March 9 1999

This category contains sources that could be more tangential, but would include the great antiquity of homo sapiens and other hominids as well as other paleontological and archaeological topics. I'm not a Theosophist or follower of Theosophy, but I have no hostility toward those views even though I reject them. This category will contain conventional as well as controversial sources. I eliminated the little-used separate Archaeology page and put its two entries here (Feb 10 1999).

See the new Catastrophism section in the Bookshop.

See the new Miscellaneous section in the Bookshop for additional titles.

At a local bookstore I noticed Earth Under Fire; Humanity's Survival of the Apocalypse by Paul LaViolette. It was in the Metaphysics section. It pertained to a pre-cataclysm civilization so it looked like it might be interesting. I'll be looking for a used copy at some point in the future, but the first thing I noticed was his reference to Atlantis as a metaphor - the ice ages were ending, and there were great waves from the melting ice which were remembered as great armies invading everyone. How tiresome. Another uniformitarian take on a catastrophic event.

In another chapter, in reference to the K-T boundary events, LaViolette wrote that for most of the species that perished at that point "extinction was terminal." Do tell. The dust jacket claims that the author is a scientist who made some predictions about high energy gamma rays that have since proved true. This book seems to be quite disappointing.

Thomas Gold has written another controversial book, The Deep Hot Biosphere regarding the probable subsurface origin of life on Earth. This looks interesting, and in an ironic way related to panspermia, the idea that life was seeded from comets. I plan to get this book when I can, and review it here. An earlier book by Gold, Power From The Earth described his thesis that petroleum is primordial and not a byproduct of biological processes. This idea of abiogenic petroleum is continued in the new work. To quote from an abstract also found linked from the above page, "There are strong indications that microbial life is widespread at depth in the crust of the Earth, just as such life has been identified in numerous ocean vents. This life is not dependent on solar energy and photosynthesis for its primary energy supply, and it is essentially independent of the surface circumstances. Its energy supply comes from chemical sources, due to fluids that migrate upwards from deeper levels in the Earth. In mass and volume it may be comparable with all surface life." For a wild discussion of abiogenic petroleum, try this.

Dr. Jiri Chlachula has found stone tools in Alberta Canada that suggest a human presence at least 20,000 years ago, and Chlachula (this is a Czech name, not a Native American name, in case you were wondering) sees no reason why humans could not have thrived in the Americas 30,000 - 40,000 years ago when the prairie teemed with life. Others mentioned in this article speak of human remains dated to that very period, and even a human settlement 12,500 years ago which was engaged in behavior that indicated a long history (use of many medicinal plants for example).

William Corliss' Science Frontiers site has short articles about the 32,000 year old cave paintings and artifacts at Boqueirao do Sitio da Pedra Furada, 50,000 year old hearths and tools at Pedra Furada, and possible 300,000 year old pre-Neanderthal activity at Central and 10,000 year old cave paintings nearby at Xique-Xique.

All these sites are in South America and are much older than the ridiculous and arbitrary 11,500 year limit. The current bias against humans in the Americas is not based on anything but blind belief. Rather than rely on dates established by finds in this continent, all dates are required to conform to some ludicrous isolationist belief from the 19th century. We are in chains.

It could be that our chains are getting cast off. Discover magazine, February 1999, has an article regarding the newest discoveries of pre-Clovis sites, apparently very prehistoric navigation (at least 15,000 years ago) from what is now Spain to what is now the Eastern Seaboard, a linguistic study showing that North American native languages are subsets of South American ones, and traveled northward and westward (similarly, the tongues of the eastern hemisphere traveled from south to north and from east to west), and non-Asian elements in the cultures of the Americas. Archaeology magazine has an article from the same month on the same topic, and while a bit more conformist, helps to nail the lid on the coffin of the isolationist delusion. Humans and earlier hominids left their remains all over the world, including islands that are not an easy swim from any continent, and would require a boat for access. In the Americas the search for such things and the identification of such things has not been permitted. And this is supposed to be the society of free thinking and free inquiry. Guess again. As the old fossils die off we'll begin to see more progress in this and other areas. The 21st century should be brighter. In fact, given what the 20th century has been, I don't see how it could be otherwise.

Western Sahara - unearthed remains of walls and fortresses.

German coal mine yields ancient hunting spears - the world's oldest known wooden spears by apparent meat eaters perhaps 400,000 years ago.

Forty five million years ago a primate less than two inches tall lived in southeastern China, millions of years before primates lived in Africa. The origin of hominids used to be believed to be in Asia, but in the middle of the 20th century the idea of African origin took hold because like any branch of science when it is at its best, the dominant idea is shaped by the most recent data. [ Earth magazine, August 1998, pp. 11-12 ]

In the book The Neandertal Enigma science writer James Shreeve writes of his visits to the sites and scientists studying human origins, and the controversies and conflicting theories. He spends the second half the book firmly in the camp of the replacement theorists, apparently swayed by the students of modern mtDNA, who use morphology only when it suits them and object to morphologists' lack of recourse to genetic material, despite the fact that mtDNA studies use only modern mtDNA and rely on morphology to show who was and wasn't modern. - probably worth a read

Apparent 43,000 year old Neandertal flute, 10 million yr old ape, etc

Amud I site - Neandertal brain capacity - the alleged extinction of the Neadertal has been puzzled over for most of this century. At first the species was degraded as a degenerate human, a fluke, by supposed scholars, and that verdict stood for a long time. Eventually a more rational assessment based on subsequent finds led to the conclusion that Neandertal was a separate and extinct species of human, whether it was or was not our ancestor. Everything about the species suggests that it should have survived, and nothing exists to contradict the idea that there was interbreeding between CroMagnon and Neandertal. What happens instead - scholars assuming that the species did not interbreed look at the toolmaking, the larger brain capacity, and speculations about whether Neandertal had a language, conclude that we will never know why it went extinct.

Homo heidelbergensis mtDNA - analysis of 379 surviving base pairs, out of about 16,000, is essentially not very meaningful. The first task was to determine which of the 16,000 were preserved based on the assumption that there is a connection in the first place. The second task was to show that there is a connection based on the identification of which 379 survived (see step one).

More Evidence Points To Impact as Dinosaur Killer

Extraterrestrial chromium found in Earth's crust supports K-T boundary extinction by impact.

Although the Gobi desert is both dry and cold today, it once was home to a large dinosaur population. One new clue to both the former climate and to the role of catastrophe in fossilization appears to have been found. A large number of dinosaur remains, mostly of whole skeletons, have been found. Apparently a mudslide buried a number of the creatures alive and led to the preservation of their remains. [ Earth magazine, June 1998, p. 11 ]

The book Forbidden Archaeology by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson has a website with a sample from the book itself. Atlantis Rising magazine has a couple of articles, both from issue 6, that discuss and review the book - here and here. Additional material can be found at the Laura Lee show website and in Top Ten Out-Of-Place Artifacts in Atlantis Rising issue 5. The latter is by Joseph Robert Jochmans, and discusses a number of well known enigmas, unfortunately including the so-called Ica Stones of Peru, most of which are fraudulent.

Cremo has written a follow up book about as huge as the first called Forbidden Archaeology's Impact, describing the consequences of the publication of the first work, more information about the filtering mechanisms of science, and I believe there is more data of the kind found throughout the first book.

Mysterious Origins of Man - this is the site to read about and purchase the video for the program, along with a companion tape that contains the extra material they could not use due to the duration or self-censoring. I was amused by some of the quotes by detractors, mostly from letters. One writer complained that the broadcast program claimed that evolution was just a theory. Evolution is just a theory, and there's nothing wrong with its being one. So what? But there are some people out there who believe that science is complete. The idea that species evolve through random mutation over vast lengths of time doesn't really hold up in the fossil record because of the lack of intermediate forms, and that's what makes it a theory. It will never be a fact, it will always be a theory. Again, there is nothing wrong with its status as a theory.

Mysteries of Our Forgotten Past

Notion of Time in Collective Memory

Adam the first human? - The Ben Crick Files - uses a hybrid approach. The author concludes that there were earlier hominids, but that the sudden appearance of anatomically modern humans was an act of creation. Although there is no connection, I'm reminded of a Theodore Sturgeon short story in which aliens arrive to recruit their fellow humans. In the story the human race was descended from the passengers of an ancient colonization ship. When one of the potential recruits asks about the planet's fossils of apparent human ancestors, the alien says, "they are indigenous," and goes on to say that the process of choosing a world to colonize weeded out worlds that were not exactly what was needed. Of course, this story assumes a uniformitarian past for Earth, as well as anticipating the replacement theory :^)

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