Paleocontact: Ancient Astronauts vs Ancient Civilizations
Researchers like Zecharia Sitchin propose that a advanced race of extraterrestrials once visited our planet, imparting knowledge hitherto unavailable to humanity. Some UFO theorists also think that the sudden appearance of a uniform code of law, the wheel, knowledge of astronomy and agriculture, and elaborate temples inscribed with cuneiform or heiroglyphic script, could not have spontaneously emerged as they seem to have done between 3400 and 3100BC.
Endorsing the idea of Paleocontact, many investigators consider that these synchronistic events could not merely represent the result of a parallel development of unrelated cultures at similar stages of evolution and claim instead that they could only have been initiated by outside influences. In other words, contact with visiting aliens who were welcomed as Gods and teachers. Certainly history records that there was an unprecedented explosion of knowledge 5,000 years ago, but it may yet have been foreshadowed by an earlier society whose cultural remnants have long since vanished.
However, as far as past scientific accomplishments are concerned, the truth is we just don't know how much of man's accumulated wisdom has been lost through wars, natural disasters, and deliberate wholesale destruction. Isolated pockets of civilization may have flourished for centuries, only to be overrun by barbarians and their former glory lost forever. The oldest societies with a written record -- Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley -- without any cultural antecedents, did seemingly blossom out of nowhere 5000 years ago.
The evidence for a truly ancient civilization, predating even the Sumerians, has been reduced to the merest vestiges of proof but for centuries out-of-place artifacts or, as archaeologists would say, oopart's, have been recovered in increasing numbers. While excavating an Egyptian tomb, near Saqqara in 1891, investigators came upon a small, birdlike object made of sycamore wood. It was dubbed the Saqqara bird and, like the rest of the tomb's contents, dated to 200BC. Little more thought was given to the matter until almost 80 years later, after the Wright brothers had made their landmark flight and ushered in the era of modern aviation. To the next generation of Egyptologists, the birdlike artifact looked uncannily like an airplane. The resemblance was so striking that a team of aviation experts was assembled in the early Seventies to explore this hypothesis. Their study revealed that the 5.6-inch long body was aerodynamically sound. In fact, one aeronautics engineer noted a remarkable similarity between the Saqqara bird and a new, oblique-winged aircraft that NASA planned to build. And when the tiny wooden relic was subjected to the ultimate test -- a flight trial -- it soared through the air with the ease and grace of a modern-day glider. To the experts, the conclusion was inescapable: The 2,000-year-old object was a model airplane.
It is tempting to dismiss the Saqqara bird as an oddity, a single misplaced piece in the incomplete mosaic of history. But it is hardly alone among artifacts that demonstrate strikingly advanced ingenuity for their age. Using increasingly refined tools for exploring the past, archaeologists have identified a number of remnants that seem as improbable in their primitive context as cavemen donning Sony headphones. Indeed, the technical sophistication of certain age-old relics is so impressive that we have only recently come to understand their purposes, prompting some scholars to wonder: Is it possible that the great scientific and technological achievements of the past 500 years were already known to ancient civilizations?
Consider:
Differential gears, which permit a machine to perform two functions simultaneously, were not used in the West until 1575. Yet this innovation was incorporated into the design of a model planetarium found on a salvaged ship that sank off the coast of Greece in 78BC. Electric batteries have been found in Iraq that date from 100BC -- more than 18 centuries before Ben Franklin received credit for discovering electricity.
The Greeks were even using lenses ground from quartz crystals. Many of these early lenses were articles of high craftsmanship, being accurately spherical and well polished. Lathes were evidently available for grinding the rock crystal into appropriate shapes. Some ancient lenses had holes drilled through them, possibly so that they could be carried around the neck on cords. These seem to have been used for kindling fires. Most lenses, though, were probably magnifiers for authenticating seals and for carving gems.
For years scholars have puzzled over these and other ooparts -- the acronym historian Rene Noorbergen coined for out-of-place artifacts. By all historical rights ooparts simply should not exist. Until recently these anachronistic objects were either relegated to the realm of the inexplicable or explained away as the mysterious residues of visiting Ancient Astronauts.
Take the great megaliths that dot the world's landscape, from the pyramids of Egypt to the mighty statues of Easter Island, to the vast circular structure of Stonehenge. These relics, many of them dating from the Stone Age, were once thought to be the work of a long-extinct race of giants, or even gods. How could mere mortals build towering monuments out of stone blocks so heavy that a modern crane cannot lift them, and so precisely joined that a knife blade cannot fit between them?
In the summer of 1980, Joseph Davidovits, a scientist at the Geopolymer Institute in St-Quentin, France, stunned an international audience by revealing that electrochemical analysis of stone fragments removed from the Gate of the Sun might once have existed in liquid form. This ten-ton eleborately carved gate stands by itself on an isolated plateau at Tiahuanaco, Bolivia, 13,000 feet above sea level. The great mystery, of course, is how it got there.
The first clue Davidovits's investigation uncovered was that the molecular structure of the stone had been rearranged, suggesting its earlier liquid stage. Further analysis revealed traces of alkaline mineral reactants, such as oxalates, which are capable of dissolving stone. Davidovits hypothesizes that the original Huanka builders probably broke down the stone by chemical means at the rock quarry, transporting it in plastic form to the site for erection, where it would then be poured into a mold.
To support his contention, the scientist points out that present-day Huanka Indians still make stone objects in such a fashion. The oxalic acid, which they use to liquefy rock, is extracted from rhubarb leaves and other plants. The main question that remains unanswered is whether primitive people in other parts of the world could have possessed such knowledge. For instance, the giant stone heads of the Olmecs of central Mexico, their features curiously Negroid, date back to 1250-400BC. The faces were carved out of boulders weighing up to 24 tons, which are known to have originated in a quarry 45 miles away. Plastic rock does not seem so farfetched when one contemplates the impossible task of dragging crushing loads over that distance with little more than crude sledges.
Since 1980, the presence of oxalic-acid residue has been discovered from scrapings of rock and monuments as far apart as Easter Island and Greece. It provides more than a hint of a clue that this technology may have been widely known and used throughout the ancient world. Other megalithic wonders, such as the Great Pyramid of Gizeh and even Stonehenge, need to be put to the test also.
