Ancient Traces
Page 26
10. For an extended discussion of this feature and its implications see Morgan, The Scars of Evolution, pp. 124–40.
11. Ibid., p. 126.
12. Ibid., pp. 45–6.
13. Ibid., p. 140.
14. Ibid., pp. 88–91.
15. Ibid., p. 111.
16. Ibid., p. 47.
17. Ibid., pp. 175–9.
18. Ibid., pp. 176–8.
19. Ibid., pp. 51–5, quoting work of geologist Paul Mohr.
20. Ibid., p. 51.
21. La Lumiere, ‘Evolution of Human Bipedalism: A Hypothesis about Where It Happened’, pp. 103–7.
22. Morgan, The Scars of Evolution, p. 178.
23. Quoted in More, ‘New Skull Turns Up in Northeast Africa’, p. 32.
24. See Tuttle, ‘Evolution of Hominid Bipedalism and Prehensile Capabilities’, p. 92, where he writes that the bone and muscle structure of the creatures such as Lucy ‘are quite compatible with the idea that… [they] were derived rather recently from arboreal bipeds. Indeed, they too may have engaged in notable tree climbing.’
See also the chart in Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, pp. 730–31, for the list of features which ‘Lucy’ shared with apes, chimpanzees, gibbons and orangutans. It appears virtually certain that these were her relatives rather than man, who seems to have existed already in modern form at that date.
25. Leakey, ‘Skull 1470’, p. 828.
26. Leakey, ‘Footprints in the Ashes of Time’, pp. 446–57. See also Leakey, ‘Tracks and Tools’, pp. 95–102.
27. See a summary of statements supporting this in Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, pp. 742–7.
28. Tuttle, ‘Evolution of Hominid Bipedalism’, p. 91.
29. Ibid.
30. Gore, ‘The First Steps’, p. 80.
31. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, p. 717, quoting Zuckerman, 1973.
32. Quoted in Gore, ‘The First Steps’, p. 85. Prof. Wood has now moved to George Washington University, Washington.
6: Suppressed Facts Concerning Ancient Mankind
1. Oxnard, The Order of Man, p. 317.
2. A show hosted by Walter Cronkite in 1981; see Lewin, Bones of Contention, pp. 13–18.
3. White et al., ‘Australopithecus ramidus, a New Species of Early Hominid from Aramis, Ethiopia’, p. 306.
4. Gore, ‘The First Steps’, p. 80.
5. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, pp. 733–4.
6. For example, see Taylor et al., ‘Clovis and Folsom Age Estimates: Stratigraphic Context and Radiocarbon Calibration’, p. 517.
7. Lee, ‘Sheguiandah in Retrospect’, p. 28.
8. During the last Ice Age an ice sheet almost two miles thick covered the area. The last warm period when humans could have lived on the site was around 65,000 BC; prior to that another warm period occurred around 125,000 BC.
9. Sanford, ‘Sheguiandah Reviewed’, p. 7.
10. Ibid., p. 14.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, p. 353.
14. Ibid., p. 346.
15. Ibid., p. xxx.
16. White et al., ‘Australopithecus ramidus, a New Species of Early Hominid from Aramis, Ethiopia’ p. 306.
17. Gore, ‘The First Steps’, p. 96.
18. Semaw et al., ‘2.5-million-year-old Stone Tools from Gona, Ethiopia’, p. 333.
19. Charlesworth, ‘Objects in the Red Crag of Suffolk’, pp. 91–4.
20. Capellini, ‘Les traces de l’homme pliocène en Toscane’, pp. 47–54. For a rendering in English, see Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, p. 54.
21. Potts and Shipman, ‘Cutmarks Made by Stone Tools on Bones from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania’, p. 577.
22. Capellini, ‘Les traces de l’homme pliocène’, pp. 47–8.
23. Ibid., p. 52.
24. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, p. 69.
25. Ibid., pp. 70–71.
26. Ibid., pp. 67–8.
27. Gore, ‘The First Europeans’, pp. 104–5.
28. Ackerman, ‘European Prehistory Gets Even Older’, pp. 28–30.
29. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, pp. 94, 96 and fig. 3.5.
30. Ibid., pp. 121–50 gives the story of the palaeo-anthropologist, J. Reid Moir, and the reactions for, and against, his discoveries.
31. Breuil, ‘Sur la présence d’éolithes à la base de l’éocène parisien’, p. 402. An English rendering in: Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, p. 158.
32. Breuil, ‘Sur la présence d’éolithes’.
33. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, p. 423.
34. Ibid., pp. 427–8.
35. Ibid., p. 428.
36. See the critique of the carbon 14 dating given in Cremo and Thompson, pp. 790–93. They point out that for an intrusive burial it was very odd. The bodies were buried without any coffin or shroud, unlikely for a burial in medieval times. Furthermore the bones of the man and the two children were spread over several square feet with the children’s bones mixed up with each other. They conclude:
This constitutes strong evidence that the Castenedolo bones are not the result of recent intrusive burial. We note that the radiocarbon method was not used to date the bones of the man or children, and the significance of the dispersed position of these skeletons in the strata was ignored by most scientists writing about them.
37. Oakley, ‘Relative Dating of the Fossil Hominids of Europe’, pp. 40–42. See also, Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, pp. 432, 757–60, 762–4 and 790–93. They conclude (p. 793):
In short, there is conflicting evidence about the age of the Castenedolo bones – a carbon 14 date and a nitrogen test… in favor of a recent age, an ambiguous uranium content test… and a fluorine content test… and stratigraphic observations… in favor of high antiquity. In almost all cases of anomalously old human bones, scientists choose to accept carbon 14 dates even when they radically contradict the stratigraphic evidence. But is it really fair that all weight should be given to the former and none to the latter? The stratigraphic evidence is unusually strong in favour of a Pliocene age for the Castenedolo bones, whereas… the carbon 14 dating is far from perfect.
38. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, p. 429
39. Patterson and Howells, ‘Hominid Humeral Fragment from Early Pleistocene of Northwestern Kenya’, p. 65; table 1 gives seven points of agreement with a modern human bone.
40. Oxnard, ‘The Place of the Australopithecines in Human Evolution: Grounds for Doubt?’, p. 394. See also Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, pp. 684–6.
41. Leakey, ‘Skull 1470’, p. 821. In his paper ‘Evidence for an Advanced Plio-Pleistocene Hominid from East Rudolf, Kenya’, p. 450, Leakey writes:
When the femur is compared with a restricted sample of modern African bones, there are marked similarities in those morphological features that are widely considered characteristic of modern H. sapiens. The fragments of tibia and fibula also resemble H. sapiens…
42. Wood, ‘Evidence on the Locomotor Pattern of Homo from Early Pleistocene of Kenya’, p. 136.
43. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, pp. 686–7.
44. Ibid., p. 750. See also Appendix 3 for a summary of the evidence of ancient artefacts.
7: Where Did Our Civilization Come From?
1. Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations of the Near East, p. 77.
2. Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia, p. 211.
3. Cremo and Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology, p. 411.
4. Stringer and Gamble, In Search of the Neanderthals, p. 157 and n. 44.
5. Gore, ‘The First Europeans’, p. 110.
6. Stringer and Gamble, In Search of the Neanderthals, pp. 156–7.
7. Shreeve, The Neandertal Enigma, pp. 277–81.
8. Andel, ‘Late Quaternary Sea-level Changes and Archaeology’, p. 742.
9. Ibid., p. 736. The effective d
epth is thought to be up to 426 feet, taking into account the rise of land deprived of the weight of ice. Total loss could be up to 65 feet more. See p. 734.
10. Whitmore et al., ‘Elephant Teeth from the Atlantic Continental Shelf’, p. 1477.
11. Ibid.
12. This ice-free passage would seem to indicate that a displacement of the poles has occurred since. For if this land was free of ice and yet a mile-high ice-cap reached as far south as Philadelphia, the North Pole must have been towards Baffin Island or Greenland; the South Pole would then have shifted towards Australia, thus leaving, perhaps, the area of Antarctica nearest to South America free of ice.
13. Shackleton et al., ‘Coastal Paleogeography of the Central and Western Mediterranean during the Last 125,000 Years and its Archaeological Implications’, pp. 310–11.
14. Andel, ‘Late Quaternary Sea-level Changes and Archaeology’, p. 742.
15. Ibid., p. 737.
16. Plato, Laws, Book III, p. 167.
17. Dansgaard et al., ‘The Abrupt Termination of the Younger Dryas Climate Event’, p. 532.
18. Alley et al., ‘Abrupt Increase in Greenland Snow Accumulation at the End of the Younger Dryas Event’, p. 527. See also Fairbanks, ‘Flip-flop End to Last Ice Age’, p. 495.
19. Marshack, The Roots of Civilisation, p. 10.
20. Ibid., p. 11.
21. Ibid., p. 12.
22. Wilson, From Atlantis to the Sphinx, p. 215.
23. Andel and Runnels, ‘The Earliest Farmers in Europe’, pp. 481–500.
24. Andel and Shackleton, ‘Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic Coastlines of Greece and the Aegean’, p. 450.
25. Andel and Runnels, ‘The Earliest Farmers in Europe’, p. 498.
26. Plato, Timaeus, p. 41.
27. Broodbank and Strasser, ‘Migrant Farmers and the Neolithic Colonization of Crete’, p. 237.
28. Ibid., p. 241.
29. Ibid., p. 242.
8: The Story of Atlantis
1. Plato, Timaeus, pp. 41–3 (edited and paraphrased).
2. Ibid.; Critias, pp. 279–307.
3. Plutarch, ‘Life of Solon’ pp. 43–76. See also Plutarch, ‘Isis and Osiris’ in Moralia, V, p. 25.
4. Plato, Timaeus, p. 33.
5. Ibid., p. 29.
6. Many say that Crantor reported it also. But Proclus reports Crantor and it is clear that this report has been mistranslated. Crantor is simply repeating the assertions of Plato. See James, The Sunken Kingdom: The Atlantis Mystery Solved, p. 173.
7. Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia, p. 22.
8. The range was 1628 to 1626 BC, derived from a study of tree rings (Science News, 125, 28 January 1984, p. 54). The argument in support of this date from tree rings and ice-core analysis has been strongly criticized in a paper published in 1997. The authors point out that no direct connection has ever been demonstrated between volcanic eruptions and changes in tree rings or ice-core characteristics. See Buckland et al., ‘Bronze Age Myths?: Volcanic Activity and Human Response in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic Regions’, pp. 581–7.
9. Luce, The End of Atlantis, pp. 35–7.
10. See James, The Sunken Kingdom, pp. 70–84.
11. Ibid., p. 81.
12. Ice-core samples from Greenland give a date cluster around 1650 BC. See the Observer, 1 May 1988, p. 29.
13. Plato, Critias, pp. 273–7.
14. Zangger, The Flood from Heaven.
15. James, The Sunken Kingdom, p. 191.
16. Ibid., p. 191, quoting Pindar, Pythian, IV, 289–90.
17. Ibid., p. 195.
18. Ibid., p. 215.
19. Ibid., p. 216.
20. Ibid., pp. 252–3.
21. Plato, Critias, p. 279.
22. Plato, Timaeus, p. 41.
23. Herodotus, The Histories, pp. 283–4.
24. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, pp. 62–6, 70–78, figs 18, 48, 49 and 52.
25. Plato, Critias, p. 283.
26. Ibid., p. 295.
27. Ibid.
28. With the dramatic exception of M. Hope, author of Atlantis: Myth or Reality, London, 1991, who jumps with both feet into the void.
29. Kukal, Atlantis in the Light of Modern Research, p. 68.
30. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, p. 68, fig. 47.
31. Admiralty Chart, no. 1950.
32. Admiralty Chart, no. 4407.
33. Admiralty Charts, nos 4104 and 4115.
34. Admiralty Chart, no. 4103; the site of the island is today called the Gorringe Ridge.
35. Sunday Times, 28 December 1997, section I, p. 12.
9: Are the Pyramids and Sphinx More Ancient than We Think?
1. Bauval and Hancock, Keeper of Genesis, p. 248.
2. In Greek these pharaohs were known as Cheops, Cephren and Mycerinus.
3. Lehner et al., ‘The ARCE Sphinx Project: A Preliminary Report’, p. 17.
4. Ibid., p. 18.
5. On the authority of Dr Zahi Hawass in 1992 see Schoch, ‘Redating the Great Sphinx of Giza’, p. 69, n. 14. Dr Hawass wrote, ‘It seems that the Sphinx underwent restoration during the Old Kingdom because the analysis of samples found on the right rear leg proved to be of Old Kingdom date.’ This calls into question the conventional dating of the Sphinx at circa 2500 BC since the Old Kingdom finished around 350 years later. This is not time enough for the depth of erosion seen on the core body of the Sphinx.
6. Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, p. 348.
7. Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, II, p. 361.
8. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, II, p. 324, note e.
9. James, A Short History of Ancient Egypt, p. 49. (My italics.)
10. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: Micropaedia, 15th edition, 1995, XI, p. 92.
11. Hassan, The Sphinx: Its History in the Light of Recent Excavations, p. 79.
12. Ibid., p. 91.
13. West, Serpent in the Sky, pp. 186–7, 229.
14. Prof. Robert Schoch teaches at Boston University’s College of Basic Studies. He has degrees in geology and anthropology and a PhD in geology and geophysics from Yale. He has authored many academic papers and books on palaeontology and the principles of geological stratigraphy.
15. Lehner et al., ‘The ARCE Sphinx Project’, p. 14.
16. Prof. Schoch took as an example the 4th Dynasty tomb of Debehen on the Giza plateau.
17. Schoch, ‘Redating the Great Sphinx of Giza’, p. 54. This paper is a revised version of his original report entitled How Old is the Sphinx? published by Boston University, College of General Studies for presentation at the annual convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Chicago, 7 February 1992.
18. Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, p. 421, quoting Prof. Schoch at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1992.
19. Ibid., quoting Prof. Schoch in NBC-TV film Mystery of the Sphinx, 1993.
20. Schoch, ‘Redating the Great Sphinx of Giza’, p. 54.
21. Wendorf et al., ‘Late Pleistocene and Recent Climatic Changes in the Egyptian Sahara’, pp. 221–6 and 232–3; also McHugh et al., ‘Neolithic Adaptation and the Holocene Functioning of Tertiary Palaeodrainages in Southern Egypt and Northern Sudan’, p. 326.
22. Hoffman, Egypt before the Pharaohs: The Prehistoric Foundations of Egyptian Civilization, p. 239. Hoffman suggests that, given the discoveries of archaeologists working in the desert, ‘It seems as if the food-producing revolution occurred in the [desert regions] many centuries, if not a full millennium before it penetrated the fertile Nile bottomlands.’
23. Schoch, ‘Redating the Great Sphinx of Giza’, p. 58.
24. West, Serpent in the Sky, p. 229.
25. Ibid.
26. Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, p. 422.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. There have been suggestions made that the use of these large blocks is proof of a very early, perhaps pre-dynastic
date, for the Sphinx temple. While the early date may be correct it cannot be established through any argument based on this monumental masonry. The use of such large blocks is attested during the 4th Dynasty; the mortuary temple of Menkaure includes some blocks of this size. See Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 254.
30. Hoffman, Egypt before the Pharaohs, pp. 200–14.
31. Ibid., p. 207.
32. Ibid., pp. 203–4.
33. Mortensen, ‘Four Jars from the Maadi Culture Found in Giza’, p. 147.
34. Hoffman, Egypt before the Pharaohs, p. 201.
35. Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000–586 B. C.E., p. 50.
36. Neugebauer and Parker, Egyptian Astronomical Texts, I, pp. 24–5.
37. Quirke, Ancient Egyptian Religion, p. 57.
38. Bauval and Gilbert, The Orion Mystery, p. 122.
39. Ibid., p. 127.
40. See Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, p. 456 (where he opts instead for 10,450 BC); Bauval and Hancock, Keeper of Genesis, pp. 74–8 and 253–4.
10: The Mysteries of Ancient Egypt
1. Dr Mark Lehner, ‘Giza: A Contextual Approach to the Pyramids’, pp. 140–45, discusses the possibility of solar cycles being a determinant for the layout of the Giza structures. Further, in his ‘Some Observations on the Layout of the Khufu and Khafre Pyramids’, he theorizes about the layout, levelling, orientation and alignment of the two pyramids.
Dr Jaromir Malek, ‘Orion and the Giza Pyramids’, p. 109, writes, ‘I have little doubt that there was a definable positional relationship between the Giza pyramids…’ A long-running discussion continued on this subject through the pages of Discussions in Egyptology. For example, in vol. 31 (1995), p. 35, R. J. Cook writes, ‘no arguments have yet been advanced which would show that… [he or other writers] are wrong in concluding that the Giza group was laid out to an overall site plan. However, any description of this plan must explain why this group was arranged in its particular configuration…’
2. Lehner, ‘Giza: A Contextual Approach to the Pyramids’, pp. 143–5. For a recent summary of all his thoughts on the surveying, alignment and building of the Giza pyramids, see his Complete Pyramids, pp. 106, 129–30 and 212–14.