colleagues found a nearly complete skull of the creature in August of 1999, near Lake Turkana, in Kenya. The creature is 3.5 million years old, roughly the same age as Australopithecus afarensis. 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. The name is significant. Anthropus means “human” whereas pithecus means “ape.” So Leakey was obviously putting Kenyanthropus platyops in the human line, implying that Australopithecus is nothing more than an extinct ape, unrelated to humans. Leakey suggested that Kenyanthropus platyops might be linked to later fossils currently attributed to Homo rudolfensis. Although Meave Leakey called for further research, it appeared she was positioning Kenyanthropus platyops so as to permanently remove the australopithecines from the line of human ancestry. 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.

In short, the picture of newly discovered early hominids is quite confusing and contradictory. In all these cases, scientists are speculating about fragmentary fossil remains, seeing in them human ancestors, when they most likely are simply varieties of apes with some few features in common with modern humans. These features are, however, not necessarily signs of an evolutionary connection.

Despite the confusion surrounding Australopithecus, many scientists still accept this creature as a direct human ancestor. The first specimen of Australopithecus was discovered in 1924 by Dr. Raymond Dart in South Africa. Dart believed it was the earliest human ancestor, but most of the influential scientists of his time thought it was just a variety of ape. It was not until the late 1950s that Australopithecus won general acceptance as a human ancestor. But there remained important scientists who did not agree. Among these scientists were Louis Leakey, one of the most famous anthropologists of the twentieth century. Meave Leakey’s interpretation of her Kenyanthropus platyops as the ancestor of the Homo line, bypassing Australopithecus, can be seen as continuing Louis Leakey’s work.

Lord Zuckerman, a respected British zoologist, carried out many exacting statistical studies showing that Australopithecus was not a human ancestor. The work of Lord Zuckerman has been carried into the present by Charles E. Oxnard, now a professor of physical anthropology at the University of Western Australia. For a strong antidote to modern propaganda about the australopithecines being human ancestors, one should read his books uniqueness and Diversity in Human evolution (1975) and The order of man (1984). These books have been largely ignored by the scientific establishment, challenging as they do one of the articles of faith of human evolution studies. But they are required reading for anyone who wants to know the truth about Australopithecus. The anatomical studies of Oxnard place Australopithecus close to the gibbons and orangutans and distant from the African apes and humans. Given this set of relationships, it is difficult to see Australopithecus as a direct human ancestor.

Scientists who believe Australopithecus is a human ancestor see in its fossil bones signs of upright walking ability and other human features. But Oxnard’s studies show a creature just as likely to be found swinging through the trees like a gibbon or orangutan as walking upright on the ground.

Even among scientists who do accept Australopithecus as a human ancestor, there is a great deal of disagreement. On one side, we have Donald Johanson, and his colleagues and supporters, who believe that the australopithecines walked upright on the ground just like modern humans. This would, according to this group, be especially true of Lucy, the specimen of Australopithecus afarensis that Johanson himself discovered in Ethiopia during the 1970s (Johanson and Edey 1981). But Johanson’s critics, and there are many, say that the long curved fingers and toes of Lucy and her relatives, along with many other anatomical features, show that these creatures spent a lot of time in trees (Stern and Susman

1983, pp. 282–284; Susman et al. 1984, p 117; Marzke 1983, p. 198). Here they would be in agreement with Oxnard. Some scientists think that Johanson and his coworkers have mistakenly combined the fossils of two or three kinds of creatures into the single species Australopithecus afarensis.

During the 1970s, Johanson put forward the idea that Lucy was the oldest known human ancestor, and that starting with her all the other hominids could be arranged in a definite evolutionary progression. The several species could be arranged in two branches coming from the trunk of Australopithecus afarensis. One branch would be composed of the Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and then Homo sapiens. On the second branch would be the remaining australopithecines. First comes Australopithecus africanus, then Australopithecus robustus, then Australopithecus boisei. The trend among these is toward greater robustness. In 1985, the Black Skull, designated Australopithecus garhi, was discovered. This was a robust australopithecine specimen even more robust than A. boisei. If the Black Skull had been younger than A. robustus and A. boisei , there would have been no problem. It would have fit nicely into the progression of robust australopithecines. But instead the Black Skull was older than the oldest specimens of A. robustus. This completely messed up the neat little diagram drawn by Johanson.

As it stands now, there is no agreement at all about the relationships between the various species of Australopithecus. As physical anthropologist Pat Shipman (1986, p. 92) put it, “The best answer we can give right now is that we no longer have a very clear idea of who gave rise to whom.” Shipman said that in 1986, but the situation has not changed much since then. In fact, the situation has become even more complicated with the addition of discoveries of new species of Australopithecus such as Australopithecus anamensis and Australopithecus aethiopicus. The confusion extends not only to the evolutionary relationships among the australopithecines but also to the relationship between Australopithecus and Homo habilis, the first member the genus to which modern humans belong. Shipman, considering all the alternatives, said, “We could assert that we have no evidence whatsoever of where Homo arises from and remove all members of the genus Austra-lopithecus from the hominid family.” In other words, Australopithecus is not a human ancestor, which is exactly what Zuckerman and Oxnard have always said. But Shipman hesitated, noting, “I’ve such a visceral negative reaction to this idea that I suspect I am unable to evaluate it rationally. I was brought up on the notion that Australopithecus is a hominid” (Shipman 1986, p. 93).

And here is one more problem with Australopithecus—mainstream scientists say Australopithecus lived only in Africa. But other scientists have reported australopithecines from China, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia (Robinson 1953, Jian et al. 1975, Franzen 1985, and Chen 1990). If accepted, this would make a mess of most current schemes of hominid evolution, making an Asian origin for the hominids as likely as an African origin.

Up until 1987, Homo habilis was depicted as a marked evolutionary advance from Australopithecus toward the human condition. Both in the scientific literature and popular presentations, Homo habilis was shown as larger than its australopithecine ancestors, and with a more humanlike body, although the head still had some apelike features. In 1987, Tim White and Donald Johanson (Johanson et al. 1987) reported the discovery of a fairly complete Homo habilis skeleton at Olduvai Gorge. Homo habilis turned out to be a very small creature with long apelike arms, not very different from Australopithecus in size and body proportions. As in the case of Australopithecus, some researchers think that Homo habilis has been mistakenly put together from the fragmentary fossil bones of two or more species (Wood 1987).

The new picture of Homo habilis has made the supposed evolutionary transition to Homo erectus more problematic. In 1984, a team of scientists including Richard Leakey found an almost complete Homoerectus skeleton (Brown et al. 1985, p. 788). Up until this time, scientists had never found any limb bones that could be positively connected with a Homo erectus skull. Yet for decades, scientists had been making fullscale models of Homo erectus, as if they really knew the correct relative sizes of the head and limbs. Strikingly, the newly found skeleton was that of an adolescent youth who would have been over 6 feet tall when fully grown. Furthermore, at about 1.6 million years old, this was the oldest Homo erectus individual found up to that time. The OH 62 Homo habilis individual found by Johanson and White was only 200,000 years older, but was quite small and apelike in comparison. An evolutionary transition so great in so little time seems quite improbable, although it is accepted by evolutionists as a matter of faith. Even some evolutionists have doubts about it. The relationship between the early varieties of the genus Homo is further complicated by African fossils designated Homo rudolfensis and Homo ergaster.

At the more recent end of its existence, Homo erectus is thought by most scientists to be the direct ancestor of Homo sapiens. Louis Leakey (1960, pp. 210–211; 1971, pp. 25, 27), however, never accepted this. In his books, he gave many anatomical reasons why neither Homo erectus nor the australopithecines should be considered ancestral to modern humans. His dissenting view is rarely, if ever, mentioned in modern textbooks about human evolution.

Here is another problem. The first Homo erectus specimens were found by Eugene Dubois in Java in the 1890s. First he found an apelike skull. And the next year he found a femur or thighbone, about 45 feet away. Bones of many other kinds of animals were found in the same deposit. Dubois thought the skull and thighbone belonged to the same creature, which he called Pithecanthropus erectus. Right from the start, many scientists refused to accept that both bones belonged to the same creature. But eventually, the scientific community agreed with Dubois. Evolutionists needed a missing link connecting living humans with their extinct ape ancestors, and Dubois had given them a likely candidate.

Interestingly enough, later researchers reinterpreted the original Java Homo erectus fossils. In 1973, M. H. Day and T. I. Molleson determined that the femur found by Dubois is different from other Homo erectus femurs and is in fact indistinguishable from anatomically modern human femurs. This caused Day and Molleson (1973) to propose that the femur was not connected with the Java man skull. It thus appears that Dubois was mistaken in attributing them to the same creature. This finding is well known in professional circles, but in most textbooks and science museum displays, the Java man skull and femur are still shown as belonging together. Why? For decades, the discovery of Java man by Dubois has been practically mythologized. Apparently, scientists are hesitant to destroy the public myth they have created.

After Dubois discovered Java man, G. H. R. von Koenigswald made additional discoveries of Homo erectus fossils, as did other scientists. The finds look impressive in textbooks, but they are in fact of very little value because of their insecure dating. Most were found on the surface, which means they could be of almost any age, including very recent.

In 1856, some German workmen uncovered some bones in a cave high up one of the walls of the Neander valley (neandertal in German). The bones were turned over to a local naturalist, and from that moment on the Neandertals have been a source of endless controversy in science. The two hottest issues are (1) the physical and cultural characteristics of the Neandertals and (2) their relationship to modern humans. Looking at the Neandertal fossils and their associated stone tools and other cultural artifacts, some scientists have characterized the Neandertals as physically bestial and culturally primitive. Others have given them more human appearance and behavior. The disagreements on this topic have been going on for about 150 years, and they have not stopped. On the relationship of the Neandertals to modern humans, the debate also remains intense. Some scientists are convinced they are our immediate ancestors, and others are convinced they are just a sidebranch that went extinct, leaving no descendants. Physical anthropologists Erik Trinkaus and Pat Shipman (1994) wrote The neandertals: of Skeletons, Scientists, and Scandals, which details in lively prose the twists and turns of the scientific debates on the Neandertals. Trinkaus and Shipman demonstrate that scientists past and present have been victims of bias and prejudice, and that they have sometimes used their positions of authority to influence the outcome of scientific debates.

One might expect that as we get closer to the present, the picture of human evolution might become somewhat clearer. Wrong. Today the heaviest disputes in human evolution studies are those concerning the most recent evolutionary event of all—the emergence of anatomically modern humans. On one side are those who say that anatomically modern humans arose once, in a single, geographically isolated part of the world, usually given as Africa. And on the other side are those who say humans arose several times in different parts of the world. This is known as the multiregional hypothesis. Complicating the picture are the Neandertals. As we have seen, some scientists would have modern humans coming directly from Homo erectus, with the Neandertals as a side branch that went extinct, whereas others would incorporate the Neandertals as the immediate ancestors of at least some modern humans.

In 1987, scientists (Cann et al.) announced that mitochondrial DNA studies had shown that humans had arisen from Africa about 200,000 years ago, thus disproving the multiregional hypothesis. But other scientists showed that these studies were flawed. Scientists have used other kinds of DNA studies to support their claims about human evolution. But these also have serious flaws. We shall consider this genetic evidence in depth in chapter 4.

Although Darwinist scientists present a united front to the public, proclaiming loudly that the evolution of humans from apelike ancestors is an established fact, they have not found the actual evolutionary path. But if the path has not been found, how can they assert, except as a matter of faith, that the evolution of humans from apelike ancestors actually did occur?

The Hidden History of the Human Race

Up to now, we have been looking at the problems that confront Darwinists in dealing with the evidence that is currently known and accepted by them. But in Forbidden Archeology, we learn that large amounts of evidence have disappeared from view by a process of knowledge filtration. Because this evidence contradicted the established evolutionary doctrines at particular times over the past 150 years, it has been eliminated from scientific discussion. This evidence shows that anatomically modern humans existed millions of years ago. If accepted, this evidence would destroy the evolutionary scenario outlined above, which has anatomically modern humans emerging about 100,000 years ago. Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and the Neandertals would no longer be human ancestors. They would all simply be creatures that coexisted with anatomically modern humans.

Evidence for extreme human antiquity is consistent with the ancient Vedic literature of India. This literature includes a group of writings called the Puranas, or histories. The Puranas inform us that humans have existed for vast periods of cyclical time. The basic unit of this cyclical time is the day of Brahma. The day of Brahma lasts for 4,320,000,000 years. It is followed by a night of Brahma, which also lasts for 4,320,000,000 years. The days and nights of Brahma follow each other endlessly. During the days of Brahma, life, including human life, is manifest, and during the nights of Brahma, life is not manifest. According to the Vedic cosmological calendars, the current day of Brahma began about 2 billion years ago. So a Vedic archeologist might expect to find evidence that humans have

18 HumAn DevoluTion: A vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory

existed for up to 2 billion years. The Puranas and other Vedic writings also speak of creatures with apelike bodies and humanlike intelligence. For example, the Shrimad Bhagavatam (9.18) tells of the monkey soldiers who assisted Lord Rama in defeating the demon Ravana. So a Vedic archeologist might also expect to find evidence for various types of apemen coexisting with humans of our type in the distant past.

Here is an example of the kind of evidence reported in Forbidden Archeology. In 1979, researchers at the Laetoli, Tanzania, site in East Africa discovered footprints in volcanic ash deposits over 3.6 million years old. Mary Leakey (1979) and others said the prints were indistinguishable from those of modern humans. To these scientists, this meant only that the australopithecines of 3.6 million years ago had remarkably modern feet. But according to other scientists, such as physical anthropologist R. H. Tuttle of the University of Chicago, fossil foot bones of the known australopithecines of 3.6 million years ago show they had feet that were distinctly apelike (Tuttle 1985). Hence they were incompatible with the Laetoli prints. In an article in the March 1990 issue of natural History, Tuttle (1990) confessed “we are left with somewhat of a mystery.” It seems permissible, therefore, to consider a possibility neither Tuttle nor Leakey mentioned—that creatures with anatomically modern human bodies to match their anatomically modern human feet existed some 3.6 million years ago in East Africa. In Forbidden Archeology, I documented hundreds of other examples of this kind of evidence, grouping them in the following categories—carved bones, stone tools, human fossils, and artifacts suggestive of high levels of culture.

Carved Bones and Shells

In the decades after Darwin introduced his theory, numerous scientists discovered incised and broken animal bones and shells suggesting that tool-using humans or human precursors existed in the Pliocene (2–5 million years ago), the Miocene (5–25 million years ago), and even earlier. In analyzing cut and broken bones and shells, the discoverers carefully considered and ruled out alternative explanations—such as the action of animals or geological pressure—before concluding that humans were responsible. In some cases, stone tools were found along with the cut and broken bones or shells.

A particularly striking example in this category is a shell with a crude yet recognizably human face carved on its outer surface. Reported by geologist H. Stopes (1881) to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, this shell, from the Pliocene Red Crag formation in England, is over 2 million years old. According to standard views, humans capable of this level of artistry did not arrive in Europe until about 30,000 or

40,000 years ago. Furthermore, they supposedly did not arise in their

African homeland until about 100,000 years ago.

Concerning evidence of the kind reported by Stopes, French anthropologist Armand de Quatrefages wrote in his book Hommes Fossiles et Hommes Sauvages (1884): “The objections made to the existence of man in the Pliocene and Miocene seem to habitually be more related to theoretical considerations than direct observation.”

eoliths: Stones of Contention

Rudimentary stone tools called eoliths (“dawn stones”), found in unexpectedly old geological contexts, inspired protracted debate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For some, eoliths were not always easily recognizable as tools. Eoliths were not shaped into symmetrical implemental forms. Instead, an edge of a natural stone flake was chipped to make it suitable for a particular task, such as scraping, cutting, or chopping. Often, the working edge bore signs of use. Critics said eoliths were the product of natural forces, such as tumbling in stream beds. But defenders of eoliths offered convincing counterarguments, demonstrating that natural forces could not have made them.

In the late nineteenth century, Benjamin Harrison, an amateur archeologist, found eoliths on the Kent Plateau in southeastern England (Prestwich 1892). Geological evidence suggests that the eoliths were manufactured in the Middle or Late Pliocene, about 2–4 million ago. In addition to eoliths, Harrison found at various places on the Kent Plateau more advanced stone tools (paleoliths) of similar Pliocene antiquity. Having toolmaking hominids in England at that time violates all current schemes of human evolution. Among the supporters of Harrison’s eoliths were Alfred Russel Wallace (E. Harrison 1928, p. 370), cofounder with Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection; Sir John Prestwich, (1892, p. 251) one of England’s most eminent geologists; and Ray E. Lankester, a director of the British Museum (Natural History).

In the early part of the twentieth century, J. Reid Moir, a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and president of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, found eoliths (and more advanced stone tools) in England’s Red Crag formation. The tools were about 2.0–2.5 million years old. Some of Moir’s tools were found in the detritus beds beneath the Red Crag and could be anywhere from 2.5 to 55 million years old.

Moir’s finds won support from one of the most vocal critics of eoliths, Henri Breuil, then regarded as one of the world’s preeminent

20 HumAn DevoluTion: A vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory

authorities on stone tools. Another supporter was paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. And in 1923, an international commission of scientists journeyed to England to investigate Moir’s principal discoveries and pronounced them genuine.

Crude Paleoliths

In the case of eoliths, chipping is confined to the working edge of a naturally broken piece of stone. But the makers of the crude paleoliths deliberately struck flakes from stone cores and then shaped them into more recognizable types of tools. In some cases, the cores themselves were shaped into tools.

Among the crude paleoliths are the early Miocene implements (about 20 million years old) found in the late nineteenth century by Carlos Ribeiro, head of the Geological Survey of Portugal. At an international conference of archeologists and anthropologists held in Lisbon, a committee of scientists investigated one of the sites where Ribeiro had found implements. One of the scientists in the party found a stone tool even more advanced than Ribeiro’s better specimens. Comparable to accepted Late Pleistocene tools of the Mousterian type, it was firmly embedded in a Miocene conglomerate, in circumstances that confirmed its Miocene antiquity (Choffat 1884, p. 63).

Crude paleoliths were also found in Miocene formations at Thenay, France. S. Laing (1893, pp. 113–115), an English science writer, observed: “On the whole, the evidence for these Miocene implements seems to be very conclusive, and the objections to have hardly any other ground than the reluctance to admit the great antiquity of man.” Scientists also found crude paleoliths of Miocene age at Aurillac, France. And at Boncelles, Belgium, A. Rutot uncovered an extensive collection of paleoliths of Oligocene age (25 to 38 million years old).

Advanced Paleoliths

Whereas the eoliths and crude paleoliths could be either the work of anatomically modern humans or the work of human precursors such as Homo erectus or Homo habilis, advanced paleoliths are unquestionably the work of anatomically modern humans.

Florentino Ameghino, a respected Argentine paleontologist, found advanced stone tools, signs of fire, broken mammal bones, and a human vertebra in a Pliocene formation at Monte Hermoso, Argentina. Ameghino made numerous similar discoveries in Argentina, attracting the attention of scientists around the world.

In 1912, Ales Hrdlicˇ ka, of the Smithsonian Institution, published a lengthy, but not very reasonable, attack on Ameghino’s work. Hrdlicˇ ka asserted that all of Ameghino’s finds were from recent Indian settlements. In response, Carlos Ameghino, brother of Florentino Ameghino, carried out new investigations at Miramar, on the Argentine coast south of Buenos Aires. There he found a series of stone implements, including bolas, and signs of fire in the Chapadmalalan formation, which modern geologists say is 3–5 million years old. Carlos Ameghino also found at Miramar a stone arrowhead firmly embedded in the femur of a Pliocene species of Toxodon, an extinct South American mammal.

Ethnographer Eric Boman disputed Carlos Ameghino’s discoveries but also unintentionally helped confirm them. In 1913, Carlos Ameghino’s collector, Lorenzo Parodi, found a stone implement in the Pliocene seaside barranca (cliff) at Miramar and left it in place. Boman was one of several scientists invited by Ameghino to witness the implement’s extraction. After the implement (a bola stone) was photographed and removed, another discovery was made. “At my direction,” wrote Boman (1921, p. 344), “Parodi continued to attack the barranca with a pick at the same point where the bola stone was discovered, when suddenly and unexpectedly, there appeared a second stone ball. . . . It is more like a grinding stone than a bola.” Boman found yet another implement 200 yards away. Confounded, Boman could only hint in his written report that the implements had been planted by Parodi. In any case, Boman produced no evidence whatsoever that Parodi, a longtime employee of the Buenos Aires Museum of Natural History, had ever behaved fraudulently.

The kinds of implements found by Carlos Ameghino at Miramar (arrowheads and bolas) are usually considered the work of Homo sapiens sapiens. Taken at face value, the Miramar finds therefore demonstrate the presence of anatomically modern humans in South America over 3 million years ago. Interestingly enough, in 1921 M. A. Vignati discovered in the Late Pliocene Chapadmalalan formation at Miramar a fully human fossil jaw fragment.

In the early 1950s, Thomas E. Lee of the National Museum of Canada found advanced stone tools in glacial deposits at Sheguiandah, on Manitoulin Island in northern Lake Huron. Geologist John Sanford (1971) of Wayne State University argued that the oldest Sheguiandah tools were at least 65,000 years old and might be as much as 125,000 years old. For those adhering to standard views on North American prehistory, such ages were unacceptable.

Thomas E. Lee (1966, pp. 18–19) complained: “The site’s discoverer [Lee] was hounded from his Civil Service position into prolonged unemployment; publication outlets were cut off; the evidence was misrepresented by several prominent authors . . . ; the tons of artifacts vanished into storage bins of the National Museum of Canada; for refusing to fire the discoverer, the Director of the National Museum, who had proposed having a monograph on the site published, was himself fired and driven into exile; official positions of prestige and power were exercised in an effort to gain control over just six Sheguiandah specimens that had not gone under cover; and the site has been turned into a tourist resort. . . . Sheguiandah would have forced embarrassing admissions that the Brahmins did not know everything. It would have forced the rewriting of almost every book in the business. It had to be killed. It was killed.”

The treatment received by Lee is not an isolated case. In the early

1970s, anthropologists uncovered advanced stone tools at Hueyatlaco, Mexico. Geologist Virginia Steen-McIntyre and other members of a U. S. Geological Survey team obtained an age of about 250,000 years for the site’s implement-bearing layers. This challenged not only standard views of New World anthropology but also the whole standard picture of human origins. Humans capable of making the kind of tools found at Hueyatlaco are not thought to have come into existence until around

100,000 years ago in Africa.

Virginia Steen-McIntyre experienced difficulty in getting her dating study on Hueyatlaco published. “The problem as I see it is much bigger than Hueyatlaco,” she wrote to Estella Leopold, associate editor of Quaternary Research. “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.”

This pattern of data suppression has been going on for a long time. In 1880, J. D. Whitney (1880), the state geologist of California, published a lengthy review of advanced stone tools found in California gold mines. The implements, including spear points and stone mortars and pestles, were found deep in mine shafts, underneath thick, undisturbed layers of lava, in formations ranging from 9 million to over 55 million years old. W. H. Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution, one of the most vocal critics of the California finds, wrote (1899, p. 424): “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 [that humans existed in very ancient times in North America], notwithstanding the imposing array of testimony with which he was confronted.” In other words, if the facts do not agree with the favored theory, then such facts, even an imposing array of them, must be discarded.

evidence for Advanced Culture in Distant Ages

Up to this point, most of the evidence I have mentioned gives the impression that even if humans did exist in the distant past, they remained at a somewhat primitive level. But artifacts suggestive of more developed cultural and technological achievement have also been found. Not only are some of the objects decidedly more advanced than stone tools, but many also occur in geological contexts far older than we have thus far considered.

The reports of this extraordinary evidence emanate from both scientific and nonscientific sources. In some cases, the artifacts themselves, not having been preserved in standard natural history museums, are impossible to locate. But for the sake of completeness and to encourage further study I will give some examples.

In his book mineralogy, Count Bournon recorded an intriguing discovery made by French workmen in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The workmen, who were quarrying limestone near Aix-en-Provence, had gone through eleven layers of limestone separated by layers of sediments. Then, in the clayey sand above the twelfth layer “they found stumps of columns and fragments of stone half wrought, and the stone was exactly similar to that of the quarry: they found moreover coins, handles of hammers, and other tools or fragments of tools in wood.” The wood artifacts were petrified. These passages appeared in the American Journal of Science and Arts in 1820 (v. 2, pp. 145–146); today, however, it is unlikely such a report would be found in the pages of a scientific journal. Scientists simply do not take such discoveries seriously. The limestones of Aixen Provence are from the Oligocene (Pomerol 1980, pp.

172–173), which means the objects found in the limestones could be 24–

36 million years old.

In 1830, letterlike shapes were discovered within a solid block of marble from a quarry near Norristown, Pennsylvania, about 12 miles northwest of Philadelphia. The marble block was taken from a depth of

60–70 feet. This was reported in the American Journal of Science and Arts (v. 19, p. 361) in 1831. The marble in the quarries around Norristown is Cambro-Ordovician (Stone 1932, p. 225), or about 500–600 million years old.

In 1844, Sir David Brewster reported that a nail had been discovered firmly embedded in a block of sandstone from the Kingoodie (Mylnfield) Quarry in North Britain. Dr. A. W. Medd of the British Geological Survey wrote to my research assistant in 1985 that this sandstone is of“Lower Old Red Sandstone age” (Devonian, between 360 and 408 million years old). Brewster was a famous Scottish physicist. He was a founder of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and made important discoveries in the field of optics.

On June 22, 1844, this curious report appeared in the London Times: “A few days ago, as some workmen were employed in quarrying a rock close to the Tweed about a quarter of a mile below Rutherford-mill, a gold thread was discovered embedded in the stone at a depth of eight feet.” Dr. A. W. Medd of the British Geological Survey wrote to my research assistant in 1985 that this stone is of Early Carboniferous age (between 320 and 360 million years old).

The following report, titled “A Relic of a Bygone Age,” appeared in the magazine Scientific American (June 5, 1852): “A few days ago a powerful blast was made in the rock at Meeting House Hill, in Dorchester, a few rods south of Rev. Mr. Hall’s meeting house. The blast threw out an immense mass of rock, some of the pieces weighing several tons, and scattered fragments in all directions. Among them was picked up a metallic vessel in two parts, rent asunder by the explosion. On putting the two parts together it formed a bell-shaped vessel. . . . On the side there are six figures of a flower, or bouquet, beautifully inlaid with pure silver, and around the lower part of the vessel a vine, or wreath, also inlaid with silver. . . . This curious and unknown vessel was blown out of the solid pudding stone, fifteen feet below the surface. . . . The matter is worthy of investigation, as there is no deception in the case.” According to a recent U.S. Geological Survey map of the Boston-Dorchester area, the pudding stone, now called the Roxbury conglomerate, is of Precambrian age, over

600 million years old.

The April 1862 edition of The Geologist included an English translation of an intriguing report by Maximilien Melleville, the vice president of the Academic Society of Laon, France. In his report, Melleville described a round chalk ball discovered 75 meters (about 246 feet) below the surface in early Eocene lignite beds near Laon. If humans made the ball, they must have existed in France 45–55 million years ago.

Melleville (1862, p. 147) stated: “Long before this discovery, the workmen of the quarry had told me they had many times found pieces of wood changed into stone . . . bearing the marks of human work. I regret greatly now not having asked to see these, but I did not hitherto believe in the possibility of such a fact.”

In 1871, William E. Dubois of the Smithsonian Institution reported on several human artifacts found at deep levels in Illinois. The first object was a copper coin from Lawn Ridge, in Marshall County, Illinois. It came from a well-boring, at a depth of 114 feet (Winchell 1881, p. 170). Using the drilling record, the Illinois State Geological Survey estimated the age of the deposits at the 114-foot level. The deposits would have formed during the Yarmouthian interglacial period “sometime between

200,000 and 400,000 years ago.”

The coin suggests the existence of a civilization at least 200,000 years ago in North America. Yet beings intelligent enough to make and use coins (Homo sapiens sapiens) are generally not thought to have lived much earlier than 100,000 years ago. According to standard views, metal coins were first used in Asia Minor during the eighth century bc.

A small human image, skillfully formed in clay, was found in 1889 at Nampa, Idaho. The figurine came from the 300-foot level of a well boring (Wright 1912, pp. 266–267). Responding to inquiries by my research assistant, the United States Geological Survey stated in a letter that the clay layer at a depth of over 300 feet is “probably of the Glenns Ferry Formation, upper Idaho Group, which is generally considered to be of PlioPleistocene age.” The boundary between the Pliocene and the Pleistocene lies at two million years ago. Other than Homo sapiens sapiens, no hominid is known to have fashioned works of art like the Nampa figurine. The evidence therefore suggests that humans of the modern type were living in America around 2 million years ago, at the Plio-Pleistocene boundary.

On June 11, 1891, The morrisonville Times (Illinois, U.S.A.) reported: “A curious find was brought to light by Mrs. S. W. Culp last Tuesday morning. As she was breaking a lump of coal preparatory to putting it in the scuttle, she discovered, as the lump fell apart, embedded in a circular shape a small gold chain about ten inches in length of antique and quaint workmanship.” The Illinois State Geological Survey has said the coal in which the gold chain was found is 260–320 million years old. This raises the possibility that culturally advanced human beings were present in North America during that time.

The April 2, 1897 edition of the Daily news of Omaha, Nebraska, carried an article titled “Carved Stone Buried in a Mine,” which described an object from a mine near Webster City, Iowa. The article stated: “While mining coal today in the Lehigh coal mine, at a depth of 130 feet, one of the miners came upon a piece of rock which puzzles him and he was unable to account for its presence at the bottom of the coal mine. The stone is of a 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.” The Lehigh coal is probably from the Carboniferous.

On January 10, 1949, Robert Nordling sent a photograph of an iron cup to Frank L. Marsh of Andrews University, in Berrien Springs, Michigan. Nordling wrote: “I visited a friend’s museum in southern Missouri. Among his curios, he had the iron cup pictured on the enclosed snapshot” (Rusch 1971, p. 201).

At the private museum, the iron cup had been displayed along with the following affidavit, made by Frank J. Kenwood in Sulphur Springs, Arkansas, on November 27, 1948: “While I was working in the Municipal Electric Plant in Thomas, Okla. in 1912, 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 or mould of the pot in the piece of coal. Jim Stall (an employee of the company) witnessed the breaking of the coal, and saw the pot fall out. I traced the source of the coal, and found that it came from the Wilburton, Oklahoma, Mines” (Rusch 1971, p. 201). According to Robert O. Fay of the Oklahoma Geological Survey, the Wilburton mine coal is about 312 million years old.

On October 8, 1922, the American Weekly section of the new York Sunday American ran a prominent feature titled “Mystery of the Petrified ‘Shoe Sole’,” by Dr. W. H. Ballou (1922, p. 2). Ballou wrote: “Some time ago, while he was prospecting for fossils in Nevada, John T. Reid, a distinguished mining engineer and geologist, stopped suddenly and looked down in utter bewilderment and amazement at a rock near his feet. For there, a part of the rock itself, was what seemed to be a human footprint! Closer inspection showed that it was not a mark of a naked foot, but was, apparently, a shoe sole which had been turned into stone. The forepart was missing. But there was the outline of at least two-thirds of it, and around this outline ran a well-defined sewn thread which had, it appeared, attached the welt to the sole.” The Triassic rock bearing the fossil shoe sole is 213–248 million years old.

W. W. McCormick of Abilene, Texas, has a document recording his grandfather’s account of a stone block wall that was found deep within a coal mine: “In the year 1928, I, Atlas Almon Mathis, was working in coal mine No. 5, located two miles north of Heavener, Oklahoma. This was a shaft mine, and they told us it was two miles deep.” One evening, Mathis was blasting coal loose by explosives in “room 24” of this mine. “The next morning,” said Mathis, “there were several concrete blocks laying in the room. These blocks were 12-inch cubes and were so smooth and polished on the outside that all six sides could serve as mirrors.” 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” (Steiger 1979, p. 27). The coal in the mine was probably Carboniferous, which would mean the wall was at least 286 million years old.

M. K. Jessup, an astronomer, recorded the following wall-in-coalmine story: “It is . . . reported that James Parsons, and his two sons, exhumed a slate wall in a coal mine at Hammondville, Ohio, in 1868. It was a large, smooth wall, disclosed when a great mass of coal fell away from it, and on its surface, carved in bold relief, were several lines of hieroglyphics” (Jessup 1973, p. 65).

The foregoing sampling of discoveries indicating a relatively high level of civilization in very distant ages was compiled from reports published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but similar reports continue up to the present day. We shall now review some of them.

In 1968, William J. Meister, a draftsman and amateur trilobite collector, reported finding a shoe print in the Wheeler Shale near Antelope Springs, Utah. This shoelike indentation and its cast were revealed when Meister split open a block of shale. Clearly visible within the imprint were the remains of trilobites, extinct marine arthropods. The shale holding the print and the trilobite fossils is from the Cambrian, and would thus be 505 to 590 million years old.

Meister (1968, p. 99) described the ancient shoelike impression in an article that appeared in the Creation Research Society Quarterly: “The heel print was indented in the rock about an eighth of an inch more than the sole. The footprint was clearly that of the right foot because the sandal was well worn on the right side of the heel in characteristic fashion.” In

1984, Richard L. Thompson visited Meister in Utah. His close inspection of the print revealed no obvious reason why it could not be accepted as genuine. The shape of the Meister print, as shown by Thompson’s visual inspection and computer analysis, closely matches that of a modern shoe print.

Over the past several decades, South African miners have found hundreds of metallic spheres with up to three parallel grooves running around their equators. Roelf Marx, curator of the museum of Klerksdorp, South Africa, where some of the spheres are housed, said: “The spheres are a complete mystery. They look man-made, yet at the time in Earth’s history when they came to rest in this rock no intelligent life existed. They’re nothing like I have ever seen before.”

My research assistant wrote to Roelf Marx for further information about the spheres. He replied in a letter dated September 12, 1984: “There is nothing scientific published about the globes, but the facts are: 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. . . . formed by sedimentation about 2.8 billion years ago. On the other hand the globes, which have a fibrous structure on the inside with a shell around it, are very hard and cannot be scratched, even by steel.” In the absence of a satisfactory natural explanation, the evidence is somewhat mysterious, leaving open the possibility that the South African grooved spheres—found in a mineral deposit 2.8 billion years old—were made by intelligent beings.

extremely old Human Fossils

As we have seen, there are lots of stone tools and other artifacts showing a human presence going back millions of years. But are there also any human fossils to further support this conclusion? The answer is yes. Of course, one should keep in mind that fossilization is a rare event. Richard Leakey once said that the key fossils related to human evolution could fit on a billiard table. And one of the comments often heard at conferences on human evolution is “we need more fossils.” Given the rarity of such fossils, the examples we are about to discuss assume considerable importance.

One good example comes from the original Java Homo erectus discoveries of Eugene Dubois at Trinil. As we have seen, modern scientists have shown that the femur found along with the Java man skull is unlike Homo erectus femurs and resembles exactly modern human femurs. They have thus concluded that the femur does not belong with the skull. But what then do we make of the femur? It would appear that we have good evidence for anatomically modern humans in Java at about 800,000 years ago, which is the age previously attributed to the skull and femur. According to modern theory, anatomically modern humans did not come into existence until about 100,000 years ago.

We have also seen that Homo habilis, as pictured before the OH-62 discovery in 1987, is probably a composite of fossils from several species. Donald Johanson has in fact suggested that many bones previously attributed to Homo habilis must now be reassigned. Among these bones is the ER 1481 femur, found at Lake Turkana, Kenya by John Harris. Richard Leakey described this femur as indistinguishable from that of a modern human being. So if it no longer belongs to Homo habilis, perhaps it should be assigned to an anatomically modern human living in Africa about 2 million years ago.

During the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, several discoveries of human skeletal remains were made in Middle Pleistocene formations in Europe. These discoveries include those made at Galley Hill, Moulin Quignon, Clichy, La Denise, and Ipswich. The presence of these skeletons in Middle Pleistocene strata could be attributed to recent intrusive burial, mistakes in reporting, or fraud. Nonetheless, there are reasons for thinking that the skeletons might in fact be of Middle Pleistocene age.

In 1888, workmen removing deposits at Galley Hill, near London, England, exposed a bed of chalk. One workman, Jack Allsop, informed Robert Elliott, a collector of prehistoric items, that he had discovered a human skeleton firmly embedded in these deposits about 8 feet below the surface and about 2 feet above the chalk bed (Keith 1928, pp. 250–

266). Elliott stated: “We carefully looked for any signs of the section being disturbed, but failed: the stratification being unbroken.” A schoolmaster named M. H. Heys also observed the bones embedded in undisturbed deposits. Heys said: “This undisturbed state of the stratum was so palpable to the workman that he said, ‘The man or animal was not buried by anybody’” (Keith 1928, p. 255). Numerous stone tools were also recovered from the Galley Hill site.

According to modern opinion, the Galley Hill site belongs to the Holstein interglacial period, which occurred about 330,000 years ago. Anatomically, the Galley Hill skeleton was judged to be of the modern human type. Most scientists now think that anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) originated in Africa around 100,000 years ago. They say that Homo sapiens sapiens eventually entered Western Europe in the form of Cro-Magnon man approximately 30,000 or 40,000 years ago, replacing the Neandertals.

Despite the testimony by Heys and Elliott that the Galley Hill skeleton was found in undisturbed strata, K. P. Oakley and M. F. A. Montagu (1949) later concluded that the skeleton must have been recently buried in the Middle Pleistocene deposits. This is also the opinion of almost all anthropologists today.

In 1863, J. Boucher de Perthes discovered an anatomically modern human jaw in the Moulin Quignon gravel pit at Abbeville, France. He removed it from a layer of black sand and gravel 16.5 feet deep. The layer also contained stone implements of the Acheulean type (Keith

1928, p. 270). The Acheulean sites at Abbeville are about 400,000 years old. Upon hearing of the discovery of the Abbeville jaw and tools, a group of distinguished British geologists visited Abbeville and were at first favorably impressed. Later, however, it was alleged that some of the stone implements in Boucher de Perthes’s collection were forgeries foisted on him by the workmen. The British scientists then began to doubt the authenticity of the jaw (Keith 1928, p. 271).

In May 1863, British geologists and archeologists met with their French counterparts in France to decide the status of the jaw. The commission jointly declared in favor of the authenticity of the jaw, despite some reservations by two of the British members. Thereafter, however, the British members continued to oppose the Moulin Quignon jaw and eventually won most scientists over to their side.

In the aftermath of the Moulin Quignon debate, Boucher des Perthes continued to maintain that his discoveries were genuine. To help prove this, he conducted several more excavations at Moulin Quignon, under very strict controls and in the presence of trained scientific observers. These excavations yielded many more anatomically modern human bones, bone fragments, and teeth. These discoveries, which received almost no attention in the English-speaking world, are significant demonstrations of a human presence in the Middle Pleistocene of Europe, over

400,000 years ago. They also tend to strengthen the case for the authenticity of the original Moulin Quignon jaw.

In 1868, Eugene Bertrand reported to the Anthropological Society of Paris that he found parts of a human skull, along with a femur, tibia, and some foot bones, in a quarry on the Avenue de Clichy. The bones were found 5.25 meters (17.3 feet) beneath the surface. Sir Arthur Keith (1928, pp. 276–277) believed the layer in which Clichy human bones were found was the same age as the one in which the Galley Hill skeleton was discovered. This would make the Clichy bones approximately 330,000 years old. The depth at which the Clichy human fossils were found (over

17 feet) argues against recent burial.

But Gabriel de Mortillet (Bertrand 1868, p. 332) said that a workman at the quarry on the Avenue de Clichy told him that he had stashed in the bottom of the pit a skeleton from the upper layers of the quarry. Even after hearing de Mortillet relate the workman’s story about stashing the bones of the Clichy skeleton, a number of scientists remained convinced Bertrand’s discovery was genuine. For example, Professor E. T. Hamy (Bertrand 1868, p. 335) said: “Mr. Bertrand’s discovery seems to me to be so much less debatable in that it is not the first of this kind at Avenue de Clichy. Indeed, our esteemed colleague, Mr. Reboux, found in that same locality, and almost at the same depth (4.20 meters), human bones that he has given me to study.”

In his remarks to the Anthropological Society, Bertrand provided additional evidence for the great antiquity of the Clichy skeleton. He stated that he found a human ulna in the stratum containing the other bones of the Clichy human skeleton. The ulna is the larger of the two long bones of the forearm. When Bertrand tried to extract the ulna it crumbled into dust. He offered this as proof that the Clichy human skeleton must have been native to the layer in which it was found. Apparently, Bertrand reasoned that a bone as fragile as the decayed ulna could not possibly have been removed from an upper layer of the quarry and stashed by a workman in the lower layer in which Bertrand found it—it would certainly have been destroyed in the process. This indicated that the ulna belonged to the stratum in which Bertrand found it, as did the other human bones.

In 1911, J. Reid Moir discovered an anatomically modern human skeleton beneath a layer of glacial boulder clay near the town of Ipswich, in the East Anglia region of England. The skeleton was found at a depth of 1.38 meters (about 4.5 feet), in deposits as much as 400,000 years old. Moir took care to rule out the possibility of burial from a more recent level.

The discovery, however, inspired intense opposition. Sir Arthur Keith (1928, p. 299) wrote, “Under the presumption that the modern type of man is also modern in origin, a degree of high antiquity is denied to such specimens.” Despite opposition, Moir initially stuck to his guns, holding that the Ipswich skeleton was genuinely old. Then suddenly he reversed himself, declaring the skeleton recent. What then happened to change his mind? He found nearby, at the same level, some advanced stone tools. He therefore concluded that the layer of boulder clay above the skeleton had been formed about 30,000 years ago from the sludgelike remnants of the original boulder clay deposit, formed hundreds of thousands of years earlier (Moir 1916, p. 109). But sophisticated stone tools turn up all over the world, in very old formations. Therefore, I cannot agree with Moir that the discovery of tools of advanced type at the same level as the Ipswich skeleton was sufficient reason to reinterpret the site stratigraphy to bring the age of the skeleton into harmony with the supposed age of the tools.

A very strong case for anatomically modern humans existing in very early times comes from Argentina. In 1896, workers excavating a dry dock in Buenos Aires found a human skull. They took it from the rudder pit at the bottom of the excavation, after breaking through a layer of a hard, limestonelike substance called tosca. The level at which the skull was found was 11 meters (36 feet) below the bed of the river La Plata (Hrdlicˇ ka 1912, p. 318).

The workers who found the skull gave it to Mr. Junor, their supervisor. In the opinion of Argentine paleontologist Florentino Ameghino (1909, p. 108), the skull belonged to a Pliocene precursor of Homo sapiens. He called this precursor Diprothomo platensis. But according to Ales Hrdlicˇ ka (1912, p. 332) of the Smithsonian Institution, the skull was just like that of modern humans.

The skull was found in what Ales Hrdlicˇ ka (1912, p. 321) called “the uppermost portion of the Pre-Ensenadean stratum.” According to modern geological opinion, the Pre-Ensenadan stratum should be at least

1.0–1.5 million years old. Even at 1 million years, the presence of a fully modern human skull anywhere in the world—what to speak of South America—would be unexpected.

Bailey Willis, the geologist who accompanied Hrdlicˇ ka on his expedition to Argentina, offered some vague, unfounded speculations about how the skull could have arrived in the rudder pit. For his part, Hrdlicˇ ka thought the fact that the skull was modern in shape was enough to rule out any great age for it. Hrdlicˇ ka’s prejudice is evident in the following statement (Hrdlicˇ ka 1912): “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 only insignificant geologically, not reaching in time, in all probability, beyond the modern, still unfinished, geologic formations.” In other words, even if anatomically modern human bones were found in geological strata millions of years old, Hrdlicˇ ka would not accept them as being that old. According to his logic, evolution is always happening, and any such bones millions of years old should, therefore, be quite different from those of modern humans. If they are not different, they are not old.

In 1913, Dr. Hans Reck, of Berlin University, found an anatomically modern human skeleton in Bed II of Olduvai Gorge. This would make the anatomically modern skeleton over 1 million years old. Aware of the possibility of intrusive burial, Reck (1914) carefully examined the sediments around the skeleton and determined that there was absolutely no sign of disturbance. Louis Leakey was initially skeptical of the discovery. However, after seeing the skeleton in a Munich museum, still embedded in its matrix of rock, and visiting the site in Africa, he changed his mind and agreed with Reck that the skeleton really belonged to Bed II. Other scientists, however, maintained their opposition. Reck and Leakey later changed their minds (L. Leakey et al. 1931), and agreed that the skeleton had been buried into Bed II at a later time. This turnaround is quite inexplicable, considering their earlier testimony that very close inspection had shown absolutely no sign that the skeleton had been buried in Bed II after the deposition of Bed II. During World War II, most of the skeleton was lost. After the war, a scientist did a carbon 14 test on some small fragments of bone he thought belonged to the skeleton. This test gave an age of about 17,000 years. But there are several problems with this date. First of all, it is not clear that the bone fragments he tested really belonged to Reck’s skeleton. Second, even if the bone fragments did belong to Reck’s skeleton, they could have been contaminated with recent carbon during the several decades they had lain exposed in the museum. This would have caused the carbon 14 test to yield a falsely young date.

In 1855, a 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 16 feet below the surface. The condition of the jaw, thoroughly infiltrated with iron oxide, was consistent with incorporation in this bed. The 16-foot level at Foxhall is the same from which J. Reid Moir (1924, p. 647) later recovered stone tools and signs of fire. Anything found at this level would be at least 2.5 million years old.

Aware that he was in the possession of a fossil of great significance, Collyer showed it to various English scientists, including Charles Lyell, George Busk, Richard Owen, Sir John Prestwich, and Thomas Huxley. All were skeptical of its antiquity. American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (1921, p. 568), writing in the 1920s, wondered why the above-mentioned scientists did not take the trouble to visit the site. They disbelieved, said Osborn, “probably because the shape of the jaw was not primitive.”

Late in the summer of 1860, Professor Giuseppe Ragazzoni, a geologist at the Technical Institute of Brescia, traveled to Castenedolo, about

6 miles southeast of Brescia, to gather fossil shells in the Pliocene strata exposed in a pit at the base of a low hill, the Colle de Vento. There he found some human bones. Ragazzoni took the bones to the geologists A. Stoppani and G. Curioni, who said they were probably from a recent burial. Accepting their decision, Ragazzoni discarded the bones.

In December of 1879, a landowner at Castenedolo noticed some human bones in an excavation. Ragazzoni recovered 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 skeleton was discovered. Ragazzoni journeyed to the site and supervised the excavation. The skeleton, enveloped in a mass of blue green clay, turned out to be that of an anatomically modern human female.

“The complete skeleton,” said Ragazzoni (1880, p. 123), “was found in the middle of the layer of blue clay. . . . The stratum of blue clay, which is over 1 meter [3 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.”

In short, any burial would have certainly produced a noticeable mixing of different colored materials in the otherwise undisturbed blue clay layer, and Ragazzoni, a geologist, testified that there was no sign of such mixing. Also, the blue clay had its own stratification, which was intact. The same was true of the bones discovered earlier. “The fossil remains discovered on January 2 and January 25 lay at a depth of approximately 2 meters. The bones were situated at the boundary between the bank of shells and coral and the overlying blue clay. They were dispersed, as if scattered by the waves of the sea among the shells. The way they were situated allows one to entirely exclude any later mixing or disturbance of the strata” (Ragazonni 1880, p. 126). 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.

Italian anatomist Giuseppe Sergi was convinced that the Castenedolo skeletons were the remains of humans who lived during the Pliocene period of the Tertiary. About the negative opinions of others, he said: “The tendency to reject, by reason of theoretical preconceptions, any discoveries that can demonstrate a human presence in the Tertiary is, I believe, a kind of scientific prejudice. Natural science should be stripped of this prejudice” (Sergi 1884, p. 309). This prejudice was, however, not overcome, and it persists today. Sergi wrote (1884, p. 310): “By means of a despotic scientific prejudice, call it what you will, every discovery of human remains in the Pliocene has been discredited.”

But Sergi was not alone in his acceptance of Ragazzoni’s discoveries at Castenedolo. Armand de Quatrefages also accepted them. Concerning the female skeleton uncovered at Castenedolo, he said in his book Races Humaines: “There exists no serious reason for doubting the discovery of M. Ragazzoni, . . . Nothing, therefore, can be opposed to it but theoretical a priori objections” (Laing 1893, p. 119).

A good example of the unfair treatment given to the Castenedolo finds may be found in Professor R. A. S. Macalister’s Textbook of european Archaeology, written in 1921. Macalister (1921, p. 183) admitted that the Castenedolo finds “whatever we may think of them, have to be treated seriously.” He noted that they were “unearthed by a competent geologist, Ragazzoni . . . and examined by a competent anatomist, Sergi.” Still he could not accept their Pliocene age. Faced with the uncomfortable facts, Macalister (1921, p. 183) claimed “there must be something wrong somewhere.” First of all the bones were anatomically modern. “Now, if they really belonged to the stratum in which they were found,” wrote Macalister (1921, p. 184), “this would imply an extraordinarily long standstill for evolution. It is much more likely that there is something amiss with the observations.” Macalister (1921, p. 185) also 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.” Here once more we find a scientist’s preconceived ideas about evolution influencing him to reject skeletal evidence that would otherwise be considered of good quality.

Scientists have employed chemical and radiometric tests to deny a Pliocene age to the Castenedolo bones. Fresh bones contain a certain amount of nitrogen in their protein, and this tends to decrease with time. In a 1980 report, K. P. Oakley (1980, p. 40) found the Castenedolo bones had a nitrogen content similar to that of bones from Late Pleistocene and Holocene Italian sites and thus concluded the Castenedolo bones were recent. But the degree of nitrogen preservation in bone can vary widely from site to site, making such comparisons unreliable as age indicators. The Castenedolo bones were found in clay, a substance known to preserve nitrogen-containing bone proteins.

Bones tend to accumulate fluorine from ground water. The Castenedolo bones had a fluorine content that Oakley (1980, p. 42) considered relatively high for bones he thought were recent. Oakley explained this discrepancy by positing higher past levels of fluorine in the Castenedolo groundwater. But this was simply guesswork. The Castenedolo bones also had an unexpected high concentration of uranium, consistent with great age.

A carbon 14 test yielded an age of 958 years for some of the Castenedolo bones. But, as in the case of Galley Hill, the methods employed are now considered unreliable. And the bones themselves, which had been mouldering in a museum for almost 90 years, were very likely contaminated with recent carbon, causing the test to yield a falsely young age.

The case of Castenedolo demonstrates the shortcomings of the methodology employed by paleoanthropologists. The initial attribution of a Pliocene age to the discoveries of 1860 and 1880 appears justified. The finds were made by a trained geologist, G. Ragazzoni, who carefully observed the stratigraphy at the site. He especially searched for signs of intrusive burial, and observed none. Ragazzoni duly reported his findings to his fellow scientists in scientific journals. But because the remains were modern in morphology they came under intense negative scrutiny. As Macalister put it, there had to be something wrong.

The account of human origins now dominant in the scientific community is the product of attitudes such as Macalister’s. For the last century, the idea of progressive evolution of the human type from more apelike ancestors has guided the acceptance and rejection of evidence. Evidence that contradicts the idea of human evolution is carefully screened out. Therefore, when one reads textbooks about human evolution, one may think, “Well, the idea of human evolution must be true because all the evidence supports it.” But such textbook presentations are misleading, for it is the unquestioned belief that humans did in fact evolve from apelike ancestors that has determined what evidence should be included and how it should be interpreted.

We now turn our attention to another Pliocene find, made at Savona, a town on the Italian Riviera, about 30 miles west of Genoa. In the

1850s, while constructing a church, workmen discovered an anatomically modern human skeleton at the bottom of a trench 3 meters (10 feet) deep. The layer containing the skeleton was 3–4 million years old.

Arthur Issel (1868) 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 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 said: “Had it been a burial we would expect to find the upper layers mixed with the lower. The upper layers contain white quartzite sands. The result of mixing would have been the definite lightening of a closely circumscribed region of the Pliocene clay sufficient to cause some doubts in the spectators that it was genuinely ancient, as they affirmed. The biggest and smallest cavities of the human bones are filled with compacted Pliocene clay. This could only have happened when the clay was in a muddy consistency, during Pliocene times” (Deo Gratias 1873, pp. 419–420). Deo Gratias pointed out that the clay was now hard and dry. Also, the skeleton was found at a depth of 3 meters (10 feet), rather deep for a burial.

In the 1880s, Florentino Ameghino announced the discovery of flint tools and signs of intentional use of fire at Monte Hermoso in Argentina. Now we will consider the human bone found there—an atlas, the topmost bone of the spinal column. It was collected by Santiago Pozzi, an employee of the Museum of La Plata, from the Early Pliocene Montehermosan formation during the 1880s. It did not attract much notice until years later. At that time, it was still covered by the characteristic yellowish-brown loess of the Montehermosan formation, which is 3–5 million years old. After the Pliocene loess was removed, scientists carefully studied the bone. Florentino Ameghino, accepting that it was truly Pliocene, assigned the atlas to an apelike human ancestor. In his description of the bone, he identified features he thought were primitive.

But Ales Hrdlicˇ ka convincingly demonstrated that the bone was actually modern in form. Like Ameghino, Hrdlicˇ ka believed the human form should, as we proceed back in time, become more and more primitive. If the bone was of the fully modern human type, then no matter what layer it was found in, it had to be of recent origin. Such a bone’s presence in an ancient stratum always could be, indeed had to be, explained as some kind of intrusion. But there is another possible explanation: human beings of the modern physiological type were living over 3 million years ago in Argentina. This is supported by the fact that the atlas showed signs of having been thoroughly embedded in sediments from the Montehermosan formation.

All in all, Hrdlicˇ ka (1912, p. 384) felt that the Monte Hermoso atlas was worthy of being “dropped of necessity into obscurity.” That is exactly what happened. Today there are many who will insist that the Monte Hermoso atlas remain in the obscurity into which it was of necessity dropped. Evidence for a fully human presence 3 million or more years ago, in Argentina of all places, is still not welcome in mainstream paleoanthropology.

In 1921, M. A. Vignati reported that a human lower jaw, with two molars, was discovered in the Late Pliocene Chapadmalalan formation at Miramar, Argentina. The jaw would thus be about 2–3 million years old. Previously, stone tools and a mammalian bone with an arrow head embedded in it had been discovered at this site. Ethnographer E. Boman, however, was skeptical. He stated: “The newspapers published bombastic articles about ‘the most ancient human remains in the world.’ But all who examined the molars found them to be identical to the corresponding molars of modern human beings” (Boman 1921, pp. 341–342). Boman took it for granted that the fully human nature of the Miramar jaw fragment unequivocally insured its recent date. But nothing Boman said excludes the possibility that the Miramar fossil demonstrates a fully human presence in the Pliocene of Argentina.

We have already discussed the numerous stone implements discovered in the auriferous gravels of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. Human bones were also found in these gravels, which range from 9 million to 55 million years old.

In February 1866, Mr. Mattison, the principal owner of the mine on Bald Hill, near Angels Creek in Calaveras County, removed a skull from a layer of gravel 130 feet below the surface. The gravel in which the skull was found was older than the Pliocene, perhaps much older. On July 16,

1866, Whitney presented to the California Academy of Sciences a report on the Calaveras skull, affirming that it was found in Pliocene strata. The skull caused a great sensation in America. According to Whitney (1880, p. 270), “The religious press in this country took the matter up. . . and were quite unanimous in declaring the Calaveras skull to be a ‘hoax.’” Whitney noted that the hoax stories did not arise until after his discovery was publicized widely in newspapers.

Some of the hoax stories were propagated not by newspaper writers but by scientists such as William H. Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution. During a visit to Calaveras County, he gathered testimony suggesting the skull examined by Whitney was not a genuine Tertiary fossil. But there is a problem with the hoax hypothesis—there are many versions. Some say religious miners planted the skull to deceive the scientist Whitney. Some say the miners planted a skull to deceive another miner. Some say a genuine skull was found by Mattison and later a different skull was given to Whitney. Some say Mattison’s friends from a nearby town planted the skull as a practical joke. This contradictory testimony casts doubt on the hoax idea.

Some observations supporting the hoax theory come from persons who examined the matrix of pebbles and earth in which the Calaveras skull had been discovered. Dr. F. W. Putnam of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History said the skull did not bear any trace of gravel from the mines. William J. Sinclair of the University of California also personally examined the skull and said the material attached to it was not gravel from the gold mine. He thought it was the kind of material one might find in a cave, where Indians sometimes placed bodies. On the other hand, Holmes (1899, p. 467) reported: “Dr. D. H. Dall states that while in San Francisco in 1866, he compared the material attached to the skull with portions of the gravel from the mine and that they were alike in all essentials.” And W. O. Ayres (1882, p. 853), writing in the American naturalist, stated: “I saw it and examined it carefully at the time when it first reached Professor Whitney’s hands. It was not only incrusted with sand and gravel, but its cavities were crowded with the same material; and that material was of a peculiar sort, a sort which I had occasion to know thoroughly.” It was, said Ayres, the gold-bearing gravel found in the mines, not a recent cave deposit.

Regarding the skull, Ayres noted (1882, p. 853): “It has been said that it is a modern skull which has been incrusted after a few years of interment. This assertion, however, is never made by anyone knowing the region. The gravel has not the slightest tendency toward an action of that sort. . . . the hollows of the skull were crowded with the solidified and cemented sand, in such a way as they could have been only by its being driven into them in a semi-fluid mass, a condition the gravels have never had since they were first laid down.”

Whitney, in his original description of the fossil, observed that the Calaveras skull was highly fossilized.This is certainly consistent with great age; however, as Holmes pointed out, it is also true that bones can become fossilized over the course of a few hundred or thousand years. Yet geologist George Becker (1891, p. 195) reported: “I find that many good judges are fully persuaded of the authenticity of the Calaveras skull, and Messrs. Clarence King, O. C. Marsh, F. W. Putnam, and W. H. Dall have each assured me that this bone was found in place in the gravel beneath the lava.” Becker added that this statement was made with the permission of the authorities named. Clarence King, as mentioned previously, was a geologist with the U. S. Geological Survey. O. C. Marsh, a paleontologist, was a pioneer dinosaur fossil hunter and served as president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1883 to 1895. But F. W. Putnam of Harvard’s Peabody Museum, as we have seen, later changed his mind, saying that the matrix of the skull appeared to be a cave deposit.

It should, however, be kept in mind that the Calaveras skull was not an isolated discovery. Great numbers of stone implements were found in nearby deposits of similar age. And, as we shall see, additional human skeletal remains were also uncovered in the same region, adding credibility to the Calaveras skull. As Sir Arthur Keith (1928, p. 471) put it: “The story of the Calaveras skull . . . cannot be passed over. It is the

‘bogey’ which haunts the student of early man . . . taxing the powers of belief of every expert almost to the breaking point.”

On January 1, 1873, the president of the Boston Society of Natural History read extracts from a letter by Dr. C. F. Winslow about a discovery of human bones at Table Mountain in Tuolumne County, California. The find was made in 1855 or 1856, and the details were communicated to Winslow by Capt. David B. Akey, who had witnessed it. The discovery took place about 10 years before J. D. Whitney first reported on the famous Calaveras skull.

Winslow (1873, pp. 257–258) gave this account of Akey’s testimony: “He states that in a tunnel run into the mountain at the distance of about fifty feet from that upon which he was employed, and at the same level, a complete human skeleton was found and taken out by miners personally known to him, but whose names he does not now recollect. He did not see the bones in place, but he saw them after they were brought down from the tunnel to a neighboring cabin. . . . He thinks that the depth from the surface at which this skeleton was found was two hundred feet, and from one hundred and eighty to two hundred feet from the opening cut or face of the tunnel. The bones were in a moist condition, found among the gravel and very near the bed rock, and water was running out of the tunnel. There was a petrified pine tree, from sixty to eighty feet in length and between two and three feet in diameter at the butt, lying near this skeleton. Mr. Akey went into the tunnel with the miners, and they pointed out to him the place where the skeleton was found. He saw the tree in place and broke specimens from it.” The gravel just above the bedrock, where the skeleton was found, is between 33 and 55 million years old (Slemmons 1966, p. 200). This must be the age of the skeleton unless it was introduced into the gravels at a later time, and we are not aware of any evidence indicating such an intrusion.

Dr. Winslow did not find any of the bones of the skeleton seen by Akey. But in another case, Winslow did collect some fossils, which he sent to museums in the eastern United States. A skull fragment, characterized by Dr. J. Wyman, a leading craniologist, as human (Holmes 1899, p. 456), was dispatched by Winslow to the Museum of the Natural History Society of Boston. The fossil was labeled as follows: “From a shaft in Table Mountain, 180 feet below the surface, in gold drift, among rolled stones and near mastodon debris. Overlying strata of basaltic compactness and hardness. Found July, 1857. Given to Rev. C. F. Winslow by Hon. Paul K. Hubbs, August, 1857.” Another fragment, from the same skull and similarly labeled, was sent to the Museum of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. The lava cap of Table Mountain is 9 million years old. The oldest gravels below the lava are 55 million years old. The skull fragment could thus be from 9 million to 55 million years old.

When examining a collection of stone artifacts belonging to Dr. Perez Snell, J. D. Whitney noted the presence of a human jaw. The jaw and artifacts all came from gold-bearing gravels beneath the lava cap of Tuolumne Table Mountain. The jaw measured 5.5 inches across from condyle to condyle, which is within the normal human range. Whitney (1880, p. 288) remarked that all the human fossils uncovered in the goldmining region, including this one, were of the anatomically modern type. The gravels from which the jaw came could be anywhere from 9 to 55 million years old. Whitney also reported on other discoveries of human fossils, from deposits of similar age.

In an address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, delivered in August, 1879, O. C. Marsh, president of the Association and one of America’s foremost paleontologists, said about Tertiary man: “The proof offered on this point by Professor J. D. Whitney in his recent work (Aurif. Gravels of Sierra nevada) is so strong, and his careful, conscientious method of investigation so well known, that his conclusions seem irresistible. . . . At present, the known facts indicate that the American beds containing human remains and works of man, are as old as the Pliocene of Europe. The existence of man in the Tertiary period seems now fairly established” (Southall 1882, p. 196).

More evidence for human beings in the early and middle Tertiary comes from Europe. According to Gabriel de Mortillet, M. Quiquerez reported the discovery of a skeleton at Delémont in Switzerland in ferruginous clays said to be Late Eocene. About this find, de Mortillet (1883, p. 72) simply said one should be suspicious of human skeletons found with the bones in natural connection. De Mortillet further stated that one should be cautious about a similarly complete skeleton found by Garrigou in Miocene strata at Midi de France.

It is possible, however, that these skeletons were from individuals buried during the Eocene or Miocene periods. A burial does not necessarily have to be recent. The truly frustrating thing about finds such as these is that we are not able to get more information about them. We find only a brief mention by an author bent on discrediting them. Because such finds seemed doubtful to scientists like de Mortillet, they went undocumented and uninvestigated, and were quickly forgotten. How many such finds have been made? We may never know. In contrast, finds which conform to accepted theories are thoroughly investigated,extensively reported, and safely enshrined in museums.

In December of 1862, the following brief but intriguing report appeared in a journal called The Geologist: “In Macoupin county, Illinois, the bones of a man were recently found on a coal-bed capped with two feet of slate rock, ninety feet below the surface of the earth. . . . The bones, when found, were covered with a crust or coating of hard glossy matter, as black as coal itself, but when scraped away left the bones white and natural.” The coal in which the Macoupin County skeleton was found is at least 286 million years old and might be as much as 320 million years old.

The evidence documented in Forbidden Archeology demonstrates that we genuinely need an alternative to the Darwinian picture of human evolution. Even confining ourselves to physical evidence in the form of fossils and artifacts, an evolutionary picture fails to emerge. The explanation that best fits the facts is that humans like ourselves and other more or less humanlike beings have coexisted on this planet for hundreds of millions of years. This conclusion is consistent with the accounts of extreme human antiquity found in the ancient Sanskrit historical writings, which tell us that humans have been present since the beginning of the current day of Brahma. But the question remains, how did we get here in the first place? For an answer to that question, we need to look beyond stones and bones.

The Extreme Antiquity of Nonhuman Species

In response to the evidence for extreme human antiquity presented in Forbidden Archeology, many have naturally asked, “Is it just our picture of human origins that is in need of revision? What about the history of other living things on earth?”

Of course, there are millions of species. Among them, I chose to first look at the fossil evidence for the antiquity of the human species because many scientists claim that the human species provides the best evidence for evolution. That effort took eight years of research, during which I studied original archeological reports of the past one hundred and fifty years in English and many other languages. When I began that effort, I did not expect that I would find as much evidence as I did for extreme human antiquity. On the basis of that experience, I cannot predict in advance what would happen if I spent several years going through the entire scientific literature on fossil discoveries relating to another species. However, some preliminary research shows that one can find in the scientific literature discoveries that challenge the Darwinian explanation for the origin of species other than the human species. In this chapter, I will give one example, based on a paper I presented at the XXIst International Congress for History of Science, which was held in July 2001 in Mexico City. The title of the paper is “Paleobotanical Anomalies Bearing on the Age of the Salt Range Form tion of Pakistan: A Historical Survey of an Unresolved Scientific Controversy.” This paper presents evidence showing that flowering plants and insects existed on earth far earlier than most Darwinists now believe possible.

For well over a century the Salt Range Mountains of Pakistan have attracted the special attention of geologists. Starting in the foothills of the Himalayas in northeastern Pakistan, the mountains run about 150 miles in a westerly direction, roughly parallel to the Jhelum river until it joins the Indus. They 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. In this escarpment and other locations, the Salt Range Mountains expose a series of formations ranging from the earliest Cambrian to the most recent geological periods. Such exposures are rarely encountered and are thus of great interest to geologists and other earth scientists. At the bottom of the series, beneath the Cambrian Purple Sandstone, lies the Salt Range Formation, composed of thick layers of reddish, clayey material (the Salt Marl) in which are found layers of rock salt, gypsum, shale, and dolomite. For centuries, the salt has been mined and traded widely in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. Ever since professional geologists began studying the Salt Range Mountains in the middle part of the nineteenth century, the age of the Salt Range Formation has been a topic of extreme controversy. Some held that it was of early Cambrian antiquity, while others were certain the Salt Range Formation was far more recent. The controversy intensified in the twentieth century when scientists discovered remains of advanced plants in the Salt Range Formation.

The History of the Controversy

Scientific investigation of the Salt Range Formation began in the nineteenth century, when Pakistan was part of British India. The Cambrian age of the overlying Purple Sandstone, which contains trilobites, was generally undisputed. But there were various opinions about the age and origin of the Salt Range Formation, usually found beneath the Purple Sandstone. Questions also arose about the relative ages of the Salt Range Formation and the Kohat salt deposits, located to the north of the Salt Range Mountains.

A. B. Wynne (1878, p. 83) surveyed the Salt Range Mountains in

1869–71 and concluded that the Salt Range Formation was a normal sedimentary deposit of Paleozoic age. This view was shared by H. Warth, who had extensive knowledge of the region gathered over twenty years (Wynne 1878, p. 73). Wynne and Warth thought the Kohat salt formations were younger, perhaps Tertiary (Wynne 1875, pp. 32–37). These views were shared by W. T. Blandford (Medlicott and Blandford 1879, p. 488).

Later, C. S. Middlemiss of the Geological Survey of India (1891, p. 42) proposed that the Salt Marl was not a sedimentary formation. It was instead a secretion from an underlying layer of magma that had intruded beneath the Cambrian Purple Sandstone. R. D. Oldham (1893, p. 112), superintendent of the Geological Survey of India, came to asimilar conclusion. This opened up the possiblity that the Salt Range Formation was younger than the overlying Cambrian Purple Sandstone.

The German geologist F. Noetling originally thought the Salt Range Formation was Precambrian (Zuber 1914, p. 334). But in a paper published in 1903 (Koken and Noetling, p. 35), Noetling said the Cambrian Purple Sandstone was the oldest formation in the Salt Range Mountains and assigned the underlying Salt Range Formation a much more recent age, without explicit explanation. T. H. Holland (1903, p. 26) reported that Noetling believed that the Cambrian Purple Sandstone and other overlying formations had been pushed over the Salt Range Formation by a massive overthrust. According to this idea, the Salt Range Formation was a normal sedimentary deposit, the same age as the Eocene salt deposits of the Kohat region, just north of the Salt Range Mountains. This overthrust version was accepted by Rudolf Zuber (1914).

W. Christie (1914), chemist for the Geological Survey of India, held that the Salt Range Formation was not of igneous origin, as proposed by Middlemiss. He found it to be a normal sedimentary deposit, produced by evaporation of seawater, but he did not say when this occurred.

Murray Stuart (1919) agreed with Christie that the Salt Range Formation was a normal sedimentary deposit. According to Stuart, the salt deposits in the Salt Range and Kohat regions were both of early Cambrian or Precambrian age. In the Kohat region, the salt lies directly below the far younger “nummulitic” limestones, from the Eocene. Stuart explained this by proposing originally both the Kohat and Salt Range Formation salt deposits had been covered by Paleozoic and Mesozoic layers. At Kohat, an overthrust had stripped the Paleozoic and Mesozoic layers away, and then the Eocene limestones were deposited atop the Cambrian or Precambrian Kohat salt. But in the Salt Range Mountains the Cambrian or Precambrian salt deposits remained covered with Paleozoic and Mesozoic layers.

In 1920, E. H. Pascoe, in considering all the previous reports, came up with his own conclusion. The Salt Range Formation was a normal sedimentary deposit, of Tertiary (Eocene) age, as was the Kohat salt deposit. Pascoe also believed the Purple Sandstone overlying the Salt Range Formation to be Eocene. The position of the Salt Range Formation and the Purple Sandstone below other formations of Cambrian antiquity was attributed to a massive overthrust.

Robert Van Vleck Anderson (1927) gave the first report of botanical fossil remains from the Salt Range Formation. He noted the presence of “poorly preserved impressions of leaves of a Tertiary or, at earliest, Mesozoic type.” The impressions came from shale deposits at Khewra Gorge in the Salt Range. He gave samples to Dr. Ralph W. Chaney of the Carnegie Institution, who said: “This specimen clearly contains fragments of several specimens of dicotyledonous leaves. This places their age as not older than the Lower Cretaceous when the first dicots appeared. One of the leaves is very probably oak (Quercus) and its size and margin strongly suggest the Oligocene species Quercus clarnensis from western America. It is of interest to note that I found a closely related species in the Oligocene deposits of Manchuria. Your specimen is almost certainly of Tertiary age” (Anderson 1927, p. 672). From this evidence, Anderson argued for a Tertiary age for the Salt Range Formation as well as the Kohat Salt. The presence of Cambrian layers above the Salt Range Formation was attributed by him to an overthrust.

In 1928, Cyril S. Fox published a study concluding that both the Salt Range and Kohat salt deposits were early Cambrian or Precambrian. He saw no signs of an overthrust. He did not mention Anderson’s discoveries.

In his presidential address to the geology section of the Eighteenth Indian Science Congress, G. Cotter (1931, p. 296) disputed Anderson’s report of leaf impressions found in the Salt Range Formation. He noted that E. R. Gee had searched the same locality in January 1929 and found no new specimens. Cotter joined Gee for another search in March 1929 and also found no new specimens. Cotter noted that they found “carbonaceous markings, some of which simulated broad leaf impressions.” But they were in his opinion “not plant fossils.”

Anderson then sent to the Geological Survey of India office his best Quercus specimen. Cotter considered it “doubtful.” But Pascoe (1930, p. 25) said that the specimen had perhaps been damaged by friction during transit, making it “undeterminable.” Pascoe expressed a hope that the specimen had been photographed before it was shipped, but there is no record of such a photograph in Anderson’s reports. Some of Anderson’s specimens were sent to Professor B. Sahni at Oxford, who, according to Cotter, thought that “the specimens, if they were plants at all, were quite indeterminate.”

Cotter (1931, p. 299) also made this interesting observation: “About the year 1924 a large trunk of wood of a modern type and scarcely at all decomposed was found in the salt in the upper tunnel of the Khewra mine. Dr. Dunn, who examined this wood, states that the trunk was about

2 ft. in diameter, and that there were several branches associated with it of about 3 to 4 inches in diameter. Prof. Sahni regarded this wood as modern and resembling an Acacia now found growing in the Salt

Range.”

Cotter, after considering all arguments pro and con, said he favored a pre-Cambrian age for the Salt Range Formation (1931, p. 300). But before his paper expressing this view went to press, Cotter examined occurences of nummulites, fossil foramanifera typical of the Tertiary, discovered by E. R. Gee in the salt marl at Khewra. Cotter, who had originally thought they had been washed into the Salt Range Formation from younger deposits, decided they were native to the Salt Range Formation. In a footnote added to his paper before publication, Cotter (1931, p. 300) reversed the position stated in the paper and declared the Salt Range Formation to be Tertiary. But he regarded it as intrusive, which would explain its position beneath the Cambrian Purple Sandstone. According to Cotter (1933, p. 151), the plastic salt, of Eocene age, was somehow squeezed by geological pressure and other forces into an abnormal position.

Cotter (1933, p. 150) said that the Khewra nummulites discovered by Gee “occurred in association with plant fragments.” He further noted (Cotter 1933, pp. 150–151) that “plant fragments were also found by Mr. Gee in the Salt Marl at the Nila Wahan.” Pascoe (1959, p. 569) cited a 1933 report that at Kalra Wahan, a sample of salt marl “yielded not only carbonised stem fragments but also several small leaves of apparently dicotyledenous type.” Pascoe (1930, p. 132) also noted that Gee found a small piece of fossil wood in the reddish marls of the Salt Range Formation.

Gee (1934) gave his own opinion about the age of the Salt Range Formation, which he called “the Saline series.” He concluded that both it and the Kohat salt deposits were of the same Eocene age. The Kohat salt was in its normal position, but Gee (1934, p. 461) noted that “a very regular thrust of immense dimensions must be postulated in order to explain the present position of the Saline series beneath the early Paleozoics (or pre-Cambrian).” Concerning foramanifera found by him in Salt Range Formation deposits, he admitted that they might be derived from more recent formations (Gee 1934, p. 463; Fermor 1935, p. 64). But Gee (1934, p. 463) noted, “Plant fragments, however, have been found not only in beds of doubtful age but also in beds which are regarded as being definitely in situ in the Saline series.” He regarded this as evidence the Salt Range Formation was not Cambrian.

Some years later, B. Sahni, then a paleobotanist at the University of Lucknow, reported the existence of numerous plant microfossils in samples taken from the Salt Range Formation at the Khewra and Warcha salt mines. Previously, doubt had been cast on plant fossils from the Salt Range Formation. Critics, said Sahni (1944, p. 462), had pointed out that “in such a highly soluble and plastic substance as the Salt Marl, extraneous material might have penetrated through solution holes or have been enveloped during relatively modern earth movements.”

But deep within the mines, Sahni found deposits where such objections could not apply. The salt in these places ran in layers separated by thin layers of saline earth, locally called “kallar.” Sahni (1944, p. 462) noted that “the kallar lies closely interlaminated with the salt, in beds which run continuously for long distances and which, although visibly tilted, show no other visible signs of disturbance.”

According to Sahni, the salt layers accumulated from evaporation of sea water in coastal lagoons, whereas the kallar represented dust and dirt blown on to the drying salt by the wind. Sahni guessed that the kallar might contain pollen and other plant microfossils. When he examined specimens, he found this to be so (Sahni 1944, p. 462): “Every single piece has yielded microfossils. . . . The great majority are undeterminable as to genus and species, being mainly shreds of angiosperm wood, but there are also gymnosperm tracheids with large round bordered pits, and at least one good, winged, six-legged insect with compound eyes.” To Sahni, this meant that the Salt Range Formation must be Eocene rather than Cambrian. Sahni later found plant fragments not only in the kallar, but in associated solid rock layers composed of dolomite and shale.

Around this same time, the Geological Survey of India and an oil company sent a team of geologists to carefully study the Salt Range Formation, and on the basis of their field observations they concluded that it was in normal position below the Cambrian Purple Sandstone and was thus Cambrian in age. This conclusion was announced in a letter to nature (Coates et al. 1945). Among the geologists signing the letter was Gee, previously an advocate of an Eocene age for the Salt Range Formation. The geologists admitted, however, that “our conclusions were arrived at despite certain difficulties, such as the occurrence of minute plant fragments of post-Cambrian age in the dolomites and oil shales, for which we have at present no clear explanation to offer.” In other words, it might be possible to explain the presence of plant fragments in the soluble salt layers, but how did they get into solid rock such as dolomite and shale? This line of reasoning is based on the assumption that land plants did not come into being until the Silurian (about 400 million years ago), with advanced plants such as angiosperms not arising until the Cretaceous (about 100 million years ago).

In his presidential address to India’s National Academy of Sciences in 1944, Sahni (1945) introduced numerous examples of pollen, wood fragments, and insect parts found in samples of kallar, dolomite, and shale from the Salt Range Formation. In his report, Sahni (1945, p. x) said that “stringent precautions” were taken to prevent contamination of the samples with modern organic remains. He also emphasized that samples were taken from locations where the geological evidence ruled out intrusion from younger strata.

The laboratory techniques employed by Sahni and his assistant, B. S. Trivedi, were rigorous. In a demonstration at a symposium, said Sahni (1945, p. xiv) “a piece of carbonised wood was revealed in a tiny block of dolomite . . . which had been cut and polished on all sides to show it had no pits or cracks visible even with a strong pocket lens. The block was, as usual, passed through a flame and then plunged into a jar of filtered dilute HCl.”

In his own address to the National Academy of Sciences, Gee (1945, p. 293) concluded that the Salt Range Formation was a normal sedimentary deposit and in its original position below the Purple Sandstone. This meant it was Cambrian or Precambrian (Gee 1945, p. 305), while Kohat salt was Eocene. This was a change from his earlier opinion that the Salt Range Formation was Eocene (Gee 1934). He saw no compelling evidence for a massive overthrust in the region (Gee 1945, p.

305). Pascoe, formerly a supporter of the idea that the Salt Range Formation was an Eocene deposit covered by an overthrust, placed the Salt Range Formation in the Cambrian section of a new edition of his manual of the Geology of india (Sahni 1947b, p. xxxi).

Gee said that foraminifera of Eocene type found by him in the Salt Range Formation were not in situ, as he earlier believed, but were derived from younger formations. Concerning plant fragments, Gee (1945, p. 296) noted: “Further work on the clay containing plant fragments at Katha led to the discovery of one or two small leaf impressions which were identified by Prof. B. Sahni as belonging to Acacia, a genus still existing in the Salt Range area, whilst in the case of the Khewra mine occurrences, the existence of an important thrust-fault nearby, running roughly parallel to the seams of rocksalt, indicated an alternative explanation for the occurrence of these plant fragments.” Gee thought they might have been introduced into the salt in relatively recent times.

Concerning the Katha finds, Gee relied on the assumption that Acacia is quite recent, and could not possibly have existed in the Cambrian. Concerning the Khewra finds, Gee used the existence of a fault to explain the presence of advanced plants in a formation he regarded as Cambrian. But he did not explain how close the thrust fault was to the exact places where he recovered plant fragments nor whether the stratification showed any obvious signs of local disturbance. The fact that the salt was still arranged in seams, apparently unbroken, leaves open the possibility that the plant fragments were found in situ.

Gee (1945, p. 297) found Anderson’s leaf impressions unconvincing, calling them “unidentifiable brownish markings, possibly organic.” Gee (1945, p. 299) saw signs of organic deposits in the shales and dolomites of the Salt Range Formation, but characterized them as “too primitive to include resistant skeletons or woody tissues such as might be preserved.”

Gee was, however, seriously troubled by the discoveries of Sahni, which were based on careful observation and laboratory work. Sahni had demonstrated the existence of advanced plant remains, including woody tissues, not only in the salt and dolomites of the Salt Range Formation but in other kinds of rock as well, such as shale. About the salt and dolomites. Gee proposed that plant fragments could have been introduced into them by “percolating water.” But this explanation would not, said Gee (1945, p. 307), apply to the extremely resistant oil shales, in which Sahni had also found microfossils. Gee (1945, p. 306) noted that if Sahni, on the basis of his plant fossils, was correct in assigning an Eocene age to the Salt Range Formation, “then it will be necessary to modify our views regarding the essential characteristics of normal sedimentary and tectonic contacts.” According to standard geological reasoning these indicated a Cambrian age.

At the Indian National Academy of Sciences annual meeting for

1945, the Salt Range Formation was once more a topic of extended debate. Sahni (1947a, 1947b) gave reports of additional discoveries of angiosperm and gymnosperm microfossils from the salt marl, the oil shales, and dolomites at all levels of the Salt Range Formation. Microfossils of advanced plants were also recovered from core samples from deep borings in the Khewra salt mine. Sahni (1947b, pp. xxxi–xxxvi) gave convincing evidence that the microfossils were not intrusive contaminations. Furthermore, at scientific gatherings in Great Britain, Sahni (1947b, p. xxxix) demonstrated to geologists his laboratory techniques and obtained “fragments of woody tissue” from samples of the Salt Range Formation’s dolomites and oil shales.

Sahni (1947a, p. 243) added that “in a fragment of Mr. Anderson’s original material several microfragments of wood have been found.” This would tend to support Anderson’s identification of leaf imprints in his material from Khewra Gorge. Sahni had accompanied Gee and others to Anderson’s site, and had found no similar specimens. Sahni (1947b, p. xx) noted that these circumstances “do not by any means cast a doubt upon the identification of Mr. Anderson’s specimen as an oak leaf.” Sahni (1947b, p. xx) also noted: “As it turned out, we had been searching at the wrong place.” Anderson’s oak leaf imprint had come from a spot lower than that searched, and some distance away.

Concerning the advanced nature of the plant and insect microfossils found in the Salt Range Formation, Sahni (1947b, pp. xlv–xlvi) 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.”

Gee, by questioning basic evolutionary assumptions about the progression of life forms on earth, introduces another possible solution to the Salt Range Formation controversy. Up to this point, the relatively late appearance of the angiosperms, gymnosperms, and certain insects had been taken for granted. Evidence of their presence in the Salt Range Formation had to be resolved by (1) suggesting they were intrusive into the formation, which was of Cambrian age or (2) suggesting that they were native to the formation proving it was Eocene and invoking a massive overthrust to account for the formation’s presence below formations generally accepted as Cambrian. Supporters of the former proposal, including Gee, were troubled, however, by the strength of Sahni’s evidence for the in situ status of his microfossils. So Gee suggested that perhaps the Salt Range Formation is, after all, Cambrian, as the geological evidence strongly suggested, and the microfossils of angiosperms, gymnosperms, and insects were in situ. This could only mean that the angiosperms, gymnosperms, and insects evolved far earlier than allowed by any current evolutionary account. It was a bold proposal, but fell on deaf ears at the time.

Subsequently, evidence for angiosperms and gymnosperms was also found in other beds of Cambrian age overlying the Salt Range Formation. These included microfossils of angiosperms and gymnosperms from the Salt Pseudomorph Beds (Ghosh and Bose, 1947), gymnosperms from the Purple Sandstone (Ghosh, et al., 1948), wood fragments from the Neobolus Shales (Ghosh, et al., 1948), and wood fragments from the Magnesian Sandstone (Ghosh, et al., 1948).

Ghosh and Bose (1950a, p. 76) proposed two possible explanations for this evidence of advanced vascular plants in the above-mentioned formations: “1. The geologically known Cambrian beds are of post-Cambrian age. 2. The vascular plants existed in Cambrian or pre-Cambrian times.” Ghosh and Bose rejected the first proposal because geologists unanimously agreed that the beds in question were in fact Cambrian. Ghosh and Bose found the second proposal more likely, even though it was “inconsistent with the prevailing concepts of plant phylogeny.” They pointed out that there had been discoveries of advanced plant remains in beds of similar age in Sweden (Darrah 1937) and in the USSR (Sahni 1947b, in note following plates).

Ghosh and Bose (1947) reconfirmed the original discoveries by Sahni and his coworkers of advanced plant remains in the Salt Range Formation itself. They also obtained fragments of advanced plants from a sample of shale from the Cambrian or pre-Cambrian beds of the Vindhyans of northern India (Ghosh and Bose 1950b) and from a sample of Cambrian rock from Kashmir (Ghosh and Bose 1951a). In some cases, Ghosh and Bose (1951b, pp. 130–131; 1952) found fragments of advanced plants (conifers) in Cambrian rock samples that also contained trilobites. The samples were from the Salt Pseudomorph beds of the Salt Range and the shales of the Rainwar locality in Kashmir.

Other researchers confirmed the work of Ghosh and his associates (Jacob et al. 1953), finding evidence for advanced vascular plants, including gymnosperms, in Cambrian rock samples from the Salt Range and other sites in India. Jacob and his coworkers also called attention to similar Cambrian paleobotanical discoveries in Sweden, Estonia, and Russia, as reported by S. N. Naumova, A. V. Kopeliovitch, A. Reissinger, and W. C. Darrah (Jacob et al. 1953, p. 35).

German researchers (Schindewolf and Seilacher, 1955) took samples of rock from the Salt Range to Germany, where specialists found no evidence of plant remains. But in his discussion, Schindewolf mentioned that he personally witnessed an Indian scientist obtain plant microfossils from a Cambrian Salt Range rock sample in India. After this, active discussion of the controversy diminished. It is quite possible that this was the result of the partition of India and Pakistan. After partition, members of the Geological Survey of India may not have had such easy access to the Salt Range in the newly independent Islamic state of Pakistan.

In recent years, petroleum geologists have conducted extensive studies of the Salt Range region, with no reference or only slight reference to the debates that took place earlier in the century. Although modern geological reports acknowledge overthrusts in the Salt Range, they unanimously declare the Salt Range Formation to be Eocambrian (Yeats et al. 1984, Butler et al. 1987, Jaumé and Lillie 1988, Baker et al.

1988, Pennock et al. 1989, McDougall and Khan 1990). One paper (Butler et al. 1987, p. 410) mentions discoveries of wood fragments in the salt deep in the mines at Khewra. The authors propose these are intrusive, but neglect to discuss the extensive reporting by Sahni and others ruling out such an explanation for the microfossils discovered in various kinds of rock from the Salt Range Formation.

Discussion

In the early stages of the debates about the nature and age of the Salt Range Formation, fossil evidence did not play a major role. Geological considerations dominated the discussion. With the introduction of paleobotanical evidence by Sahni and others in the 1930s and 1940s, the Salt Range controversy became interesting from a paleontological perspective. Sahni, along with his coworkers and supporters, believed that microfossils of advanced plants and insects, along with a few plant macrofossils (pieces of wood and leaf imprints), indicated an Eocene age for the Salt Range formation. They explained the presence of the Salt Range Formation below undisputed Cambrian beds (the Purple Sandstone, the Neobolus beds, the Magnesian Sandstone, and the Salt Pseudomorph Beds) as the result of a massive overthrust.

Advocates of a Cambrian age for the Salt Range Formation challenged Sahni’s conclusions on two fronts.

First, they argued that the plant and insect fossils must have been intrusive. But even these opponents acknowledged it would be difficult to explain how such fossils could have intruded into resistant rock such as the oil shales found in the Salt Range Formation. Overall, it seems there is fairly good evidence for the presence of microfossils and even some macrofossils in the Salt Range Formation. Sahni and his coworkers presented good arguments against possible contamination of their rock samples, either in situ or in the laboratory.

Second, the advocates of a Cambrian age for the Salt Range Formation argued against Sahni’s hypothesis of a massive overthrust, that covered the Eocene Salt Range Formation with Cambrian formations. Opponents disputed the overthrust hypothesis, citing signs of normal contact between the Salt Range Formation and the overlying beds. Modern geological opinion partly favors Sahni. There is evidence of thrust faulting in the Salt Range. But modern geological opinion is also unanimous in assigning the Salt Range Formation to the Eocambrian.

If we stop at this point, the controversy remains unresolved. There still appears to be a conflict between the geological evidence and the paleobotanical evidence. The conflict may, however, be resolved if we adopt the approach taken by Gee, who proposed that an advanced land flora and insect fauna may have existed in the Cambrian or Precambrian. This, of course, challenges accepted views on the evolution of life on earth. But it seems to be the most reasonable way to bring all categories of evidence into harmony.

Support for the existence of advanced vascular plants (including gymnosperms and and angiosperms) in the earliest Paleozoic is supported by (1) reports by Ghosh and his coworkers of microfossils of gymnosperms and angiosperms in the Cambrian beds overlying the Salt Range Formation and in Cambrian beds elsewhere in the Indian subcontinent; (2) contemporary reports from researchers in other parts of the world giving evidence for advanced vascular plants in the Cambrian (see Leclerq 1956 for a review); (3) modern reports placing the existence of the angiosperms as far back as the Triassic (Cornet 1989,

1993). According to standard views angiosperms originated in the Cretaceous. Cornet’s work places them in the Triassic, providing a step between the standard view of a Cretaceous origin for the angiosperms and Sahni’s evidence showing an angiosperm presence in the Cambrian. According to standard views, the gymnosperms originated in the Devonian, and the first land plants appeared in the mid-Silurian.

Paleobotanical and geological evidence from the Salt Range in Pakistan suggests that advanced plants, including gymnosperms and angiosperms, as well as insects, existed in the early Cambrian, consistent with historical accounts in the Puranas. When considered in relation to extensive evidence for an anatomically modern human presence extending back to the same period, the evidence from the Salt Range suggests the need for a complete reevaluation of current ideas about the evolution of life on this planet. One possible outcome of this reevaluation could be the abandonment of the Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis in favor of a model for life’s origin and development drawn from the Vedic and Puranic texts.