WORLDS BEFORE OUR OWN
Evidence(?) of human footprints 80 million years old, or civilizations far older than any hominid. Traces of past civilizations destroyed by an atomic catastrophe, or evidence of UFO visits in prehistory?
What happens when unique skeletal and cultural
evidence from a prehistoric world appear long before they
should -- and in places where they should not...?
by Brad Steiger
It is rather amazing that such sophisticated people, as we judge ourselves to be, do not even know who we are. And it becomes rather dismaying to discover that there is a great deal of suppressed, ignored, and misplaced pre-historical cultural evidence that would alter the established interpretations of human origins and provide us with a much clearer definition of what it means to be human.
Archaeologists, anthropologists, and various academicians who play the "origins of Man" game, reluctantly and only occasionally acknowledge instances where unique skeletal and cultural evidence from the prehistoric record suddenly appear long before they should -- and in places where they should not. These irritating artifacts destroy the orderly evolutionary line that academia has for so long presented to the public. Consequently, such data has been largely left buried in site reports, forgotten storage rooms, and dusty archives.
Although the Leakeys, that eminent family of anthropologists, have offered dramatic new evidence that the "homo" lineage goes back at least three million years, the academic consensus holds that an ancestor of modern man evolved about one million years ago. Homo Sapiens, the "thinking man," our own species... became the dominant planetary life form on a worldwide basis about 40,000 years ago.
It is difficult enough to explain the sudden appearance or influx of Homo Sapiens at that time, but it is an even more complex question to ponder why Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man correspondingly disappeared. And just when Richard Leakey is adding to a growing body of evidence that mankind developed in Africa, a Hungarian excavation surrenders a Homo Sapiens skull fragment in a context more than 600,000 years out of alignment with the accepted calendar of man's migrations across the planet.
The Creationist may present an extreme point of view when he maintains that the world is roughly only 6000 years old and that man himself is only a few days younger, but what happens to evolution when there are such sites as the one in Australia, which yielded Homo Sapiens (modern man), Homo erectus (our million-year-old ancestor), and Neanderthal (our Stone Age cousin) in what appears to be a contemporaneous environment? Then there is the Tabun site where Homo Sapiens fragments were found in strata below (which means older than) classic Neanderthal bones. This is but one of several digs that has produced evidence of modern man before what is accepted as one of his predecessors.
Somewhere, in what would appear to be a biological and cultural free-for-all, there must lie the answer to that most important question: Who are we?
But just as we are trying our best to fit skeletal fragments together in a manner that will be found acceptable to what we believe we know about our origins, pre-Adamite footprints are being found, which, if they are what they appear to be, will make total shambles of our accepted evolutionary calendar.
In Pershing County, Nevada, a shoe print was found in Triassic limestone, strata indicative of 400 million years, in which the fossilized evidence clearly revealed finely wrought double-stitching in the seams.
Early in 1975, Dr. Stanley Rhine of the University of New Mexico announced his discovery of human-like footprints in strata indicative of 40 million years old.
A few months before, a similar find was made in Kenton, Oklahoma. At almost the same time, a similar discovery was revealed in north-central Wisconsin.
At Glen Rose, Texas, a 16-inch hominid footprint was next to dinosaur tracks in contemporaneous strata, thereby suggesting that man may have outlived the giant reptiles by 80 million years. (ED.: see also websites on "The Mysterious Origins of Man" and on NBC.)
If man lived at the same time as the dinosaurs, he might have been a king-sized fellow to better confront the gigantic reptiles. Skeletal remains of surprisingly large human beings have been discovered all over the Americas, from Minnesota to Nicaragua. The skeletons average in size from seven to over eight feet tall -- and none of them are carved "Cardiff" hoaxes.
In Death Valley, there is ample fossil and skeletal evidence to indicate that the desolate area was once a tropical Garden of Eden where a race of giants lived and fed themselves with palatable foods taken from the local lakes and forests.
To speak of a race of prehistoric giants in what is now the desert sands of Death Valley is simultaneously to refute the doctrine which decrees that man is a relative newcomer to the North and South American continents. While on the one hand, new radiocarbon dates demonstrate that the Bering Land Bridge and Cordilleran Ice Corridor were not passable until 9000 years ago, an increasing amount of physical evidence indicates that man was surely in this hemisphere much earlier than that recent date.
For one thing, corn, a New World contribution to the pantries, is said to be, at 9000 years, our oldest domesticated seed crop. Some earliest agriculturist had to be on this continent more than 9000 years ago in order to domesticate the seed. Conclusive proof that such ancient farmers did exist was offered when a Humble Oil Company drill brought up Mexican corn pollen that was more than 80,000 years old.
The anomalous Indian blood seration and dentition and the geographic distribution of the American Indian demands an impossible genetic time scale in which to transform Asiatic immigrant to distinctive New World inhabitant. Even if we attempt to keep some kind of peace with the accepted theories of New World habitation, we must grant more evolution in 40,000 years in North America than that which took place in more than one million years in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
We might rest our case by providing as evidence the 50,000 year-old skulls found in California, which are clearly those of American Indians, but we are left with another mystery. A 140,000 year old American Indian type skull (via metric analysis) has been found at an Iranian excavation site.
What enormously complicates the above finding is the uneasy fact that no precedent or prior skull types of the American Indian have been found anywhere in the world. The Amerindians appear without any evolutionary transformational base.
The sites of the mysterious Mullions also offer no end of trouble to conventional timetables and esteemed evolutionary structures.
The Mullion culture suddenly appeared approximately 10,000 years ago along the Algerian coast with the largest skeletal population in the entire prehistoric record. In addition, the Mullions also possessed the largest cranial capacity of any population the world has ever known -- approximately 2,000 cc versus our present 1,400 cc.
Whoever the Mullions were, they inhabited the site only briefly, and their population consisted mostly of women and children, who worked with tool types and domesticated animals never before seen.
As we shall see again and again, we have such a limited knowledge and practically no understanding of the worlds before our own. For example, who walked the streets of that remarkable ''minicivilization" in Yugoslavia? Whoever strode the boulevards of those now silent cities were once citizens of a culture that flourished before ancient Egypt and China -- 5000 years before the glory that was Greece.
What of the lost Amerindian civilization of Cahokia, complete with pyramids and a great wall? One site, near the present city of St. Louis, may have contained a metropolis of more than 250,000 North American Indians.
And who constructed the mysterious seven-mile walls of the Berkeley and Oakland, California, hills? Or the stone wall that runs for 20 miles near Petra in Jordan? And which pre-Mayan peoples engineered an elaborate waterworks in Yucatan to irrigate crops over 2000 years ago?
And orthodox pooh-poohing to the contrary, the pyramids do hold many mysteries. No one has ever really answered the anomalies of the Egyptian and Mexican pyramids; no one has truly dated them; and if we accept established theories for their construction, no one has explained how the earliest and smallest populations could erect the largest architecture.
Scientific knowledge has seemingly been prized by certain inhabitants of every culture, known and unknown.
Rock engravings, which may be as old as 60 million years, depict in step-by-step illustrations an entire heart-transplant operation and a Cesarean section. These 150,000 engraved stones also portray scenes indicating that a very special race of man actually lived at the same time as the prehistoric monster reptiles.
The ancient Egyptians used the equivalent of contraceptive jelly and had urine pregnancy tests.
The cement used in filling Mayan dental cavities still holds after 1500 years.
Cosmas and Damian, two brothers, accomplished successful leg transplants 1700 years ago. Had they somehow acquired knowledge of the techniques of gifted surgeons from the dim past?
The Caracol Tower at Chichen Itza is a remarkable Mesoamerican observatory that seems to have correlated its findings with similar sites in North America, including Mesa Verde, Wichita, and Chaco Canyon.
No fabric is supposed to have been found until Egypt produced cloth material 5000 years ago. How, then, can we deal with the Russian site which provides spindle whorls and patterned fabric designs more than 80,000 years old?
Not only did the ancient Babylonians appear to use sulfur matches, but they had a technology sophisticated enough to employ complex electrochemical battery cells with wiring. There is also evidence of electric batteries and electrolysis in ancient Egypt, India, and Swahililand.
Recently interpreted ancient Aramaic texts suggest that the wandering Israelites were given a machine for producing ''manna from heaven'' that kept them alive on their exhaustive desert trek.
There is evidence of a metal-working factory of over 200 furnaces which was found at what is now Medzamor in Russian Armenia.
Although a temperature of over 1780 degrees is required to melt platinum, some pre-Incan peoples in Peru were making objects of the metal.
Even today the process of extracting aluminum from bauxite is a complicated procedure, but Chou Chu, famous general of the Tsin era (265-316 A.D.), was interred with aluminum belt fasteners on his burial costume.
Relics found embedded in solid rock or in ancient, undisturbed strata are called "erratics." The discoveries of these erratics suggest a vast antiquity for man's existence on this planet.
Carved bones, chalk, stones, together with what would appear to be greatly ornamented ''coins," have been brought up from great depths during well-drilling operations.
A strange, imprinted slab was found in a coal mine. The artifact was decorated with diamond-shaped squares with the face of an old man in each ''box."
In another coal-mine discovery, miners found smooth, polished concrete blocks which formed a solid wall. According to one miner's testimony. he chipped one block open only to find the standard mixture of sand and cement that makes up most typical building blocks of today.
A gold necklace was found embedded in a lump of coal.
A metal spike was discovered in a silver mine in Peru.
An iron implement was found in a Scottish coalbed. Estimated to be millions of years older than man is believed to have existed.
A metal, bell-shaped vessel, inlaid with a silver floral design was blasted out of solid rock near Dorchester, Massachusetts.
Two hypotheses may explain the presence of these perplexing artifacts, these "erratics": 1) that they were manufactured by an advanced civilization on Earth which, due either to natural or technological catastrophe, was destroyed before our world's own genesis; 2) that they are vestiges of a highly technological civilization of extraterrestrial origin, which visited this planet millions of years ago, leaving behind various artifacts.
This present volume shall emphasize the former theory. It will show that erratics do not appear to be the products of a "supercivilization'' capable of interplanetary flight. These objects are generally of a workmanship which ranges in technical sophistication from what we would judge by our orthodox historical yardstick as comparable to that possessed by the societies of Greece or Rome or to that level achieved by our own twentieth-century technology.
Even if a highly advanced extraterrestrial race might have visited this planet in prehistoric times, it seems unlikely such common, everyday items as nails, necklaces, buckles and vases would have been carried aboard a spacecraft deposited in such widely separated areas; for erratics have been found in North and South America, Great Britain, the whole of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Mid-East.
The question of just what exactly may have happened to these worlds before our own is one that invites a great deal of highly speculative thinking. In spite of the general unpopularity of catastrophism, there does seem to be a number of recently discovered "proofs" of ancient cataclysmic changes in the Earth's crust which may account for the nearly total disappearance of these prehistoric worlds. Geological evidence indicates that these changes were both sudden and drastic might have completely overwhelmed and destroyed the early inhabitants and their cultures.
Perhaps the most potentially mind-boggling evidence of an advanced prehistoric technology that might have blown its parent-culture away is to be found in those sites which ostensibly bear mute evidence of pre-Genesis nuclear reactions.
In an earlier work, I told of the "fused green glass" found deep in the strata of an archaeological dig. The statement that such material had been known previously only at nuclear testing sites (where the sand had melted to form the substance) proved to be an unsettling thought for many readers. But throughout the planet, in the same geologic strata, there unequivocally exists areas which scientists state are strongly suggestive of nuclear reactions. Could it be possible that these sites provide evidence of a prehistoric nuclear war?
''Fused green glass" has been found in such sites as pierrelatte in Gabon, Africa; the Euphrates Valley; the Sahara Desert; the Gobi Desert; Iraq; the Mojave Desert; Scotland; the Old and Middle Kingdoms of Egypt; and south-central Turkey. At the same time, scientists have found a number of uranium deposits that appear to have been mined or depleted in antiquity.
But before we confront the grim specter of nuclear annihilation in prehistoric times and begin to worry about history repeating itself in some kind of cyclic purgation, let us attempt to meet head on the mystery of mankind's genesis. It would seem only proper, after all, to resolve its beginnings before dealing with its ending.
This excerpt was taken from: Steiger, Brad. "Worlds Before Our Own." New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 1979.
