Many years ago Michael Cremo and Richard L. Thompson wrote a book entitled Forbidden Archaeology. Cremo discusses it here
They claim that humans in their modern anatomical form have existed for millions of years and that “knowledge filtration” occurs where the evidence supporting the dominant theories of the time pass through with ease whereas contradictory evidence is filtered out.
An NBC broadcast narrated by Charlton Heston based on the book can be viewed here
At the end of an interview given in the making of the film, Thompson had this to say:
…our basic point of view is that one should look at all of the evidence and then be able to make a reasonable decision. The main outcome that we would like to see from our publication of Forbidden Archaeology is that we would like to see an opening up of our serious scientific enquiries into the nature and origin of human beings and also other forms of life. We feel that the mainstream scientific position on these questions has been too narrowly constricted for a very long period of time. Much important evidence has been left out of the picture and many important ideas have also been excluded. We would like to see a much deeper investigation into all of the available evidence and in this way we could learn more about what we are and about what our real purpose in life should be.
In his book, “Hidden History of the Human Race”, Cremo concludes:
that the total evidence, including fossil bones and artifacts, is most consistent with the view that anatomically modem humans have coexisted with other primates for tens of millions of years.
I agree with these conclusions. I do not go along with the view that human evolution has proceeded from a crude primitive condition to increasingly sophisticated modern culture. I believe that some very ancient human cultures have matched and even exceeded modern humans in their technological sophistication.
I’m fairly confident this post will generate much criticism. I look forward to this so long as it relates to the evidence and an attempt is made to back it up.
Impossible. Humans have only existed for around 6000 years, starting with the creation of Adam and Eve.
Why are you criticizing science? Your real argument should be with creationists. As far as I can tell, scientists have been doing a reasonable job of investigating human origins. We have learned a lot over the last few years.
Cremo is incredibly wrong.
Vedic Creationism? Did not know about that. The basic factual claim is that human beings have been around in their present form for 30-40 million years, is it not?
Is there any supporting evidence?
Shouldn’t you have made an attempt to back up your beliefs if you’re going to demand it of others?
I’m not criticizing science, I’m trying to determine what evidence is available Creationists are welcome to argue for their own positions.
Anything to back that up?
Welcome to burden tennis! Is there a peer-reviewed paper discussing fossil evidence for humans being around, 30-40 million years ago? That should be the start of a discussion. What evidence supports the claim?
“Forbidden Archaeology” is a very large book that took 8 years of research to produce,so I would say that they have amassed a fair amount of supporting evidence. Some of this evidence is mentioned in the videos I linked to.
Show us the bones, Charlie.
We don’t care how heavy the book is, Charlie.
Where are the bones?
Can you give us a few examples of where these millions-of-years old human fossils have been found, who found them, what they look like, and how they have been dated? I trust there will be something about this in the book?
How is it that out of all the species of animals and plants in the world, only Homo sapiens has been here since the Eocene? I think we’re back to the Charlie-centric universe.
Chariots of the Gods was also a thick book.
… and so was The Origin of Species.
So was Harry Potter. That is obviously proof that sorcery is real.
A few minutes into the video linked by Charlie, no surprises. These guys, the authors, are your typical liars, dishonest pieces of shit out there to make an easy buck off of gullible idiots.
BTW, Charlie, what do you think of this?
This OP is perfect for the supporters of the Adam and Eve bottleneck fiasco Venema, Sawmidass, Miller and the rest of the theoevol club…
They should jump on it lol
My thought was, if the heaviness of the book lends it credibility, will that improve CharlieM’s opinion of The Origin of Species?
there is no evidence for other human types exceeding out intellectual status.
YES evidence is king. Yes humans gathering evidence is poorly done and if we did it HOW would we know? how would we know we failed? it still requires a paradigm of what evidence is.
Its welcome if more newsworthy folks question evolutionary biology narrative we hear now.
I recently saw the FOOL PENN and TELLER shows on youtube.
the magic is all about distraction and other ways smart careful folks miss how they are tricked.
Thats what happened in evolutionism acceptance.
A biological theory was not based on biological scientific evidence. It was based on other evidences. Yet nothing from real gooy biiology.
a misdirection has been going on about evolution as a biological theory or even hypothesis.
there is no evidence for evolution based on bio sci evidence. if so evos name your top three or one.
its as hopeless as this new book.
Moved comment to guano
My beliefs are not altogether the same as those of Cremo, but he does provide much evidence which, even if only a small amount of it were true, would go towards confirming my thoughts on human evolution. I brought his findings up for discussion because I think he is sincere in his beliefs and he has done plenty of research which would make for an interesting discussion IMO.
In this video which I linked to Cremo says:
He has researched findings from their original discoveries onwards and opened them up for discussion. He makes no secret of his beliefs on the matter.
And more to the point, I wasn’t asking petrushka to back up his (I presume) beliefs, I was asking him to back up his statement, “Cremo is incredibly wrong.”
Why would we want to start by discussing such a narrow claim?
True enough we don’t care about its weight. But what about the content matter?
Do you agree with any of this statement:
Cremo makes it very clear that much of the evidence he deals with is of artefacts. He states that bones are very difficult to date directly as carbon-14 dating is limited because of its half-life and bones can suffer from contamination. That is why it is advantageous to have precise knowledge of the surrounding environment in which they are found and not just the bones in isolation.
Where do you get that only the species Homo sapiens has been here since the Eocene?
How about other radiometric dating methods that are suited for much older fossils than C14?
It would only make for an interesting discussion if you actually presented something to discuss. Most people, me included, are unwilling to read the book or watch the video for you. Please present something, some argument or piece of evidence, that you find compelling.
If any other species has been here since the Eocene, please present some kind of evidence for that. There are no Eocene fossils of any extant species, including humans. Why? Cremo and Wilson, based on your vague hints, attempt to claim that radiometric dating is all wrong and that we don’t know what strata are actually Eocene. Is that the argument you want to make? It seems to me just a desperate response to the fact that the human fossil record spectacularly fails to support their claims.
I am more interested in the second controversy from your link:
Cremo had this to say:
So Cremo has looked at the evidence and come to the conclusion that the Calaveras skull is not reliable evidence.
I have a copy of “The Origin”. I enjoyed reading it and I admire Darwin. How exactly do you know what my opinion is?
I’m about 11 minutes into the video, and some of the “evidence” includes the Paluxy River “human” footprints nonsense. Just to give you an idea of the level of stupidity and unoriginality of the authors of that bullshit
ETA: The video presents the testimony of Archaeologist Carl Baugh to support the claim that those are actually human footprints… but who is this Baugh guy? let’s check:
ROTFLMFAO!
Should cultures be judged solely on the intellectual status of individuals within that culture?
I’m done watching this shit. The next featured “scientists” in the vid were:
Dr. Dale Peterson, dressing in a fancy lab coat… his doctorate is in English and American Literature
“Geologist” Don Patton
The fuck out of here, geez!
Cremo generally agrees with the conventional view of the age of the earth so he has no problem with the use of radiometric dating.
Ok then.
Can you give us a few examples of where these millions-of-years old human artefacts have been found, who found them, what they look like, and how they have been dated?
Then why does he claim that human fossils are mis-dated? Charlie, stop with the one-liners and make a real attempt to engage in a serious discussion. You asked what was wrong with Cremo & Wilson, several people suggest a few things, and your response is simply to evade. Please try to understand the arguments and think about your responses before hitting send.
No. It should be their relationship to jesus christ and then a moral standard. then a intellectual one. i was responding to a claim of human types with greater intellect then us.
Details of the archaeological investigations on human activity in America carried out at Hueyatlaco compel me to believe in an early age for human settlement.
A paper authored by some of the experts involved in investigating the archaeological site at Hueyatlaco in Mexico concludes that:
A video documenting the history of the research can be found here
Here is a brief outline:
In 1959 fission track dating was used to date fossils from Olduvai Gorge in Africa. The dates obtained were in the range of 1.8 to 2 million years before the present. In the same year another discovery was made in Hueyatlaco, Mexico.
Charles Naeser’s (geologist USGS) was involved in dating samples from both sites using fission track dating. The dates he obtained from the Olduvai Gorge samples were accepted and the site became famous. The Hueyatlaco site was to become “notorious”. From the Hueyatlaco site, Naeser analysed 2 different uranium samples which showed to have a date range of 400000-600000 years . Regarding this finding he said, “it appears to have gone into a black hole, no one ever talks to me about it, just as if we’de never done it”
The archaeologist Cynthia Irwin-Williams went to the site in 1962, ’64 and ’66. She organized an interdisciplinary team to do the research. They could not carbon date any bones that were found because they had completely fossilized.
In 1966 Dr Virginia Steen-McIntyre joined the team specializing in the dating of volcanic ash. She determined the ash layer above the artefact location to be 250000 years old. According to McIntyre, standing by her findings was to ruin her career. She admitted to being naive. Irvin-Williams was not so naive. After the 1966 visit she walked away from the site never to return and she produced no publications from her six years of field work. Dr Jose Luis Lorenzo, chief archaeologist at INAH, had published a bullitin descrediting Irwin-Williams and the work at the site He maintained that the artefacts had been planted. According to the video, Juan Armenta Camacho who along with Irwin-Williams had discovered the site was banned from going there.
In 1997 George Carter, archaeologist, called upon his friend Marshall Payn to reopen the site and in 2005 new research began headed and funded by Payn. Uranium series disequilibrium dating was used and the bones were dated to greater than 100000 years. They sent a couple of hundred pound of the rock material to Caltech where Kenneth Farley, an expect on Uranium-thorium-helium dating, examined it. He obtained results of 400000 to 600000 years for the age of the rock. He was not informed about the source of the rock only that the crystals were likely to have a young age.
Dr Michael Waters, geoarchaeologist, believed that the ancient dates are wrong, he put it down to an unconformity produced by erosion caused by a river cutting a bed in the rock.
The team went back in 2001 to try to determine if the artefacts were as old as suggested or if they were more recent artefacts deposited when the river cut through the layers. They went back with the geologists Robert McKinney and Samual VanLandingham and McKinney returned to Texas with some samples. There he examined some monoliths taken from the site by Roald Fryxell in the mid ’60s. These monoliths contain a record of the state above where the artefacts were found. His conclusion was that
McKinny examined sections from both inside and outside the purported unconformity inset and found the rock to be of the same composition and have the same weathering patterns.
VanLandingham examined the diatoms within the samples. He found identical diatoms which were at least 80000 years old both inside and outside the proposed inset.
Here is Marshall Payn talking about Michael Waters –
And Robert McKenny says:
Samual VanLandingham
If you are willing to watch this video I think you will see that it shows genuine scientists attempting to determine the truth of the age of the Hueyatlaco artefacts and their evidence being ignored and even worse suppressed by those who are unwilling to accept their findings.
Yeah, you’re willing to give credibility to that video (from a channel called UFOTV, lulz) and take it at face value, uncritically, just because you’re into conspiranoid bullshit. Good for you.
I checked and there is no silencing going on, there are multiple papers published and readily available on the subject, including McIntyre’s, for fuck’s sake!
http://www.pleistocenecoalition.com/steen-mcintyre/Quat.Research_1981.pdf
Why don’t you try fact checking for a change?
CharlieM,
It’s quite reasonable to doubt extraordinary claims and demand extraordinary evidence for them. If some claim contradicts the bulk of the evidence, it’s a proper requirement for that claim to be carefully re-examined.
But let’s suppose the claim is correct, and there’s a collection of hominid artifacts in Mexico that’s 250,000 years old. How does that help your claim that Homo sapiens goes back to the Eocene? Is there any evidence for the identity of the species that supposedly left these artifacts? Is there any evidence from this that our species is much older than previously supposed? And isn’t the time scale off by more than two orders of magnitude? I ask for evidence of Eocene Homo sapiens and you respond with purported evidence of Pleistocene hominids. Is that the best you have?
Well you and I have a different interpretation of the evidence on ignoring or suppressing data, and I was expecting that. But what do you think about the evidence for the dating of the artefacts? Do you have any thoughts on this that might lead to us having a civilized discussion?
Simple. Because there is no objective truth of the matter that one ought to fact check first.
You did not ask for this evidence in the paragraph I responded to. I ask for a little patience and I will respond to questions when and if I can find the time.
You asked for something that might be worth discussing and I think that the Hueyatlaco case fits the bill. If you don’t think that it’s worth discussing then that’s fine by me.
If you are unwilling or unable to recognize context, we won’t get very far. Must I restate the subject in every paragraph? I’m asking you for evidence on the main claim of Cremo and Thompson, and the main claim you make in the OP. How could that have been in any way unclear? In case I actually do have to repeat it, that claim is that “humans in their modern anatomical form have existed for millions of years”, in fact since the Eocene. You have offered nothing relevant to that claim. Please change your approach.
Narrow? If there was evidence for humans being around 30 million years ago, it would be a bombshell.
And it’s also the main claim that Charlie made in the OP:
He seems to have spent most of the subsequent discussion running away from that claim. It’s as if he had some intimation that he couldn’t support it at all.
Your “evidence” amounts to some cranks claiming the data is being suppressed. My evidence consists on a number of readily available papers on the subject, discussing the data you claim is being suppressed. So yeah… you’re full of shit.
No way! I’m not allowed to comment on that, you know. I’m part of the conspiracy. This convo never took place. Moving on now 😀
dazz…
We all have our own beliefs… until they are proven wrong…we are allowed to let our imagination wonder…You have yours….and Charlie has his… that what forums or blogs are about…Charlie may be trying to reconcile something what he thinks is a piece of evidence and he has come up with this…
His idea is abnormal but it is not prohibited….
I’m not sure who Wilson is and why you think the authors of “Forbidden Archaeology” have a problem with radiometric dating. But anyway.
I am trying to gain a full understanding of life and the creatures on earth. It is perfectly okay to carve up the various life forms into separate species so long as it is understood that a complete reality of the form of life under examination must include its past history and future potential. lt is not just the form we see in front of us and recognise as the member of a particular species that we must consider. This static, snapshot of the living form is just a human construction plucked out of its total reality like a rose petal plucked from the living being of which it is but one part. Viewed in isolation it is a dead, meaningless form.
You are correct in that I should not have so readily agreed with the authors conclusions that, “anatomically modem humans have coexisted with other primates for tens of millions of years”. As Cremo writes in, “Forbidden Archaeology”:
So I do believe that all primates that appear on earth have devolved from the archetypal human form. But as this archetype is a dynamic, ethereal form it would fossilize no more readily than a flame would fossilize.. It is not static. Any form which remains unchanged for vast periods of time (tens of millions to hundreds of millions of years) has diverted from the path of progressive evolution. And IMO evolution does progress in sentience and consciousness.
So returning to the physical evidence can we agree on a time where evidence of modern-like humans first appeared. Do you agree with the following evidence Cremo puts forward in the video
1. Happisberg footprints suggested to be consistent with anatomically modern footprints from 0.78 to 1 million years old.
2. A skull found in Buenos Aires found in a formation considered by geologists to be 1.5 million years old.
3. A fairly complete anatomically modern human skeleton found in a bed purported to be between 1.7 and 2 million years old at Olduvai Gorge by the German scientist Hans Reck.
4. Anatomically modern human jaw found in the Red Crag formation, England. Red Grag formation estimated to be between 2 and 3 million years old.
5. Mary Leakey discovered modern like footprints at Laetoli, Tanzani from 3.7 million years ago.
6. Human skeletal remains from Castenedolo, Italy in a formation about 4 million years old.
When do you believe that the earliest modern looking humans appeared?
I don’t know much about any of these. Can you reference the actual scientific publications that back up each claim? Pending that, I doubt every claim. The actual science would seem to show that anatomically modern humans evolved somewhere around 100,000 years ago, in Africa.
Are you now rejecting the claim that anatomically modern humans appeared in the Eocene? If so, that’s progress. What about your claim that there are lots of modern species also known from the Eocene?
I spent a bit of time looking into the dating of hominid fossils. My main takeaway is that it is quite problematic to get reliable ages from direct dating of the bones. C14 dating gets us back to about 55,000 years, U and ESR dating can extend this to about 250,000 years, albeit with a lot of uncertainty and difficulty. For a scientific review paper (albeit slightly dated, from 2006), check out this. A bit of a read, but useful if you want to get a feel for the techniques and their limitations.
In many cases, dating has to be done using circumstancial evidence, e.g. through dating the sediments in which the bones are found, or via much more reliable dating of associated volcanic rocks – but there the uncertainty lies in the exact relation between the fossils and the rocks. This stuff is not simple and error bars will be significant. Having said that, there really appears to be no serious research pointing to humanoids from the Eocene.
The most interesting snippet I found was a story in Scientific American about some researchers thinking about what traces an earlier technologically advanced civilisation might have left. Before you get too enthusiastic, their conclusion was that no evidence has been found so far, and perhaps the best place to look for it is off-world (see here – pure speculation at this time).
With respect to the Hueyatlac site, this is a long standing scientific controversy and there is quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing to be found online. My takeaway is that when even the specialists can’t land on a satisfactory conclusion on the age of the finds, it is preposterous to think that any one of use here, non-specialists, can add anything of value to this particular debate. As far as I am concerned this one is simply an as yet unresolved scientific question that would need a lot of new field and lab work to be settled. Of course the usual internet crackpots can’t wait for that and prefer to jump to premature conclusions.
Even if the dating at 250,000 years turned out to be correct, all it would do is put the arrival of hominids in America at a much earlier date than we think. It would not change our ideas of the age of modern humans and would certainly not support Charlie’s main idea (since abandoned, apparently) that modern humans were around in the Eocene.