Ancient Traces

by Michael Baigent

  What this discovery by Mrs Culp proves – if we can accept the story – is that such a specialist culture existed before the time of the dinosaurs. Of course, this is an outrageous thought.

  Unfortunately for those who prefer the comfort of the orthodox theories, other man-made objects have been found in very early rock formations.

  Ancient Artefacts…

  The Times, Saturday 22 June 1844, contained a curious story. ‘A Singular Circumstance’, it was headed. Some days earlier, it explained, just below Rutherford on the river Tweed, some workers in a quarry found a gold thread in a piece of rock. They took a small section of it to the local newspaper office at Kelso where it was put on display.27 The author noted wryly, ‘How long this remnant of a former age has remained in the situation from which it was taken will baffle the skill of the antiquary or geologist…’

  While the exact site of discovery cannot now be determined, the age of the sandstone in the area of Rutherford is 360 million years.

  Equally enigmatic is a report which Sir David Brewster delivered to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He stated that quarrymen in the Kingoodie Quarry, near Dundee, had found an iron nail in the middle of a block of sandstone. After it had been split open, the head of the nail, together with an inch of its shaft, was still firmly embedded in the rock.28 The sandstone in this area is Lower Devonian, at least 387 million years old.

  A similar challenge to orthodoxy emerged in 1885, in an iron foundry in the Austrian town of Vöcklabruck, midway between Salzburg and Linz. A block of coal broke open to reveal a small steel object, almost a perfect cube, measuring 2.6 by 2.6 by 1.8 inches. A deep groove ran around it and two opposing faces were rounded. The foundry owner’s son took the cube to the museum at Linz where it was studied. Analysis revealed that it was as hard as steel and contained both carbon and nickel. A cast was made of it, which was fortunate for the original has now been lost – perhaps in the chaos of war – but the cast has survived.29

  In California, in 1952, an artesian well specialist, Frederick Hehr, accidentally discovered at a depth of thirty-seven feet the apparent remains of an iron chain embedded in solid sandstone. A photograph of it dating from 1955 shows the block of stone with one large ring connected to a number of much smaller ones. Unfortunately, like many of these remnants, its whereabouts is no longer known.30

  Because of the anomalous character of finds such as these and the fact that they present such a challenge to the accepted scientific perspective – the orthodox ‘paradigm’ – many of these finds are not reported and those which are fail to receive the attention which would ensure their preservation. With such official disdain, all too often they simply become lost, given away to an interested friend, filed in a box in the bowels of a museum or discarded upon the finder’s death.

  … Or Ancient Ancestors?

  The iron nail from Kingoodie could be 387 million years old; the gold thread found in Rutherford was in rock dated to 360 million years; Mrs Culp’s gold chain fell out of coal assigned a date of at least 260 million years; the finds at Table Mountain range between 35 and 33 million years: clearly there is no possibility that any of this data can be accommodated into the conventional scientific understanding of the earth’s history. It suggests, at least, that those fossils of ape-like creatures which are studied by the palaeontologists have little or nothing to do with the evolution of humans at all. In fact, this evidence – if it can be substantiated even in just one of the cases we have reviewed – indicates that humans, in a modern form, have been walking upon this planet for a very long time indeed.

  But while we have listed some of the artefacts found – and it is amazing that any have survived at all – what of the people themselves? Have any bones, skeletons or other remains been found?

  In fact, they have.

  In 1862 bones judged to be human were discovered by coal miners working ninety feet underground in Macoupin County, Illinois. The miners reported that the bones were first seen with a shiny hard coat the same colour as the coal. This, they discovered, could be scraped off leaving white bones. Recent estimates of the age of the coal there indicate a minimum of 286 million years.31

  In what is unfortunately a repetitive litany, these bones have long since vanished and no other studies seem to have been made of them. We can have little doubt, however, that the miners reported the events just as they occurred. But were these bones of humans? Or were they of some early primate? Or were they some strange rock formation or mineral accretion? It would have been pleasing if the bones had been measured and described by an experienced geologist or biologist. And even more satisfactory would have been someone who had the foresight to store the remains so that we might study them now.

  The thought of bones being found in coal deep beneath the surface of the earth may seem so strange as to cast doubt immediately upon the veracity of the find. However, curious though it might seem, given the great pressures and temperatures involved in the formation of coal, true fossil bones have certainly been found buried deep within coal seams.

  During the early morning of 2 August 1958, coal miners working at Baccinello, Italy, 656 feet below the surface, discovered the skeleton of an extinct ape, an Oreopithecus. It was found stretched out and compressed – like a hedgehog on a motorway – in the roof of a gallery. The lignite coal which held it was dated to 10 million years ago. Judging by the bone fragments which had earlier been recovered mixed with coal brought to the surface, an expert from the Natural History Museum of Basle concluded that some thirty skeletons had already been destroyed by mining operations.32

  Footprints which appear to be human have also been discovered in a number of sites.

  In 1938 Professor Wilbur Burroughs, a respected and widely published professional geologist, and head of geology at Berea College, Kentucky, reported finding fossil footprints dating from the Upper Carboniferous age, around 250 million years ago, at a site in Kentucky. He commented cautiously that ‘creatures that walked on their two hind legs and had human-like feet left tracks on a sand beach in Rockcastle County, Kentucky’.33 The Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Smithsonian Institution became interested in these, pointing out that similar tracks had been found elsewhere, in Pennsylvania and Missouri.

  Professor Burroughs described the fossil tracks as being on an ancient beach, now an outcrop of hard sandstone on a privately owned farm. The tracks showed both left and right feet, and each print revealed ‘five toes and a distinct arch’. The length of each track was about nine and a half inches and the width across the toes six inches. They were quite distinct.34

  In order to rule out suggestions of fraud, suggestions that these prints had been carved long ago by local people or Indians, Burroughs took, a microscope to the site to study the composition of the sandstone itself. He reported that the grains of sand inside the tracks were more closely packed than those outside. This is consistent with the weight of an animal’s foot pressing down. In the best-preserved track he discovered that the grains in the arch of the foot, while more compacted than outside, were not as compacted as those at the heel.35

  In addition to this, the sandstone beside the prints was slightly raised, as it would be from a footprint which, as the foot pushed downwards, would push the surrounding sand up slightly. Two local doctors, well used to human feet, also studied the prints and agreed with Professor Burroughs’ conclusion: that the prints were not carvings but true fossils of an unknown creature which walked on two legs.36

  The trouble with this conclusion is that there were no known bipedal creatures living at that date in history. The largest land animals of the time, according to current knowledge, were primitive amphibians rather similar to modern crocodiles and, like the latter, they moved on four legs and had a heavy tail which too would have left a fossil track.

  Professor Burroughs was stumped: the most obvious conclusion for a non-scientist – ignorant of the anomalous dating – would be that these prints were made by humans.
But, as a scientist, Burroughs could not accept that, at least publicly (for it seems that he had begun to suspect something quite heretical). Instead he wrote blandly that, ‘The creatures that made the tracks have not as yet been identified,’ and, together with a biologist, a curator from the Smithsonian and a professor of Latin, chose the species name Phenanthropus mirabilis, meaning ‘looks human’ and ‘remarkable’.37 The Smithsonian has no record of this creature today.

  When queried about these prints in 1953, going perhaps as far as he dared, Burroughs replied cautiously, ‘They look human. That is what makes them especially interesting, as man according to some textbooks has been here only a million and a half years.’38

  Humans with Dinosaurs?

  One hundred and eleven million years ago much of what is now Texas was a great ocean. On its shores were wide mudflats which were the habitat of a great variety of dinosaurs. They roamed at will, their tracks criss-crossing the mud. Naturally, most of these traces have long since vanished, but with one exception: the region around the town of Glen Rose, Texas. There, fossil dinosaur tracks have long been found. They have always been accepted as genuine by the scientific establishment who have studied them with interest.

  For many years, especially in the 1930s, local entrepreneurs cashed in on the interest in dinosaur footprints by chiselling them out for sale to tourists. Before long faked fossil footprints of humans also began to appear on the local market.

  Through these ancient fossil mudflats flows the Paluxy river. In 1969, in the bed of this river, a remarkable discovery was made. Mr Stan Taylor found a short trail of human-like footprints, since known as the ‘Taylor Trail’.

  Unfortunately, this find has become tainted by the local trade in fakes. In addition, since Taylor’s discovery the major advocates of the Paluxy site have been of the ‘creationist’ fundamentalist Christian fraternity. So we need to be cautious; a not-so-hidden agenda is at work here. In fact, the agenda is positively evangelical: the ‘Creation Evidence Museum’ stands in Glen Rose as a bulwark against the evils of evolutionary theory.

  Taylor first saw two human-like fossil footprints under shallow water at the edge of the Paluxy river right in front of a solid limestone bank about eight feet high. He began excavating this bank to see if any more prints were to be found beneath it. Between 1969 and 1972, and with the aid of mechanical earth-moving equipment, he removed tons of rock to reveal that the prints did indeed continue on underneath. It seemed sure proof against any charges that they had been carved or faked in any other way.

  Taylor uncovered seven more prints. They were all very convincing. They showed a consistent left-right pattern as would be made by the bare feet of a human walking across mud. Later excavation revealed further prints, bringing the total in the trail to fourteen. In the immediate vicinity, 134 dinosaur tracks of the same age were noted. It seems as though humans and dinosaurs were roaming together on the same prehistoric mudflats.

  There is little possibility of fraud with these tracks. No one could have created fake footprints under solid limestone; even the most critical of the sceptics concede this. So, despite the taint from the past, despite the creationist agenda, the evidence speaks for itself. The explanation, it appears, is to accept either that humans were alive along with the dinosaurs tens of millions of years ago, or that some dinosaurs had human-like feet. Or is there some other explanation?

  There is, too, one practical difficulty. How would any humans have survived in this flat muddy environment filled with fast-moving predators seeking food?

  The critics, and there are many, do not dispute that these are genuine fossil footprints. They argue that they were made by dinosaurs in the same way as many other of the prints in the region. But these particular prints have been either heavily eroded or were never made very clearly in the first place. These critics have shown how a three-toed dinosaur print could be converted into something rather like a worn human footprint: as the centre ‘toe’ of the dinosaur bears most of the weight and thus goes deeper into the mud, it is this impression alone which would survive after the lighter impression of the two outer toes had been worn away through erosion.39

  This is a very plausible scenario, but difficulties with it as a definitive explanation still remain. For one thing, the human-like prints of the ‘Taylor Trail’ actually run amongst and beside some tracks of a three-toed dinosaur. The three toes are clearly visible; there is no suggestion of the outer two having been worn away. Secondly, at least some of the human-like prints show what appears to be the impression of a big toe. Thirdly, each of the prints is eleven and a half inches long, consistent with a large human foot. We should also recall that Professor Burroughs made a point of describing that five toes were visible on the fossil prints he found. This certainly does not accord with any ‘erosion’ explanation.

  Whatever the truth, photographs of the Paluxy river finds are heart-stopping. They defiantly challenge the entirety of modern evolutionary theory. They bring conversation to an end as the enormity of their implications strikes home. And so, despite the creationist taint, and despite the erosion hypothesis, the conclusion must be that here too science has a case to answer. Unfortunately, the experts shy away, scientific journals are hesitant to run research articles about these prints and most specialists who do pass comment do so with a supercilious disdain which only reinforces the impression that they have something to fear.

  A similar picture emerges in Russia: Professor Amanniyazov of the Academy of Sciences in Turkmenistan reported in 1983 finding a human-like footprint in rock dated to 150 million years ago. Next to the human-like print was one of a three-toed dinosaur, just as we have seen in the Paluxy river example. The professor concluded, rather reasonably in the circumstances, that while the print looked human to him, there could be no proof that it was.40

  These cases are not alone: fossil footprints closely resembling those of humans have been found at quite a number of sites in the United States, Central America, Africa and Turkey.41 Not all, however, are as old as those of Kentucky, Texas or Turkmenistan.

  Traces of Fossil Shoe Prints

  That fossil footprints have been found in rock so immensely old is extraordinary enough, but the strata have produced even more unusual residues: fossil shoe prints.

  In 1922 a mining engineer and geologist, John Reid, was looking for fossils in Nevada. He was astonished to find a fossil of the rear half of a human shoe. The shoe’s sole was clearly outlined in the rock. Proof was the visible stitching: around the edge of the sole ‘ran a well-defined sewn thread which had… attached the welt to the sole’.42 Inside this, another line of stitches was evident and in the centre of the heel was an indentation just as would be caused by wear.

  The fossil was taken to New York by Reid and shown to a geologist from Columbia University and to three professors of the American Museum of Natural History. They all agreed that the fossil was from the Triassic period, 213 to 248 million years ago. They also all agreed that it ‘was the most remarkable imitation’ of a shoe. Further than that they would not commit themselves.

  Microscopic analysis of the fossil was undertaken by an expert from the Rockefeller Institute with the result that, by virtue of the intricate twists and warps of the thread used in the stitching, it appeared conclusive that this was a fossil of a man-made object.43

  But science rejected this find as a ‘freak of nature’. No book on fossils will ever mention it. No professional will ever discuss it. A photograph taken in 1922 is all that remains of it today.

  More recently, in June 1968, a second shoe print was found by William Meister in rock dating from the Cambrian Explosion near to Antelope Springs in Utah. This too is rather difficult to dismiss. In his search for fossils, Meister split open a two-inch-thick rock of shale – dating from 505 to 590 million years ago – and, as it fell apart, it did so to reveal what looked like the print of a sandal just over ten inches long and three and a half inches wide.

  While scientists who have bee
n made aware of this find are dismissive – as would be expected – there is a curiosity about this particular find which makes it very hard to discard as a freak or a fraud. Crushed into the mud by the front of the sandal, by the weight put on it those many millions of years before, was a small fossil trilobite – a shellfish which has been extinct for 280 million years. The indentation it left is clearly visible.

  On the heel was another small trilobite which had evidently crawled or dropped on to the sandal’s flat impression after it had been made.44 This is good evidence against this fossil being simply a geological oddity and, it would seem, conclusive evidence both for its age and for it being the fossil impression of something the shape of a sandal which squashed into the mud so many millions of years ago.

  Scientist and author Dr Richard Thompson, who visited Meister to study this fossil, reported that, ‘Close inspection of the print revealed no obvious reason why it could not be accepted as genuine.’45 Apart from the date, that is.

  Ancient Humanity

  While some readers may disagree, in the face of this evidence it does seem reasonable, even rational, to accept the possibility that intelligent beings were walking the earth many millions of years ago.

  Perhaps humanity evolved very early and many times in the past, developed a culture, a civilization, only to see it destroyed by some major incident. The most ancient writings which have been passed down to us record periodic destructions of humanity over long periods of time.

  The ancient Indian writings, the Vedas, arguably expressing the oldest traditions known, speak of vast ages of man’s existence, the smallest division being the Kali-Yuga which amounts to a period of 432,000 years. One yugic period represents 4,320,000 years. A thousand of these Yugas form a Kalpa, a ‘day of God’ – which just about equals the modern calculation of the age of the earth.