Ancient Traces

by Michael Baigent

  There is just one small problem, however. While an aquatic phase of human development does appear to be the most likely means by which our physical attributes developed, when might this have occurred? At first sight it would seem logical to suggest that this development might have occurred during the ‘Dark Ages’ of primate fossils, from around 4 million to 8 million years ago. But what if mankind were to prove far older?

  What if the development in isolated seas or lakes occurred many millions of years earlier? Would this mean that humans anatomically identical to modern Homo were living long before Lucy and her fellow creatures? If this could be demonstrated, then the latter would be excluded from any relevance to human evolution at all; every textbook on the subject would need to be rewritten.

  Is this unreasonable? Is it perhaps a wild theory going far beyond the evidence?

  Not at all.

  The Laetoli Footprints

  In 1978 an expedition led by Mary Leakey based at Laetoli, in northern Tanzania, about thirty miles south of the Olduvai Gorge, discovered the fossilized footprints of three walking humans. These early people had walked across some recently fallen volcanic ash, perhaps in an attempt to escape an eruption. Some fifty footprints extending for seventy-seven feet were excavated. They were dated to between 3.6 and 3.8 million years ago.26

  These footprints are earlier than Lucy, thus they are the very earliest evidence so far discovered for erect walking. Yet there is a mystery about them which is unwelcome to Donald Johanson and his supporters. For these footprints were not made by a creature such as Lucy – no matter how often Johanson argues that they were. In fact, although they were up to 200,000 years earlier than Lucy, they were made by feet anatomically the same as those of modern humans.27 There is no possibility that they were made by creatures such as Lucy.

  The foot of an Australopithecus – the genus of Lucy – has long toes with, as in apes, a divergent big toe. The best example of such a fossil foot which has been found cannot be fitted to the prints. The Laetoli prints, like those of modern humans, have a non-divergent big toe and the space between it and the second toe is the same as it would be today. Professor Russell Tuttle of Chicago University writes bluntly that, ‘It is difficult to imagine a foot… [like that of Lucy] fitting neatly into the footprints at Laetoli.’28

  Many experts who have studied these prints have concurred that the feet which made these prints are, in the words of Professor Tuttle again, ‘indistinguishable from those of striding, habitually barefoot humans’.29

  Professor Tuttle continued his criticism. In February 1997 he was reported by National Geographic as maintaining that, ‘The tracks were made by a mystery hominid whose fossils have yet to be found.’30 These facts have not been well publicized: popular accounts of Lucy and her compatriots ignore it.

  But the Laetoli footprints are just one of many facts which call into question the importance of Lucy in the evolution of humans. Unfortunately the self-appointed guardians of orthodoxy have ensured that their interpretation has found its way into all the standard scientific presentations.

  But not without action on the part of dissenters. The prominent zoologist, the late Professor Lord Zuckerman, speaking to the Zoological Society of London in 1973, criticized the claim that Australopithecus was a human ancestor. He complained that, ‘The voice of higher authority had spoken, and its message in due course became incorporated in textbooks all over the world.’31

  Almost a quarter of a century later the claim is still being called into question, but this time in the light of much more extensive knowledge. In 1997 Liverpool University’s former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and expert on human anatomy Professor Bernard Wood maintained in National Geographic that humanity has ‘no clear path of descent from the australopithecines’.32

  But the arguments over the place of Lucy and her people in human evolution are just the beginning of the complexities.

  The truth about humanity’s development is far stranger than we can imagine. Science does its best with the few fragments of early primates and hominids which have been found. But behind every interpretation of these finds lies the assumption that these bones represent progressive stages of mankind’s evolution over the last 4 or 5 million years. Without this assumption some of the finds would receive quite a different explanation. This assumption has quietly attained the status of an ideology which clouds the modern perspective on the past.

  In fact, it seems likely that humans had already evolved, were already living, when Lucy was born 3.6 million years ago. The Laetoli footprints, at least, are evidence for this.

  Perhaps the required aquatic stage of human development occurred during the ‘Dark Age’ period from around 8 million years ago. Or perhaps it occurred many millions of years earlier.

  Louis Leakey may have originally been closer to the truth when he considered human development as being 40 million or more years in the past rather than the 4 or 5 million accepted today.

  There is, as we shall see, some support for this.

  6

  Suppressed Facts Concerning Ancient Mankind

  Victors tend to rewrite history in their own image; those yet to achieve victory have often already started scribbling. They know that the control over information and its interpretation is the control over belief.

  Such attempts to dominate belief are manifest in many different academic disciplines, notoriously, in recent years, with the Dead Sea Scrolls. But human prehistory has not escaped such ambitions either. Professor Charles Oxnard, of the University of Southern California, pointed out that when Australopithecus was first discovered there was a sharp public dispute amongst experts as to whether such creatures were nearly human or nearly ape. With the result, he commented acidly, that the ‘opinion that they were human won the day’. Then he added a warning: this did not just defeat the alternative opinion but, much more seriously, it risked burying all the evidence which supported it.1

  This is remarkably tough talking. We can be sure that it arises from a real concern that certain material, despite being perfectly sound, has been deliberately excluded in the hope that future generations of scientists will forget it even exists.

  The continuing fight to maintain Lucy and her australopithecine cousins’ position as human ancestors is carried on without much evidence of compromise or goodwill. While scholastic professionalism tends to contain the bitterness, jealousy and mutual derision which are endemic, the battle lines remain drawn and explosions still occasionally occur. Dr Donald Johanson and Richard Leakey once had a very public airing of their bitter disagreement, live on a coast-to-coast American television show.2 Subsequently, a species of guerrilla warfare seems to have continued.

  The title of Johanson’s book (in collaboration with writer Maitland Edey), Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, published in 1981, left little room for misunderstanding his claim. Richard Leakey, writing in 1992 in Origins Reconsidered, does not challenge the position of Lucy directly. Rather, the book gives considerable space to the work of other experts who prove very critical of the claimed ‘humanness’ of the Australopithecus species, of which Lucy was an early member. This has the overall effect of allowing but one conclusion: that they were tree-dwelling apes; they were not ancestral to humans.

  Yet in 1994 a colleague of Johanson, anthropologist Dr Tim White, opened a paper for Nature with the confident statement that, ‘Work in southern Africa established Australopithecus as a human ancestor…’3 There is no sense here that the situation might be rather more contentious.

  However, doubts seem to be slipping through the cracks of the great ship ‘Lucy’. Even National Geographic, a bastion of orthodoxy if ever there was one, in a major series on human origins published in the late 1990s made it clear – in a mealy-mouthed sort of a way – that the issue over the place of Lucy in the ancestry of humanity was far from being resolved: ‘Some scientists,’ it reported grudgingly, ‘are now even questioning Lucy’s position as the mother of us all.’4

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sp; Forbidden Archaeology

  The same year that Professor Oxnard pronounced his warnings, Dr Richard Thompson, an American scientist with many papers to his credit in mathematics, geology and physics, began to collect together all the contrary evidence relating to the prehistory of mankind. Dr Thompson was a member of the spiritual Bhaktivedanta Institute, and his perspective on history was that expressed in the ancient Vedic writings of India: that mankind has been in existence for a very very long period of time.

  In collaboration with writer Michael Cremo he produced a volume explaining and analysing this evidence, most of which had been suppressed or dismissed by modern science. After nine years’ work it was published in 1993 as Forbidden Archaeology. It was one of the most remarkable books of the decade. And, it must be acknowledged, notable for its dignified restraint. There is, the authors found, amongst the finds of geologists, archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists, evidence to suggest that modern-type humans lived many millions, or tens of millions, of years ago in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. They used tools, hunted and coexisted with other near-human or near-ape species such as the diminutive Lucy.

  The authors point out that there is every reason for thinking that the situation in the distant past was rather similar to that today: humans and apes of different species living at the same time. We have already noted the enigmatic fossil footprints found at Laetoli – proof that humans and certain Australopithecus species were alive in the same area at the same epoch.

  The very thought that the present reconstruction of our evolutionary past might be so seriously askew is heresy of the highest order against the dominant orthodoxy.

  Cremo and Thompson voice their suspicions that the views of those who do not accept either the ‘Lucy’ or ‘out of Africa’ hypotheses are not being passed on to the wider community beyond the specialist academic enclaves. They suspect that these opposing views are being deliberately suppressed in order to maximize the impact of the orthodox theories on schools, universities and the interested public.5

  A further, probably unintentional, effect is that the well-publicized clashes between the Leakeys and Johanson have served to divert attention from an even greater argument: whether Africa is truly the cradle of humanity or not. This, both the Leakeys and Johanson agree on. But many others do not; and with good reason, as we shall see.

  To maintain the exclusion of contrary evidence and to shore up the wobbling superstructure of the orthodox viewpoint, a double standard has long operated. Fossil bones or ancient tools which fit the modern theories are quickly accepted and published in the scientific literature; those fossils or artefacts which are contrary to current thinking are dismissed as wrongly identified, intrusive to the early rock formations in which they have been found or, in the last resort, they are carefully placed into ‘missing files’ amongst the clutter of museum basements.

  A classic example of this – sadly not the only one – is the case of Canadian archaeologist Thomas Lee, whose excavation produced evidence unacceptable to the reigning orthodoxy. This scandal centres upon traces of human activity from a much later date than we have been discussing but it demonstrates well the power of an entrenched establishment in manipulating the view of history towards its own perspective. It demonstrates too the utter ruthlessness and self-interest with which these academic battles are fought and won.

  The Manipulation of Evidence

  During the last Ice Age, so much water was locked up in the vast polar ice-caps that the sea-level worldwide dropped by hundreds of feet. Eastern Siberia was joined to Alaska by a great ice-free tundra plain. According to accepted wisdom, it was across this that the first humans walked from Asia into North America. Since the 1920s the date of this migration has been put at around 10,000 BC.

  Even now, despite several contrary finds which directly and fatally challenge this theory, the orthodox position remains the same.6 Uncompromising criticism is aimed at any archaeologist who should prove sufficiently maverick – that is, sufficiently honest with the data – to suggest otherwise: for the champions of orthodoxy take no prisoners.

  Thomas Lee had for many years worked as assistant curator of Indian antiquities for the National Museum of Canada in Toronto. In summer 1951 he was engaged in an archaeological survey of Ontario. While examining Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron he discovered, at its eastern end, near the present village of Sheguiandah, evidence of early human settlement; he began to excavate.7

  During the course of his archaeological digging Lee turned up dozens of stone tools which seemed to have been constructed by people with an advanced level of skill. Excited by these finds, he continued his ‘inch-by-inch’ excavations until 1955. The problem was, though, that these tools he found seemed far older than 10,000 BC.

  In order to be certain that his dating of these implements was correct, he sought the advice of a number of geologists who, by a study of the strata in which they were found, together with the known history of the North American Ice Ages, determined that all the implements were at least 65,000 years old and could have been much older, perhaps as old as 125,000 years.8 In 1954 some forty or fifty geologists visited the site on a field trip and agreed with this geological analysis of the strata.9 In fact, over the years, more than 100 geologists visited the site while the excavations were under way and so had ample opportunity to observe the strata and the objects found in them. Yet, despite the accord of geologists over the dating, the finds presented an insoluble problem to the current view of man’s antiquity in North America: they were, quite simply, unacceptable.

  In 1970 a geologist from Wayne State University in Detroit, Dr John Sanford, reviewed all the evidence gathered by Lee and others at the Sheguiandah site. He reported that

  the stratigraphic sequence of the sediments and the artefacts contained in each layer is definite and unequivocal. Careful digging and observation of the sediments and artefacts in place leave no room for doubt regarding the stratigraphy.10

  Discussing the interpretation of the finds, he concluded that the artefacts ‘certainly date from early rather than late Wisconsin time’.11 This is the way geologists refer to the last of four great Ice Ages which have covered North America. The Wisconsin period dates from around 80,000 years ago. But Dr Sanford added that the very deepest artefacts from the site probably date from the later stages of the previous Ice Age period, the ‘Sangamon’, which ended around 100,000 years ago.12

  Lee’s discoveries were therefore unwelcome to those whose careers were closely tied to the orthodox theory that humans first came to America across the ice-free Bering bridge.

  Lee related the following story:

  while visiting the site, one prominent anthropologist, after exclaiming in disbelief, ‘You aren’t finding anything down there?’ and being told by the foreman, ‘The hell we aren’t! Get down in here and look for yourself!’ urged me to forget all about what was in the glacial deposits and to concentrate upon the more recent materials overlying them.13

  As a result of Lee’s refusal to collaborate with such a charade, his opponents played a merciless game. Lee’s publication possibilities were eliminated. Simultaneously, and taking advantage of his inability to justify himself in print, the evidence he had uncovered was seriously misrepresented by a number of well-known specialists in the field, thereby discrediting both Lee’s reputation as a professional and his finds. Finally, large numbers of the artefacts he had found disappeared into the bowels of the National Museum of Canada, to be forgotten.14

  However, Lee initially had the support of the Director of the National Museum of Canada, Dr Jacques Rousseau, who refused to dismiss him; in fact, he wished a paper to be published on the subject. This heresy added to the pressure on the Director who was himself soon replaced. Lee too lost his job with the Museum; Sheguiandah was contemptuously dismissed by other archaeologists as a ‘non-site’.

  And, as a terminal injustice both to Lee and to the finds, the discovery site was turned into a tourist resort.


  By such derision important evidence is easily marginalized or removed entirely. In this case everything was done to suppress and discredit the data which emerged from the site. This was crucial for Lee’s opponents, for if they had not successfully achieved this then, all the texts describing early man in North America would have needed rewriting. It was that important. Academic careers built upon elaborate but mistaken theories would have been in jeopardy. As Lee bitterly wrote, ‘It had to be killed. It was killed.’15

  The Origins of Man

  The theories of human origins are based upon fossils found in a geographically limited area, Africa, and represent only a few species spread over many millions of years. It is necessary to stress how small, and how geographically specific, these samples are. All the evidence really serves to tell us is about the situation in East Africa between 1 and 4 million years ago. Any wider claims remain conjectural.

  It remains true, however, that to date, the earliest proto-human creatures accepted by science have been found in Africa. They are represented by seventeen fragments of fossil bones found in Ethiopia between 1992 and 1993 and dated to 4.4 million years ago.16 The earliest Homo ancestors accepted are also from Africa, represented by parts of two skulls, one from Uraha in Malawi and another from Lake Baringo in Kenya: both are considered to be 2.4 million years old.17 But we should recall that the Laetoli prints, made by a human foot, are dated to 3.6 million years ago. The earliest tools are also from Africa; just over 3,000 of them were found at Gona, in Ethiopia, between 1992 and 1994. They are assigned a date of around 2.5 million years.18 There is no indication of what sort of creature made and used these tools as no bones were associated with them, but they are presumed to derive from some early human species. They are very primitive artefacts of flaked stone which nevertheless reveal that whoever made them already had considerable understanding of stone-fracturing techniques. There is also evidence of blunted tools being sharpened by having additional flakes chipped off. This is conscious and deliberate tool-making and planning for the future. Africa, then, is the focus for most modern efforts to find evidence of ancient mankind and ancient tool use.