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

by J. Douglas Kenyon

  The problem with mutation being the driving force is several-fold. As Behe pointed out in his book, life within a cell is just too complex to be the outcome of random mutations. But Darwin didn’t have the kind of lab technology that molecular biologists today have at their disposal. Darwin was working with species, not the structure of cells, mitochondria, and DNA. But the mutation theory doesn’t work well on other levels, either.

  Now we must return to the problem of the sudden appearance of flowering plants. There is a high degree of organization in flowers. Most flowers are specifically designed to accommodate bees and other pollinators. Which came first, the flower or the bee? We’ll get to that momentarily; the first question is: How did the alleged primitive nonflowering plant, which had for eons relied on asexual reproduction, suddenly grow the structures required for sexual reproduction?

  According to Darwin’s theory, it happened when a gymnosperm mutated and then changed over time into a flowering plant. Is that possible? Let’s keep a few facts in mind: In flowering plants, the transfer of pollen from the male anther to the female stigma must occur before seed plants can reproduce sexually. The mutation had to start with one plant, somewhere, at some point. There were no insects or animals specifically adapted to pollinate flowers because there were no flowers prior to that time.

  This is where the idea of combining mutation, natural selection, and gradualism breaks down. When faced with the dilemma of advanced organization and the leap from asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction, Darwinists will say that evolution simply operates too slowly for the links to be apparent. That is a non sequitur. If it acts slowly, then there should be a superabundance of fossils demonstrating the existence of the missing links.

  Natural selection would not select a gymnosperm (let’s say a fern) that suddenly mutated a new structure that required an enormous amount of the plant’s energy but had no purpose. In other words, flowerless plants could not have gradually grown the flower parts in a piecemeal fashion over tens of millions of years until a fully functional flower head was formed. That would go against Darwin’s own law of natural selection, the survival of the fittest.

  The more you isolate the logical steps that had to occur for Darwin’s theory to be correct, the more trouble you get into. How would a newly evolved flower propagate without other flowers nearby? Why do we find numerous examples of gymnosperms and angiosperms in the fossil record but no transitional species to demonstrate how mutation and natural selection operated to create flowers?

  If Darwinism cannot explain the mechanisms responsible for speciation and how life on this planet evolves, what can? Sir Francis Crick, the codiscover of DNA’s double helix structure, proposed the concept of “panspermia,” the idea that life was brought to Earth by an advanced civilization from another planet. It is obvious that Crick was not sold on Darwinism. Behe ends his book with an argument for integrating a “theory of intelligent design” into mainstream biology.

  Other biologists, like Lynn Margulis, think that Darwinism leans too heavily on the idea that competition is the main, driving force behind survival. She points out that cooperation is as readily observed and as important, perhaps more important. Nature contains many examples of symbiosis: Flowers need bees and vice versa. Another example is the relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and forest trees. There are bacteria that fix nitrogen for plants. The list goes on. What is a human body but a collection of different kinds of cells and viruses working together to create a complex organism?

  The old paradigm is starting to give way to new thinking and new models such as intelligent design and extraterrestrial intervention. Marx and Freud were nineteenth-century pioneers who blazed trails, but so was Newton. Their new paradigms inspired new perspectives and they solved old problems. Still, they had their limits. Their theories were mechanistic and materialistic. Newton’s decline came with the introduction of Einstein’s theory of relativity. The new paradigm of the laws of physics fit the facts and answered more questions, and that meant it had greater utility. Is Darwin next?

  Until a more comprehensive theory of how life originated, changed, and continues to evolve emerges, as Richard Milton put it, “Darwin doesn’t work here anymore.”

  2 Evolution vs. Creation

  Is the Debate for Real?

  David Lewis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  WHAT ABOUT THE BIBLE AND CREATIONISM?

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

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

  NEW GROUND OR ANCIENT WISDOM?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  LOST CIVILIZATIONS, THE REAL MISSING LINK?

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

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

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

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

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