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

by J. Douglas Kenyon

  We know that humanity was fairly homogeneous throughout the Stone Age. Even 10,000 years ago, people lived pretty much the same way, whether they were in Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, or the Americas. They lived very close to nature, hunting wildlife and gathering wild plants, using stone tools and stone, wood, and bone weapons. They had learned the art of making and controlling fire and they had very accurate and detailed knowledge about the habits of animals, the lay of the land, nature’s cycles, and how to distinguish between edible and poisonous plants.

  This knowledge and their way of life had been painstakingly acquired over millions of years of experience. Stone Age humans have been wrongly portrayed and misunderstood. They were not stupid brutes, and there would be no modern mind and no modern civilization without the long evolution they went through to establish the basis for all that would eventually happen. They were keenly aware, entirely in communion with nature, and unquestionably stronger and more muscularly robust than we are today.

  In reality, the natural world we inherited from Stone Age man was entirely intact. Everything was as pristine and virginal as it had been during the millions of years of human evolution. Nature bestowed her bounty upon those early humans and they learned to live within that natural framework. Viewed from a statistical perspective, the human status quo is the hunter-gatherer culture that we lived in for 99.99 percent of our existence as a species, at least according to modern science.

  It is very easy to understand how our remote ancestors lived; life changed very little and very slowly. Early man adapted and stuck with what worked. It was a simple but demanding way of life that was passed on from generation to generation by example and oral tradition.

  There really does not seem to be much mystery about it. But that all starts to change radically after the last ice age. Suddenly, a few tribes began to embrace a different way of life. Giving up their nomadic existence, they settled down and started raising certain crops and domesticating several animal species. The first steps toward civilization are often described but never really examined at a deep level. What compelled them to change abruptly? It is more problematic to explain than we have been led to believe.

  The first issue is very basic and straightforward. Stone Age people did not eat grains, and grains are the basis of agriculture and the diet of civilization. Their diet consisted of lean wild meats and fresh wild greens and fruits.

  To begin with, we will be looking at the evolutionary discordance from a general standpoint by examining the mismatch between characteristics of foods eaten since the “agricultural revolution” that began 10,000 years ago and our genus’s prior two-million-year history as hunter-gatherers. The present-day edible grass seeds simply would have been unavailable to most of mankind until after their domestication because of their limited geographic distribution. Consequently, the human genome is most ideally adapted to those foods that were available to pre-agricultural man.

  This presents us with an enigma that is every bit as difficult to penetrate as the building of the Great Pyramid. How and why did our ancestors make this leap? As they had little to no experience with wild grains, how did they know what to do to process them, or even that they were indeed edible?

  Beyond that, by the time of the abrupt appearance of the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations, grains had already been hybridized, which demands a high degree of knowledge about and experience with plants, as well as time. If you have any experience with wild plants or fruits, or any experience of farming, then you know that wild breeds are very different from hybridized cultivars. It is well established that hunter-gatherers had no experience with plant breeding or animal domestication, and it should have taken much longer to go from zero to an advanced state than historians insist it did.

  We must ask, Where did their knowledge originate? How did Stone Age man suddenly acquire the skills to domesticate plants and animals and do it with a high degree of effectiveness? We find purebred dog species like salukis and greyhounds in Egyptian and Sumerian art: How were they bred so quickly from wolves?

  The following issues make the conventional explanations difficult to support: 1) mankind’s very slow process of evolution in the Stone Age; 2) the sudden creation and implementation of new tools, new foodstuffs, and new social forms that lacked precedence. If early humans had eaten wild grains and experimented with hybridization for some lengthy time period and evolved in obvious developmental stages, then we could comprehend it.

  But how can we accept the scenario of the Stone Age to the Great Pyramid of Giza?

  Plant breeding is an exacting science and we know it was being done in Sumeria, in Egypt, and by the ancient Israelites. If you doubt that statement, consider that we are growing the same primary grain crops that were developed by the ancients. That is a strange fact and it begs close scrutiny. There are hundreds of other possible wild plants that could be domesticated. Why have we not developed new grains from the other wild species of the past three thousand years? How could they pick the best crops with the extremely meager knowledge that they would have possessed had they just emerged from the Stone Age?

  They not only figured out all these complex issues, but they also quickly discovered the principles of making secondary products out of cereals. The Sumerians were making bread and beer five thousand years ago and yet their very close ancestors—at least according to anthropologists—knew nothing of these things and lived by picking plants and killing wild beasts. It is almost as if they were given a set of instructions by someone who had already developed these things. But it could not have been from their ancestors, because they were hunters and plant collectors.

  It is very difficult to reconstruct these rapid-fire transitions, especially when they were accompanied by radical changes in every other feature of human life. How and why did humans who had known nothing but a nomadic existence and an egalitarian social structure so quickly and so radically change? What compelled them to build cities and create highly stratified civilizations when they knew nothing about such organizations?

  During the Epipaleolithic Era, circa 8000–5500 B.C.E., the tribes in the Nile Valley were living in semi-subterranean oval houses roofed with mud and sticks. They made simple pottery and used stone axes and flint arrowheads. They were still seminomadic and moved seasonally from one camp to another. The vast majority of tribes around the globe were living in a similar state. How do we get from there to quarrying, dressing, and manipulating one- to sixty-ton stones into the world’s most massive structure, and in such a short time?

  This quick transition is all but impossible to explain rationally. All inventions and cultural developments require time and a sequence of easily identified developmental stages. Where are the precursors? It is very easy to trace this path of development during the Stone Age from very primitive tools to chipped ax heads and flint arrowheads. That is what we should find as civilization develops.

  But where are the smaller-scale pyramids—much smaller? Where are the crude stone carvings that precede the sophisticated stelae? The slow evolution of forms, from simple to complex, is all that human beings knew, not mud and thatch-roof huts and then large-scale architecture employing megalithic blocks of stone and complex artwork demanding master craftsmanship.

  But the developmental phases are simply not there. Sumerian cuneiform tablets describe fairly complex systems of irrigation and farming, bakeries, and the making of beer. The Bible tells us that the ancient Jews raised grapes and made wine, and both leavened and unleavened bread. We take these things for granted but the assumptions underlying them are never questioned. Where did they learn to hybridize bread wheat and turn it into flour and bake the flour into bread in such a short time span? Ditto for viticulture. These are not simple or obvious products.

  We assume that their ancestors developed farming skills over a prolonged period of time, which is a logical expectation. But that is not the case. The very first and very primitive agricultural experiments that have been documented by archeolog
ists occurred in Jarmo and Jericho. These were small, humble villages that raised a few simple crops, but they still hunted game and gathered plants, so they were not strictly agricultural communities.

  The problem is that there is no intermediate step between them and Sumeria and Egypt, just as there are no small-scale ziggurats, pyramids, or any progression showing that Stone Age artisans could suddenly carve intricate statuary and stelae.

  The orthodox theories are starting to rely more on the “official” pronouncements of authorities rather than on well-argued and well-documented facts. We have reached a crisis in the fields of anthropology, history, and archeology because the conventional theses are unable to solve an increasingly large number of anomalies. The explanations are thin and threadbare and becoming more ponderous and unable to support their own weight. The pieces do not lock together and fit into a smooth, coherent whole.

  We have mentioned previously in this book a quote by the eminent paleo-anthropologist Louis Leakey. Some years ago, while giving a lecture at a university, Leakey was asked by a student about the evolutionary “missing link.” He replied, “There is not one missing link, there are hundreds of links missing.” This is even more true for cultural than biological evolution. Until we find those links, we are like amnesiacs struggling to make sense out of our modern lives and our collective history.

  28 Atlantean Technology: How Advanced?

  What Does the Evidence Really Show?

  Frank Joseph

  Edgar Cayce said that the inhabitants of Atlantis operated aircraft and submarines, and were in possession of a fabulous technology superior to that achieved in the twentieth century. The question of so advanced a technology in ancient times is the most difficult argument for many investigators to accept, especially Cayce’s descriptions of achievements beyond anything known today. He said the Atlanteans were adept at “photographing from a distance” and “reading inscriptions through walls—even at distances.”

  The Atlantean “electrical knife was in such a shape, with the use of the metals, as to be used as the means for bloodless surgery, as would be termed today—by the very staying forces used which formed coagulating forces in bodies where larger arteries or veins were to be entered or cut,” he said.

  Refugees from Atlantis supposedly brought to Egypt “electron music where color, vibration, and activities make for toning same with the emotions of individuals or peoples that may make for their temperments being changed. And same may be applied by the entity in those associations with what may be called the temperments of individuals, where they are possessed—as it were—by the influences from without, and those that are ill from diseases that have become of a nature or vibratory influence within the body as to set themselves as a vibration in the body.”

  Cayce told of “a death ray that brought from the bowels of the Earth itself—when turned into the sources of supply—those destructions to portions of the land.” This “death ray” may be today’s laser because, Cayce said in 1933, it “will be found in the next twenty-five years.” He spoke of “electrical appliances, when these were used by those peoples to make for beautiful buildings without but temples of sin within.” The Atlanteans were skilled in “the application of the electrical forces and influences especially in the association and the activities of same upon metals; not only as to their location but as to the manner of the activity of same as related to the refining of some and the discovery of others, and the use of the various forms or transportation of same—or transformation of same to and through those influences in the experience.”

  At the time Cayce said that the Atlanteans used electrical current for the working of metals, there was no evidence that the ancients knew anything about electricity, let alone how it might be applied to metallurgy. Then in 1938, Dr. Wilhelm Koenig, a German archeologist, was inventorying artifacts at the Iraq State Museum in Baghdad when he noticed what seemed to be the impossible resemblance of a collection of two-thousand-year-old clay jars to a series of dry cell storage batteries. His curiosity had been aroused by the peculiar internal details of the jars, each of which enclosed a copper cylinder capped at the bottom by a disk (also of copper) and sealed with asphalt.

  A few years later, Dr. Koenig’s suspicion was put to the test. Willard Gray, a technician at the General Electric High Voltage Laboratory in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, finished an exact reproduction of the Baghdad jars. He found that an iron rod inserted into the copper tube and filled with citric acid generated 1.5 to 2.75 volts of electricity, enough to electroplate an object with gold. Gray’s experiment demonstrated that practical electricity could have been applied to metalworking by ancient craftsmen after all.

  Doubtless, the “Baghdad battery,” as it has since become known, was not the first of its kind—it was a device that represented an unknown technology preceding it by perhaps thousands of years, and might have included far more spectacular feats of electrical engineering long since lost.

  According to Cayce, the Atlanteans did not confine their application of electricity to metallurgy. They had “the use of the sound waves, where the manners in which lights were used as a means of communication,” he said.

  “Elevators and the connecting tubes that were used by compressed air and steam” operated in Atlantean buildings.

  Atlantean technology soared into aeronautics. Airships of elephant hides were “made into the containers for the gases that were used as both lifting and for the impelling of the crafts about the various portions of the continent, and even abroad. . . . They could not only pass through that called air, or that heavier, but through that of water.”

  Manned flight is practically emblematic of our times, and we find such references to ancient aeronautics incredible. Yet serious researchers believe Peruvian balloonists may have surveyed the famous Nazca Lines two thousand or more years ago from aerial perspectives. Despite reluctance to take Cayce at his word, equivocal yet tantalizing evidence does exist to at least suggest that manned flight may indeed have occurred in the ancient world.

  The earliest substantiated journeys aloft took place in the fifth century B.C.E., even before Plato was born, when the Greek scientist Archytas of Tarentum invented a leather kite large enough to carry a young boy. It was actually used by Greek armies in the earliest known example of aerial reconnaissance.

  More amazing was the discovery made in the Upper Nile Valley near the close of the nineteenth century. The story is best told by the famous author and explorer David Hatcher Childress: “In 1898, a model was found in an Egyptian tomb near Sakkara. It was labeled a ‘bird’ and cataloged Object 6347 at the Egyptian Museum, in Cairo. Then, in 1969, Dr. Khalil Massiha was startled to see that the ‘bird’ not only had straight wings, but also an upright tail-fin. To Dr. Massiha, the object appeared to be that of a model airplane. It is made of wood, weighs 39.12 grams and remains in good condition.

  “The wingspan is 18 cm, the aircraft’s nose is 3.2 cm long, and the overall length is 18 cm. The extremities of the aircraft and the wing-tips are aerodynamically shaped. Apart from a symbolic eye and two short lines under the wings, it has no decorations nor has it any landing legs. Experts have tested the model and found it airworthy.”

  In all, fourteen similar flying models have been recovered from ancient digs in Egypt. Interestingly, the Saqqara example came from an archeological zone identified with the earliest dynastic periods, at the very beginning of pharaonic civilization, which suggests that the aircraft was not a later development but belonged instead to the first years of civilization in the Nile Valley.

  The Egyptians’ anomalous artifacts may indeed have been flying “models” of the real thing operated by their Atlantean forefathers. The Cairo Museum’s wooden model of a working glider implies the ancient Egyptians at least understood the fundamental principles of heavier-than-air, man-made flight. Perhaps such knowledge was the only legacy left from a former time, when those principles were applied more seriously.

  The quote from Childress
is excerpted from his book Vimana Aircraft of Ancient India and Atlantis (coauthored with Ivan Sanderson), the most complete examination of the subject. In it, he was able to assemble surprising evidence from the earliest Hindu traditions of aircraft supposedly flown in ancient times. Then known as vimanas, they appear in the famous Ramayana and Mahabharata and the less-well-known but earliest of the Indian epics, the Drona Parva.

  Aircraft were discussed in surprisingly technical detail throughout several manuscripts of ancient India. The Vimaanika Shastra, Manusa, and Samarangana Sutradhara, all classic sources, additionally describe “aerial cars” that were allegedly operating from deeply prehistoric times.

  Each of these epics deals with a former age, hinting at the last, bellicose, cataclysmic years of Atlantis. Childress’s collection of impressive source materials dating back to the dawn of Hindu literature heavily underscores Cayce’s description of flying devices in Atlantis. It is important to understand, however, that these vimanas had virtually nothing in common with modern aviation, because their motive power was utterly unlike combustion or jet engines. They also had little to do with aeronautics as we have come to understand it.