One area where orthodoxy has been frequently challenged is in the notion of sudden change brought about by enormous cataclysms, versus the “gradualism” usually conceived of by evolutionists. Even though it has become fashionable to talk of such events, they have been relegated to the very distant past, supposedly before the appearance of man. Yet some individuals, like Immanuel Velikovsky, have argued that many such events have occurred in our past and induced a kind of planetary amnesia from which we still suffer today.
That such catastrophic episodes have occurred and that humanity has suffered from some great forgettings Cremo agrees: “I think there is a kind of amnesia that, when we encounter the actual records of catastrophes, makes us think, oh well, this is just mythology. In other words, I think some knowledge of these catastrophes does survive in ancient writings and cultures and through oral traditions. But because of what you might call some social amnesia, as we encounter those things we are not able to accept them as truth. I also think there’s a deliberate attempt on the part of those who are now in control of the world’s intellectual life to make us disbelieve and forget the paranormal and related phenomena. I think there’s a definite attempt to keep us in a state of forgetfulness about these things.”
It’s all part of the politics of ideas. Says Cremo, “It’s been a struggle that’s been going on thousands and thousands of years, and it’s still going on.”
PART TWO
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MAKING THE CASE FOR CATASTROPHISM: EARTH CHANGES, SUDDEN AND GRADUAL
4 In Defense of Catastrophes
Pioneering Geologist Robert Schoch Challenges the Conventional Wisdom on Natural History
William P. Eigles
When the maverick Egyptologist John Anthony West went looking in 1989 for scientific validation that the Great Sphinx of Giza (and possibly other monuments of ancient Egypt) was of a greater antiquity than alleged by orthodox Egyptologists, he found it through the person of Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D., a young but very well-credentialed associate professor of science and mathematics at Boston University. Schoch’s specific expertise lay in geology and paleontology, and he possessed just the corpus of scientific knowledge and analytical techniques that West needed to verify the hypothesis, first proposed by the independent archeologist R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz in the 1950s, that the weathering observable on the Sphinx and its rocky enclosure was due to chronic precipitation from the sky rather than long-term exposure to windborne sand.
What Schoch found, using accepted geological methodology, is now a matter of public record, popularized in the controversial 1993 television special “The Mystery of the Sphinx,” in which he was featured. His findings were that the erosion on the Sphinx and its enclosure incontrovertibly reflects the effects of streaming water, which means that the oldest portions of the ancient statue must date to at least 2,500 years earlier than heretofore posited, or to the period between 7000 and 5000 B.C.E., the last time when large quantities of rain fell in that area of the world.
Schoch’s finding was tantamount to setting back the conventionally accepted timetable for the development of human civilization in the Middle East by two and a half millennia—and maybe much more. This propelled the geologist headlong into a vehement debate with the traditional Egyptological establishment, which summarily rejected the overwhelming evidence in favor of his much older date for the Sphinx’s construction.
The experience, however, also served to rekindle and amplify a long-standing, if dormant, curiosity in the author to examine the even larger issues of how and why civilizations have come and gone on our planet. As a result of the inquiry thus spurred, Schoch found that his own trained, unquestioning allegiance to the prevailing scientific paradigm of uniformitarianism, which governed his geological fields of interest, began metamorphosing in favor of catastrophism as the theory of choice for explaining past—and perhaps even future—planetary changes of the epochal kind.
This personal intellectual journey informs Schoch’s first nontechnical book, Voices of the Rocks: A Scientist Looks at Catastrophes and Ancient Civilizations, coauthored with Robert Aquinas McNally, a professional science writer. In it, they survey the evidence and convincingly argue that instead of evolution and cultural change being a gradual process over many millennia (the uniformitarian viewpoint), natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, floods, and extraterrestrially sourced impacts (asteroids, comets, meteorites) have significantly and often abruptly altered the course of human civilization (the catastrophist perspective).
Indeed, research conducted and reported by Schoch and many others strongly suggests that cataclysmic natural events have obliterated civilizations in the past and could well do so again. Schoch admits that he went “screaming and kicking” toward catastrophism, without any prior seeding by professional mentors or university teachers who were closet proponents of the alternate paradigm. But, he says, “I just followed the evidence, and in so doing, it just didn’t take me to where I was taught it would. As a scientist, I couldn’t dismiss the evidence out of hand, and so another theory was needed to account for it.”
In proposing catastrophism as an alternative working model for past events, Schoch’s book also sends a clarion call about the need to address various modern environmental issues such as global warming, ozone depletion, and the threat of large terrestrial impacts from outer space, any one of which may portend a disaster of global proportions.
Schoch and McNally begin their book with an overview of the scientific process and, specifically, an examination of how science progresses, including the concept of thought paradigms and how they shift as the world actually changes (or at least human perceptions thereof). By way of example, they note that the ancient worldview of the heavens as being a dangerous place populated by angry gods may not have been mythological fantasy after all, but rather a paradigm using religious language to explain the observation of actual phenomena, such as would occur if and as Earth’s orbit carried our planet through a dense meteor stream in space.
After Earth’s orbit took it out of that meteor stream and, after time elapsed, this paradigm would eventually become irrelevant and would be superseded by one that reflected the subsequently calmer skies, such as the Earth-centered series of concentric planetary orbital rings later proposed by Aristotle.
The authors claim that the same paradigm-shift phenomenon is at work today concerning geology, the evolution of the species, and human cultural change, with secular catastrophism gaining ascendancy over uniformitarianism. This change is based principally on the abrupt shifts in the fossil records of plant and animal communities in the earth that have been observed by various researchers, indicating relatively rapid mass extinctions of life on the surface of the planet at various points in the past (such as the disappearance of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period sixty-five million years ago).
In particular, the work begun in 1980 by the father-son team of Drs. Luis and Walter Alvarez, and repeated by others, identified the presence of higher-than-normal concentrations of iridium in the so-called K-T boundary, the thin demarcation layer of clay between the geological strata of two different, major epochs in Earth’s history.
After eliminating volcanic activity as a possible source of this anomaly, the researchers concluded that the only other explanation for such high concentrations of iridium would be an asteroid, or, more precisely, the collision of one with Earth. Confirmation of this theory seemed to appear with the discovery, in 1990, of a large impact crater at Chicxulub in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, dated as being of the same vintage as the K-T boundary.
These findings helped give rise to a new model of Earth—and species—change, known as punctuated equilibrium. This theory proposes that our planet’s chronology can be likened to a sequence of steady states regularly interrupted by periods of rapid, often radical, change, caused by such catastrophic events as massive volcanic activity, an asteroid impact, and a change in planetary temperature occasioned by various means.
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br /> Schoch’s personal work in redating the Sphinx to the Neolithic period (which encompasses the 7000–5000 B.C.E. time span, an expanse of time conventionally associated with only very rudimentary societies and building skills), led him to question traditional notions of the linear, uniformly progressive rise of human civilization from approximately 3100 B.C.E. forward, and to postulate the existence of sophisticated cultures far earlier than had been previously supposed.
Countering the claimed absence of evidence for any such notion, he cites some intriguing evidence of technical flint mining from 31,000 B.C.E.; sophisticated Neolithic villages in Egypt dating to 8100 B.C.E.; and, most recently, the astronomically aligned Nabta megalith circle found in the Nubian Desert of the southern Sahara dating to 4500–4000 B.C.E.. Remains of ancient cities elsewhere in the Near East, such as Jericho in Israel from 8300 B.C.E. and Äatal HÅyÅk in Anatolia, Turkey, from the seventh millennium B.C.E., serve to buttress his argument that peoples of even earlier antiquity possessed impressive organizational skills, technical knowledge, and engineering prowess. Additional evidence exists outside of Egypt—in the Americas and Europe—as well: in particular, the astronomically correlated painted imagery discovered on cave walls in Lascaux, France, which has been dated to ca. 15,000 B.C.E.—stunningly earlier still.
Pursuing the thread of inquiry into sophisticated ancient civilizations further led Schoch to confront the reputed existence of the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria (or Mu). In his book, he makes short work of Lemuria, dismissing it as pure fantasy after a short review of the associated literature. Reviewing at greater length the accounts of Atlantis proffered by Plato in his dialogues, and the later accounts of the Roman historian Diodorus Siculus, Schoch finds them thoroughly lacking in their ability to help us locate that sunken continent today.
In surveying the list of supposed sites for the sunken landmass, he deftly and methodically disassembles the arguments supporting claims for Atlantis existing in the mid-Atlantic Ocean, on Minoan Crete, or in the South China Sea. With respect to the claim for Atlantis being situated under the ice cap in Antarctica, advanced by such writers as Professor Charles Hapgood, Graham Hancock, and Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, Schoch devotes more time to discounting their shared theory.
Ultimately, Schoch finds no evidence to support the notion of Antarctica being ice-free during the period claimed by Plato for its existence, and notes further that, denuded of the massive weight of its icy covering and surrounded by higher water levels, Antarctica would look a lot different as a geological landmass than has been posited by the modern authors cited.
Last, he marshals evidence that disputes the accuracy of the maps on which these authors rely for their suppositions of advanced cartographic knowledge on the part of prehistoric ancients. In the end, Schoch subscribes to the claim, advanced by Mary Settegast in her book Plato Prehistorian: 10,000 to 5,000 BC in Myth and Archeology, that Plato’s account refers to the Magdalenians, a western Mediterranean Paleolithic culture that existed and warred chronically in the ninth millennium B.C.E., and whose demise was occasioned by the melting of the glaciers of the last ice age and the probable swamping of their coastal settlements.
Schoch’s quest for hard evidence led him to personally explore an underwater cliff cut in a series of immense geometric surfaces that were discovered in 1987 off the coast of Yonaguni, an island in the same Japanese chain that includes Okinawa. The architecture of broad, flat surfaces separated by sheer vertical stone risers appeared to suggest antediluvian human workmanship.
However, after diving the site repeatedly—observing, scraping, and taking samples of the rock—he became convinced that the Yonaguni Monument was a natural formation of bedrock, shaped entirely by natural processes and too imprecise in its shaping and orientation to be the work of human hands. Schoch’s scientific training and background also causes him to write off, after some earnest consideration, the recent claims of sentient handiwork for the Face on Mars and other putatively artificial structures in the Cydonia region of the Red Planet.
The potential for pole shifts, tectonic movements, and other Earth-originated catastrophes to change human history is also explored at length by Schoch. Seeking an explanation for the mysteriously widespread demise by fire of scores of settlements in the eastern Mediterranean region outside of Egypt and Mesopotamia at the end of the Bronze Age, around 1200 B.C.E., the author initially considers and then rejects the possibility of volcanic action (there was no known eruption at that time) or a devastating earthquake (none at that time is known to have led to a major conflagration).
While stories of floods of biblical proportion exist in the myths and folklore of cultures all over the world and, together with some scientific evidence, might suggest some watery global destruction in the distant past, they cannot account for the inferno that appeared to engulf the numerous Near Eastern communities extant at the end of the Bronze Age. Schoch also reviews the comings and goings of ice ages and ponders whether forces of nature or Earth’s rotation might be responsible for the temperature changes that caused them.
He notes only in passing, but at least with suitable astonishment, the apparent coincidence of a scientifically validated incident of dramatic global warming around 9645 B.C.E. (a rise of fourteen degrees Fahrenheit in fifteen years) with the scientifically postulated scenario of a massive freshwater flood pouring into the Gulf of Mexico at about the same time and coincident with the date that Plato ascribed to the sinking of Atlantis. Although of seemingly great significance, Schoch does not pursue the matter.
Schoch’s review also covers the possibility that pole shifts accounted for alterations in the surface conditions on Earth, whether gradual or rapid, actual or only apparent. He examines the work of Dr. Charles Hapgood, who asserted that Earth’s crust has slipped over the inner layers and moved the poles at least thrice, by about thirty degrees of latitude, in just the last 80,000 years, with the last movement being completed ca. 10,000 B.C.E. (shades of Atlantis’s demise again?). Schoch discounts Hapgood’s work, however, on the basis of, among other things, “new and better [paleomagnetic] data” having been collected since the late professor conducted his research.
Schoch also disputes the related “soon-to-be-slipping-polar-ice-cap” thesis of the successful catastrophist author Richard Noone, who wrote 5/5/2000 Ice: The Ultimate Disaster, asserting that the planetary alignment which occurred on May 5, 2000, would be of very little moment because of its occurrence on the other side of the Sun from Earth.
Still, in seeking an explanation for the so-called Cambrian explosion of wildly diverse and numerous new life-forms over a ten-million-year period more than five hundred million years ago, Schoch is somewhat more sympathetic to the later work of the Cal Tech geologist Joseph Kirschvink and his colleagues, who, using more varied and more reliable data than Hapgood had access to, have proposed that “true polar wander,” an entire crustal and mantle displacement of ninety degrees over the earth’s core during the Cambrian period, somehow helped make the generation of so many new life-forms possible. Exactly “how” this happened, however, remains a mystery.
Schoch finally turns his attention to the heavens and the possibilities of drastic change owing to impacts on the earth of asteroids, meteorites, and comets (generically called bolides). Since 1957, when scientists finally agreed that the meteor crater in Arizona was the result of an asteroid impact 50,000 years ago, approximately 150 impact craters have been identified around the world, and the number grows annually.
With the discovery in 1993 of the comet known as P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 and the observation of its striking Jupiter in 1994, science was forced to acknowledge the possibility that a comet could indeed, even in contemporary times, collide with a planet and do so with a force sufficient to cause global extinctions.
Whether the Tunguska explosion of 1908, which occurred in Siberia, was the result of a similar impact or that of an asteroid or even an extraterrestrial space vehicle is unknown, but the massive dev
astation caused by whatever collided with Earth on that fateful day is a sobering portent of what could occur if and when it happens again in or around a highly populated area. Schoch intimates that even a shift in the polar spin axis is possible as a result of such a major collision, if the hypotheses of other researchers are correct.
In any event, two other reputable scientists have cited evidence for a significant bolide impact on Earth circa 10,000 B.C.E. that they claim caused the sudden end of the last ice age and probably led, in turn, to a great flood (Atlantis again?). And in 1996 and 1998, two chains of craters were identified on Earth, chains that can be correlated, in time, with past major extinctions of life on our planet. Whether such phenomena suggest some periodic pattern of destructive hits—for instance, that of an asteroid or comet crossing Earth’s orbit on a collision course sometime in the future—is currently a matter of much conjecture and theorizing on the part of scientists. In this vein, Schoch postulates that with respect to the fiery end of the Bronze Age in 1200 B.C.E., a serial stream of hot bolides, fragmenting upon entry into Earth’s atmosphere and detonating there with much force and heat, could well account for the widespread devastation recorded for that period.
Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization Page 5
