Publisher: Bhaktivedanta Institute,
Authors: Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson
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
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.
(From the International Journal of Alternative and Complementary
Medicine, August 1994)