Forbidden Archaeology
In the very first issue of Shadows Of Your Mind magazine in 2017 I interviewed ‘forbidden’ archaeologist Michael Cremo on the anomalies that challenge the accepted view of our human ancestry
In 1996, a book was released that posed serious questions about the history of the human race. The book was called Forbidden Archaeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race and was written by Michael Cremo and Dr. Richard L Thompson. Within it’s pages was the hypothesis that modern man, Homo Sapiens, was not just tens of thousands years old but could possibly be millions of years old! This theory proposed that modern-type humans would have lived alongside our supposed ape ancestors rather than be descended from them.
Examining long-forgotten evidence of Victorian-era discoveries, which went totally against the accepted Darwinian theories of the time, the book spanned over 900 pages and certainly ruffled a few feathers in mainstream academia and civilised anthropology. Now, more than twenty years later and with a follow-up currently being written, we spoke to author Michael Cremo to ask why that same mainstream academia continues to ignore that evidence and has yet to answer many of the questions raised — although they do seem to be getting closer.
SOYM: How would you define the term ‘Forbidden Archaeology’?
Michael Cremo: By “Forbidden Archaeology” I mean archeological discoveries that are dismissed by mainstream scientists. Primarily because they show the existence of humans, like us, predating the mainstream scientific consensus regarding the first appearance of modern humans nearly 200,000 years ago.
SOYM: When did you first become interested in the origins of humanity?
MC: As a young person, I explored different cultures and world views. I became especially attracted to the spiritual culture and world view of ancient India. In the Puranas, the historical writings of ancient India, I found accounts of human populations existing in the very distant past, millions of years ago. Similar accounts of extreme human antiquity can be found in the writings of other ancient wisdom traditions. This was something very different than I had learned from my teachers in school and university. So I wondered, are these accounts of extreme human antiquity simply mythology, or is there perhaps some factual basis for them? That’s what inspired me to look into the history of archaeology. Of course if you look at the current textbooks you see only the discoveries that are consistent with the currently accepted ideas about human origins and antiquity. But I decided to look beyond the textbooks, into the original scientific reports, from the time of Darwin up to the present. When I did that, I found many reports of archaeologists and geologists finding human bones, footprints and artifacts (of the kind normally attributed to humans like us) that were far older than 200,000 years. In many cases they were millions of years old. I collected those reports in my book Forbidden Archaeology.
SOYM: There is indisputable evidence of hand-worked flint and stone hand tools discovered in geological strata levels that date back millions of years, many of which you describe in the book.
MC: Yes, but the discoverers interpret them in such a way as to fit modern evolutionary expectations. For example, among the oldest stone tools recognized by modern scientists are the crude stone tools found at the Lomekwi 3 site at West Turkana, Kenya, which are 3.3 million years old. They were reported to the scientific world in 2015. Who made them? According to mainstream scientists it had to be some variety of Australopithecus, the apeman they believe existed at that time. But archaeologists have discovered that living populations of humans in Ethiopia still make similar crude stone tools. They strike flakes off of flint cores, and use them to scrape animal hides. So, regarding the Lomekwi stone tools, they could have been made by humans like us, not Australopithecus, 3.3 million years ago.
ACADEMIA IS DISMISSIVE OF ANY DISCOVERIES THAT CONTRADICT THE DARWINIAN CONCEPT OF EVOLUTION
SOYM: Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace turned the biological world on it’s head in the 19th Century but Darwin himself struggled to tie his theory of evolution to the accepted human history of the time. Why do think mainstream academia still holds Darwinism with such esteem yet seems to be unnecessarily dismissive of the field of palaeoarchaeology?
MC: Palaeoarchaeology means archaeology of the deep past, going back more than ten thousand years. Mainstream academia is not dismissive of palaeoarchaeological discoveries per sé, as long as they are consistent with the Darwinian evolutionary consensus on human origins, namely that we were preceded by a sequence of more primitive apelike creatures. They are, however, dismissive of palaeoarchaeological evidence for extreme human antiquity, evidence showing that humans like us existing long before 200,000 years ago. That is because this evidence goes so far back in time, it seems to contradict the whole Darwinian evolutionary concept of not only human life, but all life. That means some alternative is necessary, and the alternatives tend to involve the introduction of non-material substances (such as consciousness existing independently from matter) and some higher cosmic intelligence being involved in our origins. But over the past few centuries science has developed in such a way as to exclude non-material substance and a higher guiding intelligence. And they want to keep it that way. It is interesting that Alfred Russel Wallace, who along with Darwin was the co-founder of the theory of evolution, was a supporter of evidence for extreme human antiquity and introduced non-material substance and intelligent guidance into his ideas about our origins. Initially, the theory of evolution was called the Wallace-Darwin theory. But after Wallace became involved with these other kinds of ideas, his name was dropped.
SOYM: So do you think the evidence for extreme human antiquity is more suppressed now than in Victorian-era Britain?
MC: Yes. After Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, scientists in Europe and elsewhere began to consider the idea that humans like us evolved from primitive apes. So the search began for “missing links,” creatures intermediate between ancient apes and modern humans. But they were not finding the intermediates. Throughout the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s, archaeologists and geologists were finding evidence for humans like us existing millions of years ago. These discoveries were published in the mainstream scientific journals and displayed in the museums because at that early stage, even for evolutionists, the timeline for the appearance of the first anatomically modern humans was not fixed. They had no reason to think that humans like us could not have existed millions of years ago. That all changed with Eugéne Dubois’ discovery of Java Man in the 1890s in Indonesia. His discovery consisted of an ape-like skullcap and a humanlike thighbone. So now scientists had their first missing link. It was judged to be about 800,000 years old.
From then on, scientists insisted that humans like us had to come after that, long after that. As this became widely accepted, the same scientists had to decide what to do with the evidence for extreme human antiquity that had been uncovered during the previous decades. Naturally, it had to be dismissed and if anyone else discovered any such evidence in the future, then that also had to be dismissed or interpreted in such a way that it fit the evolutionary timeline.
SOYM: Ocean levels are significantly higher today e.g. with the UK being connected to the European continent as recent as 8,000 years ago. Do you think there could be a wealth of information waiting to be discovered under the coastal sea beds?
MC: Yes. Actually marine archaeology is a growing field. Some of the discoveries fit the conventional time line for human origins. But some discoveries do not. Some years ago (2001 — Ed), Canadian researchers reported sonar images of what appeared to be the remains of a sunken city off the western tip of Cuba. The remains were at a depth of about 2000 feet. The last time that surface was dry land was many millions of years ago.
SOYM: With regards global discoveries of ‘giants’ skeletons in the 19th and 20th centuries that were publicly displayed and subsequently covered-up, where do you think they fit in the story of mankind?
MC: Science tells us that in the past many kinds of plants and animals were bigger than they are today. The deer were bigger, the bears were bigger, the trees were bigger. So why not humans also? In the mountains of California you can see the California redwood trees. They are over 300 feet tall. Some of them are thousands of years old. I think they are holdovers from that earlier age when living things, including humans, were bigger.
SOYM: Do you think there’s something to be said for the existence of similar larger hominid species such as the Almas giants of Mongolia, or even Sasquatch (Bigfoot) in North America?
MC: In Forbidden Archaeology, I have a chapter on evidence for the existence of such creatures. It appears that today humans like us are coexisting on this planet not only with apes but also apemen (hominids). And that was also true in the distant past. Apemen were there, apes were there. And humans like us were also there. So if you look at all the evidence, the pattern that emerges is one of coexistence of all these types, not evolution of one from another.
SOYM: There seems to be more opposition to ancient humans living in North America than anywhere else in the world — with the exception of Antarctica — with the Clovis culture still regarded as the origin point around 12,000 years ago despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Why do you think this is?
MC: It could be it has something to do with the politics of colonization of the Americas by the Europeans. Actually, the native American Indian populations, according to their own traditional histories, were always here. They were not recent arrivals. Acknowledging that might increase the legitimacy of their claims to the land. Also, I think there is also some understanding among archaeologists that if discoveries even slightly older than the Clovis culture are accepted, then it will lead to acknowledging other even older discoveries that challenge not just modern scientific ideas about the peopling of the Americas but also the whole concept of human origins. The stone tools found at the Calico site in California are about 250,000 years old. And then there are the discoveries at Table Mountain in the California gold mining region, reported to the scientific world by Dr. J. D. Whitney in 1880s. These human bones and artifacts come from formations modern geologists say are about 50 million years old. There are many other discoveries like this from North and South America.
SOME OF THE OLDEST STONE TOOLS RECOGNIZED BY MODERN SCIENTISTS ARE 3.3 MILLION YEARS OLD
SOYM: Is is fair to say that humanity is becoming more ignorant of our own history due to a reliance on technology and being spoon fed information?
MC: It is a complex situation. The supporters of the dominant evolutionary theory of human origins have thus far continued to maintain their complete control of the educational institutions in most countries. But at the same time they are not able to control all the ways that people get information through all the current channels of communication. Gallup surveys have shown that the majority of people in America do not accept the scientific establishment ideas about human origins and antiquity. It is an unstable situation, where you have an elite establishment trying to force its views on a population that does not really accept that view. Eventually, the people who are paying the taxes are going to question why are we giving these people so much money to indoctrinate us in something we really don’t accept? Of course, there are many things that science does get right, but the idea we evolved from apes is not one of them.
SOYM: Do you think there is any weight to the theory of some kind of extraterrestrial genetic intervention in our evolution as popularised elsewhere?
MC: One common idea is that the process of human evolution went on pretty much as mainstream scientists say up to the point of the apeman Homo erectus, about 400,000 years ago. Then they say some flesh and blood extraterrestrials came and manipulated the genes of Homo erectus to produce humans like us as a slave race.
I do not accept that theory. There is archaeological evidence that humans like us were present on earth long before 400,000 years ago. I think the human presence goes back to the very beginnings of life on earth. But I do believe our presence here is the result of an extraterrestrial intervention.
I have an expanded conception of what extraterrestrial means. All bodies, including human bodies, are vehicles for conscious selves. The conscious self is not produced by matter. It comes from another level of reality. The human body is a vehicle which we can use to transfer the conscious self back to the higher level of reality from which we came. So in that sense, as conscious selves, we are all extraterrestrials. I talk about this in my book Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory.
© James St John via Flickr.
SOYM: What was the last book you read that grabbed your attention?
MC: The Message of the Engraved Stones of Ica by Javier Cabrera Daquera. I’ve known about the Ica stones from Peru for a long time. These stones have engravings of dinosaurs on them, among other things. The engravings were allegedly made millions of years ago, during the time of the dinosaurs. I had my negative preconceptions about them. But reading the book I came to see them in a more favorable light.
SOYM: The field of archaeology can be pretty daunting by itself, do you have a piece of advice for anyone who wants to get started into alternative archaeology?
MC: Alternative archaeology is a big field.
My best advice is to pick an aspect of that field. Do your research. Become expert in it. And then communicate it, by writing, speaking, etc. Decide what audiences you want to reach: the general public? People interested in alternative ideas? Scientists? Students? I try to reach them all.
For more information visit Michael’s website www.mcremo.com
