Ancient Traces

by Michael Baigent

  8. Artist’s impression of the Central African mokele-mbembe as a small dinosaur.

  9. The coelacanth, thought to be extinct for 70 million years until re-discovered in 1938. At the moment it is only known in the Indian Ocean.

  10. Silver model of a coelacanth found in a church in Bilbao, Spain, in 1964. A second was found in Toledo in 1965. Both date from the seventeenth or eighteenth century and originate from Mexico, where the fish must have been known at that time.

  11. Photograph of the enigmatic carcass found inside a sperm whale at Naden Harbour, British Columbia, Canada.

  12. The drawing gives an interpretation of its features.

  13. Drawing of mysterious Canadian sea-creature ‘Caddy’ snatching at birds off Vancouver Island in 1945, by eyewitness Wilfred Gibson.

  14 Reconstruction of the fossil bones and artist’s impression of the zeuglodont, a species of which might still survive in the sea.

  15. The Laetoli footprints, made over 3.6 million years ago by feet anatomically similar to those of modern humans. They were discovered in 1978 by a team led by Mary Leakey.

  16. Ancient tools found by the famous French prehistorian Abbé Henri Breuil at Clermont, France. Identical to those dating from the last million years of human development, they were, in fact, excavated from Eocene strata; these date from 38 million years ago.

  17. (above): Drawing of very ancient butchering marks, presumably as a result of human activity, discovered on a fossil whale bone found in Italy last century in rock strata near Siena dating from 2 to 5 million years ago.

  Below: A drawing of the magnified section of a butchering mark on a whale bone from the same area and date showing what is obviously the result of slicing action by a sharp object.

  18. The pre-dynastic Egyptian carved slate ‘Palette of Narmer’ from over 3100 BC. Around the centre are depicted two long-necked creatures held in captivity. There is no valid reason to hold that these are mythological.

  19. Drawing of a long-necked creature from within the Ice Age cave of Pergouset, France, dated at around 10,000–13,000 BC.

  20. Drawing of a group of unknown reptilian creatures incised in a wall of the Ice Age cave of Casares, Spain.

  21. Giza: the Pyramid of Khafre and the Sphinx, which shows both modern and ancient repairs to its heavily eroded stone body. The pattern of this erosion and its extent, far greater than on other structures on the Giza plateau, suggest that it is thousands of years older than previously thought.

  22. The vertical erosion pattern on the Sphinx enclosure seen here can only have been caused by rainfall; wind-blown sand creates a different, more horizontal pattern.

  23. Detailed analysis of the head of Egyptian pharaoh Khafre – assumed builder of the Sphinx - and the head of the Sphinx by New York forensic expert Detective Frank Domingo. The difference between the two is so marked that they cannot be representations of the same ruler. The Sphinx is not Khafre.

  24. The earliest example of the spiritual Pyramid Texts, carved into the interior of the Pyramid of Unas, Saqqara, south of Giza, and dating from around 2350 BC.

  25. Wooden coffin of the doctor Seni from El-Bersha, Egypt. The interior contains The Coffin Texts painted in black ink, a genre dating from 2000 – 1600 BC.

  26. The end section of the Egyptian Book of the Dead of Userhat dating from around 1400 BC from Thebes. It is completed with a drawing of the sun-god being adored as he rises.

  27. Alchemical illustration from Steffan Michelspacher, Augsburg, 1616. The blindfolded alchemist is finally led by the mercurial hare to the seven steps of the alchemical process by which means he climbs into the palace wherein the sun and moon are united.

  Notes

  NOTE The full bibliographical details, when not cited here, are to be found in the Bibliography.

  Introduction

  1. Belitzky, Goren-Inbar and Werker, ‘A Middle Pleistocene Wooden Plank with Man-made Polish’, p. 351.

  2. Letter from Prof. Goren-Inbar, 8 October 1996.

  3. Belitzky, Goren-Inbar and Werker, ‘A Middle Pleistocene Wooden Plank’, p. 352.

  1: How Ancient is Humanity?

  1. There are a number of differing dates for the Cambrian Explosion: ‘nearly 530 million years ago’, according to Drs Erwin, Valentine and Jablonski, ‘The Origin of Animal Body Plans’, p. 126; Prof. Levinton in ‘The Big Bang of Animal Evolution’, p. 52, puts it at ‘roughly 570 million years’ before the present.

  2. Semaw et al., ‘2.5-million-year-old Stone Tools from Gona, Ethiopia’, pp. 333–6

  3. The Times, 24 December 1851, p. 5, citing as a source the Springfield Republican.

  4. Whitney, The Auriferous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California.

  5. Skertchly, ‘On the Occurrence of Stone Mortars in the Ancient (Pliocene?) River Gravels of Butte County, California’, pp. 332–7.

  6. Becker, ‘Antiquities from under Tuolumne Table Mountain in California’, pp. 189–200.

  7. Holmes, ‘Review of the Evidence Relating to Auriferous Gravel Man in California’. See summary in Corliss, Ancient Man: A Handbook of Puzzling Artifacts, pp. 670–72.

  8. See Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, pp. 270–93.

  9. Whitney, The Auriferous Gravels, p. 264. Whitney personally inspected some of these objects.

  10. Ibid., p. 265.

  11. Ibid., p. 266.

  12. pp. 274–5.

  13. Ibid., p. 266.

  14. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, pp. 376–7.

  15. Becker, ‘Antiquities from under Tuolumne Table Mountain’, p. 194.

  16. Holmes, ‘The Evidence Relating to Auriferous Gravel Man’, p. 453.

  17. Becker, ‘Antiquities from under Tuolumne Table Mountain’, p. 192. See also Holmes, ‘The Evidence Relating to Auriferous Gravel Man’, pp. 450–53.

  18. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, p. 378.

  19. Becker, ‘Antiquities from under Tuolumne Table Mountain’, p. 192.

  20. Whitney, The Auriferous Gravels, p. 274.

  21. Ibid., pp. 275–8. Objects were found in the Californian counties of Amadour, El Dorado, Placer, Nevada, Butte, Siskiyou and Trinity. For dating see Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, pp. 386–7.

  22. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, p. 392.

  23. Morrisonville Times, 11 June 1891, p. 1.

  24. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, p. 805.

  25. Ibid., p. 806.

  26. Morrisonville Times, 11 June 1891, p. 1.

  27. The Times, 22 June 1844, p. 8, quoting the Kelso Chronicle.

  28. Brewster, ‘Queries and Statements Concerning a Nail Found Embedded in a Block of Sandstone’, II, p. 51.

  29. Nature, 35, 11 November 1886, p. 36. It weighed 1 pound 11 ounces and was covered with a thin layer of oxide. It was as hard as steel and had a specific gravity of 7.75. Some of the specialists who examined it considered that it had been artificially produced, others that it was a meteorite.

  30. Allan and Delair, When the Earth Nearly Died, p. 336.

  31. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, p. 454. The original report was published in the Geologist, December 1862.

  32. Hürzeler, ‘The Significance of Oreopithecus in the Genealogy of Man’, p. 169; Science, 128, 5 September 1958, p. 523

  33. Burroughs, ‘Human-like Footprints, 250 Million Years Old’, p. 46. See also Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archeology, pp. 454–8. Found at the O. Finnell Farm, Rockcastle County, near the town of Berea, Kentucky.

  34. Burroughs, ‘Human-like Footprints’, p. 46.

  35. Ibid., pp. 46–7.

  36. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, p. 456.

  37. Burroughs, ‘Human-like Footprints’, p. 47.

  38. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, p. 457.

  39. Thulborn, Dinosaur Tracks, pp. 229–31. See also Corliss, Science Frontiers: Some Anomalies and Curiosities of Nature, pp. 44–45.

  40. Cremo and Thompson, Forb
idden Archaeology, p. 458.

  41. See the survey in Corliss, Ancient Man, pp. 636–51.

  42. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, p. 807.

  43. Ibid., p. 808.

  44. Deseret News, 13 June 1968, p. 14A. See also Corliss, Unknown Earth: A Handbook of Geological Enigmas, p. 642; Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, pp. 810–13.

  45. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, p. 812.

  2: Problems with Evolution

  1. Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 75.

  2. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, p. 1.

  3. Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, p. 149. Although this essay was originally written in 1977, his first challenge was in 1972. (See n. 31, below.)

  4. Schindel, ‘The Gaps in the Fossil Record’, p. 282.

  5. Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 293.

  6. Ibid., p. 206.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Ibid., p. 439.

  9. Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, p. 150.

  10. An interview by Luther D. Sunderland reported in Mebane, Darwin’s Creation-Myth, p. 18.

  11. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable, p. 95.

  12. Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection, p. 44.

  13. Levinton, ‘The Big Bang of Animal Evolution’, p. 52. See also Erwin, Valentine and Jablonski, ‘The Origin of Animal Body Plans’, p. 126: ‘All of the basic architectures of animals were apparently established by the close of the Cambrian explosion…’

  14. Levinton, ‘The Big Bang of Animal Evolution’, p. 52.

  15. Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection, p. 39.

  16. Formerly called Eohippus.

  17. Denton, Evolution, pp. 182–3. See also Eldredge, Reinventing Darwin: The Great Evolutionary Debate, pp. 129–31, and Milton, The Facts of Life, pp. 122–7.

  18. See Milton, The Facts of Life, p. 124.

  19. Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, p. 151.

  20. Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection, p. 50.

  21. Phraseology with thanks to Jacobs, Quest for the African Dinosaurs: Ancient Roots of the Modern World, p. 242.

  22. Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection, p. 40.

  23. Ibid., p. 41.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Ibid., p. 14.

  26. Leith, The Descent of Darwin, p. 78.

  27. Stahl, Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution, p. 349

  28. Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, p. 157.

  29. Darwin, Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, II, p. 273.

  30. Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection, p. 18.

  31. Gould and Eldredge, ‘Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism’, in Models in Paleobiology, pp. 82–115. Gould and Eldredge write (p. 96): ‘Many breaks in the fossil record are real; they express the way in which evolution occurs, not the fragments of an imperfect record.’

  32. Denton, Evolution, p. 310.

  33. Ibid. The possibility is one chance in ten to the power of 100; there are estimated to be ten to the power of seventy atoms in the observable universe.

  34. Hoyle, Nature, 12 November 1981, p. 105.

  35. Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection, p. 291.

  36. Ibid., p. 157.

  37. See Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, pp. 16–18.

  38. Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection, p. 294.

  3: Could ‘Extinct’ Creatures Still Exist?

  1. Welfare and Fairley, Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, p. 106.

  2. Kaharl, Water Baby: The Story of Alvin, p. 91.

  3. Soule, Wide Ocean, p. 171.

  4. See Bille, Rumors of Existence, pp. 21–2; Shuker, In Search of Prehistoric Survivors: Do Giant ‘Extinct’ Creatures Still Exist?, p. 123.

  5. Shuker, In Search of Prehistoric Survivors, pp. 122–3.

  6. Ellis, Monsters of the Sea, pp. 343–4, quoting D. J. Stead, Sharks and Rays of Australian Seas, Sydney, 1963.

  7. Shuker, In Search of Prehistoric Survivors, p. 123.

  8. Ibid., p. 123. See also Linklater, The Voyage of the Challenger, p. 244

  9. Shuker, In Search of Prehistoric Survivors, p. 119.

  10. Ibid., p. 120.

  11. Ibid., p. 121.

  12. Secretariat, P.O. Box 43070, Tucson, Arizona 85733, United States.

  13. Heuvelmans, In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, pp. 473–7

  14. LeBlond and Sibert, Observations of Large Unidentified Marine Animals in British Columbia and Adjacent Waters, pp. 5–6.

  15. Ibid., p. 63.

  16. Ibid., p. 31.

  17. Ibid., p. 32.

  18. LeBlond and Bousfield, Cadborosaurus: Survivor from the Deep, p. 2.

  19. Ibid., p. 29.

  20. Ibid., p. 40.

  21. Ibid., p. 31.

  22. Ibid., pp. 94–118.

  23. Ibid., pp. 119–20.

  24. Ibid., p. 57.

  25. Ibid., pp. 51–5.

  26. Ibid., p. 57.

  27. Shuker, In Search of Prehistoric Survivors, p. 81.

  28. Ibid., pp. 81–2.

  29. Ibid., p. 82.

  30. Ibid., pp. 82–3.

  31. Ibid., p. 84.

  32. Ibid., p. 102. Doubts have since emerged over this video. Suspicions have been raised that it might have been a hoax. See Fortean Times, 102, September 1997, p. 29.

  33. Shuker, In Search of Prehistoric Survivors, pp. 100–102.

  34. Ibid., p. 83.

  35. Ibid., p. 84.

  36. Shuker (ibid., p. 92) reports that fossils of the plesiosaur group, the later elasmosaur, have been found in a rock formation in California which also contains fossils from the Palaeocene period (55–64 million years ago). Unfortunately there has not yet been a proven link between the two types of fossil.

  37. See his discussion, ibid., pp. 91–8.

  38. Ibid., p. 95.

  39. Vartanyan, Garutt and Sher, ‘Holocene Dwarf Mammoths from Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic’, pp. 337–40. See also Lister, ‘Mammoths in Miniature’, pp. 288–9.

  40. Shuker, In Search of Prehistoric Survivors, p. 81.

  41. Ibid., pp. 108–9.

  42. Bille, Rumors of Existence, pp. 39–40.

  43. New York Times, 12 November 1995.

  44. For a review of all creatures discovered this century, large and small, see Shuker, The Lost Ark.

  4: Living Dinosaurs

  1. For the story of the expeditions see Mackal, A Living Dinosaur?: In Search of Mokele-Mbembe.

  2. Kingdon, Island Africa, pp. 10–16.

  3. Proyart, Histoire de Loango, Kakongo, et autres royaumes d’Afrique, pp. 38–9.

  4. Ley, The Lungfish and the Unicorn, pp. 122–3.

  5. Shuker, In Search of Prehistoric Survivors: Do Giant ‘Extinct’ Creatures Still Exist?, p. 1.9.

  6. Heuvelmans, On the Track of Unknown Animals, p. 462.

  7. Ibid., pp. 434–41.

  8. Shuker, In Search of Prehistoric Survivors, p. 19.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Ibid., pp. 19–20.

  11. Mackal, A Living Dinosaur?, pp. 19–20.

  12. Ibid., pp. 21–2.

  13. Ibid., p. 23.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Ibid., pp. 24–5.

  16. Ibid., pp. 81–2.

  17. Ibid., pp. 77–8.

  18. Ibid., p. 82.

  19. Ibid., pp. 59, 62, 75–6.

  20. Ibid., pp. 179–80.

  21. O’Hanlon, Congo Journey, p. 323.

  22. Mackal, A Living Dinosaur?, p. 84.

  23. Ibid., p. 139.

  24. Ibid., pp. 235–6.

  25. Ibid., pp. 257–9

  26. See, for example, Emery, Archaic Egypt, p. 45 and plate 3(a).

  27. Lorblanchet and Sieveking, ‘The Monsters of Pergouset’, p. 40. It is illustrated on p. 47. The same room also contains inscribed signs – groups of curved parallel lines as well as a zigzag design with six angles on the left, seven on the right. What these signs record, if anything, is unknown. See pp. 43 and 50.

  28. Breuil, Quatre cents siècles d’art p
ariétal, p. 390, fig. 512.

  29. Melland, In Witch-bound Africa, p. 238.

  30. Price, Extra-special Correspondent, p. 178.

  31. Lt Col. A. C. Simonds, ‘Pieces of War’, typescript memoir dated 1 July 1985, covering the years 1931–74.

  32. The original article was reproduced in Fortean Times, 105, December 1997, p. 37.

  33. Shuker, In Search of Prehistoric Survivors, p. 57.

  34. Ibid., pp. 54–5.

  35. Ibid., p. 56.

  36. Lawson, ‘Pterosaur from the Latest Cretaceous of West Texas: Discovery of the Largest Flying Creature’, p. 947.

  37. Shuker, In Search of Prehistoric Survivors, p. 59.

  38. Ibid.

  5: The Mysteries of Human Evolution

  1. Johanson and Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, p. 22.

  2. For many years it was considered that no Homo erectus remains had been found in Europe. In March 1994 much of the upper portion of a hominid skull was found in Italy. Dated to about 900,000 years ago, it was called ‘Ceprano Man’ and has been assigned to the species of erectus despite a number of slight morphological distinctions. See Gore, ‘The First Europeans’, p. 101.

  3. See, for example, the chart published in Leakey and Walker, ‘Early Hominid Fossils from Africa’, p. 62. See also Lewin, Bones of Contention, p. 17.

  4. See the comments on Australopithecus as apes in Leakey and Lewin, Origins Reconsidered, for example, pp. 158, 194 and 196.

  5. Ibid., p. 120.

  6. Lewin, Bones of Contention, p. 137.

  7. Leakey and Walker, ‘Early Hominid Fossils from Africa’ p. 62. They named the species Australopithecus anamensis.

  8. White et al., ‘Australopithecus ramidus, a New Species of Early Hominid from Aramis, Ethiopia’, p. 306. In 1995 this species was renamed Ardipithecus ramidus.

  9. Johanson and Edey, Lucy, p. 309.