Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race
Publisher: Bhaktivedanta Institute, San Diego
Authors: Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson
ISBN: 0-9635309-8-4

When a scientific theory gathers the status of a dogma, the possibilities of new research being conducted in that area and the room for new theories on the matter become severely restricted.

Those who try to break through such barriers run the risk of castigation and prejudice. They find few champions in academia. The going is all uphill. Mentally they are pushing against the habits and collective unconscious of many powerful minds and help even of the simplest kind from the 'establishment' is rarely forthcoming.

Their task is not an easy one and many do not have the character, the time, the funds or the other necessary resources to do justice to their thesis. It then becomes easy for others to criticise their work, dismissing it from the view-point of 'established opinion' as the work of a misguided enthusiast without giving it the real consideration it deserves.

Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson are therefore to be congratulated on spending eight years producing the only definitive, precise, exhaustive and complete record of practically all the fossil finds of man, regardless of whether they fit the established scientific theories or not. To say that research is painstaking is a wild under-statement. No other book of this magnitude and caliber exists. It should be compulsory reading for every first year biology, archaeology and anthropology student-and many others too!

The nine-hundred and fourteen excellently produced pages of Forbidden Archeology take us through so many anomalies of fossil man-anomalies only according to modern theories-that unless every single one of these finds is incorrectly dated, documented and observed, man's present scientific theories of his own origins must now be radically re-assessed. If only one human fossil or human artifact of the fifty or so meticulously documented and discussed from the Miocene or early Pliocene is correctly dated then everything concerning the theories of human origins must return to the melting pot. And the evidence is that a large portion of them are entirely credible.

Why then have they not been previously considered? Because the roller-coaster of habituated mind patterns and dogma has simply brushed them aside as do creationists who - faced with all the evidence of ancient times- still insist that the world was created in 4004 BC, according to a preconceived opinion. The psychological processes are in both instances the same.

We are treated to Pliocene bones, including a skull from middle Pliocene strata near Castendolo in Italy, maybe five million years old. Bones found in carboniferous coal in Pennsylvania, at least 286 million years old and capped by two feet of slate rock, 90 feet below the surface. Footprints of Human-like, bipedal creatures who lived in carboniferous Kentucky and Pennsylvania and Missouri too. Flint tools from the Miocene, 10 to 12 million years old, found in Burma and the same from even older Late Oligocene sands in Belgium. Hundreds of metallic spheres with three parallel grooves running around their equator, found in recent decades by South African miners in Precambrian mineral deposits 2.8 billion years old. And a great deal more.

The book is both entertaining and scholarly-a rare combination. It rolls along presenting its information in a logical and coherent fashion, making honest comment and assessment as it goes. There is nothing long-winded about it-only thoroughness. Data is not pressed into the service of any particular doctrine but presented and left to tell its own story. Words like 'possible' and 'not sure' are used quite commonly, a practice that demonstrates an intellectual honesty and integrity that would, with profit benefit many proponents of the more conventional points of view.

Cremo and Thompson also describe the process by which data gets suppressed - consciously and unconsciously - and discuss all the evidence upon which modern theories are founded.

Forbidden Archeology deserves to provoke discussion and controversy. It should not be swept aside or ignored. If the general scientific community once again put their heads in the sand until the furor passes by, they will be guilty of negligence in their duty to the world at large as self-professed seekers of the truth of things.

John Davidson
(From the International Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, August 1994)