Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization (5 page)

Cremo sees the response as an innocent one from someone interested in protecting his career. In other areas, though, he perceives something much more vicious, as in the case of Virginia Steen-McIntyre. “What she found was that she wasn’t able to get her report published. She lost the teaching position at the university. She was labeled a publicity seeker and a maverick in her profession. And she really hasn’t been able to work as a professional geologist since then.”

In other examples Cremo finds even broader signs of deliberate malfeasance. He mentions the activities of the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded Davidson Black’s research at Zhoukoudian, in China. Correspondence between Black and his superiors with the foundation shows that research and archeology were part of a far larger biological research project. The following is a quote from that correspondence: “. . . thus we may gain information about our behavior of the sort that can lead to wide and beneficial control.” In other words, this research was being funded with the specific goal of control. “Control by
whom
?” Cremo wants to know.

The motive to manipulate is not so difficult to understand. “There’s a lot of social power connected with explaining who we are and what we are,” Cremo says. “Somebody once said ‘Knowledge is power.’ You could also say ‘Power is knowledge.’ Some people have particular power and prestige that enables them to dictate the agenda of our society. I think it’s not surprising that they are resistant to any change.”

Cremo agrees that scientists today have become a virtual priest class, exercising many of the rights and prerogatives that their forebears in the industrial-scientific revolution sought to wrest from an entrenched religious establishment. “They set the tone and the direction for our civilization on a worldwide basis,” he says. “If you want to know something today, you usually don’t go to a priest or a spiritually inclined person, you go to one of these people because they’ve convinced us that our world is a very mechanistic place, and everything can be explained mechanically by the laws of physics and chemistry, which are currently accepted by the establishment.”

To Cremo, it seems the scientists have usurped the keys of the kingdom and then failed to live up to their promises. “In many ways the environmental crisis and the political crisis and the crisis in values is
their
doing,” he says. “And I think many people are becoming aware that [the scientists] really haven’t been able to deliver the kingdom to which they claimed to have the keys. I think many people are starting to see that the worldview they are presenting just doesn’t account for everything in human experience.”

For Cremo, we are all part of a cosmic hierarchy of beings, a view for which he finds corroboration in world mythologies: “If you look at all of those traditions, when they talk about origins they don’t talk about them as something that occurs just on this planet. There are extraterrestrial contacts with gods, demigods, goddesses, angels.” And he believes there may be parallels in the modern UFO phenomenon.

The failure of modern science to satisfactorily deal with UFOs, extrasensory perception, and the paranormal provides one of the principle charges against it. “I would have to say that the evidence of such today is very strong,” he argues. “It’s very difficult to ignore. It’s not something that you can just sweep away. If you were to reject all of the evidence for UFOs, abductions, and other kinds of contacts, coming from so many reputable sources, it seems we have to give up accepting any kind of human testimony whatsoever.”

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

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

W
hen 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.

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).