Forbidden Archeology

authors: Michael Cremo & Richard Thompson

reviewed by Theresa Welsh

This 1000 page book is well worth the time you’ll spend reading it. These guys have done their research very well. They take you through an examination of many historic anomalies that point to a human race much older than we’ve been told.

Why would we find manufactured artifacts in coal millions of years old? What about a small figurine of a person, expertly formed in clay, found in a stratum dated to about two million years ago, long before humans were supposed exist? But that pales in comparison with a 500 million year old footprint. Even older than that, a grooved metallic ball found in South Africa has been dated to 2.8 billion years ago! In Illinois, a human skeleton was embedded in a coal deposit that an expert said was 286 million years old. This book has an extensive appendix at the back listing every known anomaly and its age. The sheer number of these incredible anomalies -- items found where (and when) they should not be -- is strong support that something is wrong with our understanding of human habitation on earth. The authors do not simply list these anomalies; they have checked them out as best they could, done the research as to where these items were found, and what methods were used to arrive at the dates. This is an exhaustive look at items found in geologic strata where they should never have been found.

Thompson and Cremo have combed the data on various finds indicating a human presence going back further than the currently-accepted date for the age of modern man. Many of the finds they discuss are not from presently-accepted sources but from reports more than a hundred years old. These are finds reported in professional literature, but now discredited or overlooked by modern Paleontologists. The type of evidence they examine includes reports of broken bones, eoliths, neoliths, and paleoliths (shaped stones), and flint arrows found in earth stratum whose age has been determined or items dated by radiocarbon dating or other dating methods. They include many pictures and drawings of these stone implements, so the reader can judge if they appear to have been shaped by an intelligent hand.

Cremo and Thompson point out that in the past, many scientists accepted an older age for mankind. For instance in 1921, American Paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn stated “ Proofs…now rest on the firm foundation of the Foxhall flints in which human handiword cannot be challenged…” And yet, modern scientists have thrown out this and other items that were once accepted.

The authors build a case that scientist tend to accept as evidence anything that corroborates their current position and reject whatever tends to refute it. The body of evidence supporting the idea of modern man being millions of years old has simply been ignored and forgotten. They tell us that “when theories change, and a certain body of ideas and discoveries becomes unacceptable, there is generally a period of time during which prominent scientists will publish systematic attacks against the unwanted findings… if the attacks are successful, then after some last attempts at rebuttal by diehard supporters, scientists will realize it is not in their best interest to defend the unwanted material or be associated with it. A shroud of silence descends over the rejected evidence…”

If we accept the evidence indicating the presence of man millions of years ago, how can we reconcile this with the accepted view that homo sapiens evolved from other primate forms and is just hundreds of thousands of years old? The authors are ready to discard the idea that the human race is the result of Darwinian evolution. They take a detailed look at the supposed evidence for evolution and conclude that it’s based on very little. I remember when I was in school years ago how we used to joke about “the missing link.” But, in fact, that link has never been found -- the evidence that present man is actually an evolutionary descendant from the same line as other primates. The authors, in this 1000-page blockbuster, present massive amounts of evidence for their position that man is actually much older and they go further by suggesting that man is not the only hominid on earth who has ancestors. Do those bones and skeletal remains that supposedly represent pre-modern man actually have nothing to do with us?

One of the most interesting chapters is on the “living ape-men” who could be the real descendants of some of those skulls and bones put forward as belonging to primitive man. The authors tell us: “Over the past hundred years or so, researchers have accumulated substantial evidence that creatures resembling Neanderthals, Homo Erectus, and the Australopithecines even now roam wilderness areas of the world.” Back in 1775, Carl Linnaeus, who founded the modern system of species classifiction, included three categories of existing human species: homo sapiens, homo troglodytes (cave man), and homo ferus (wild man). Although there were only reports of the last two, Linnaeus considered them sufficiently reliable to assume these beings existed. The authors present evidence from around the world that homo sapiens has some cousins, called variously wild men, sasquatch, abominable snowman, yetis, almas, and bigfoot. Reports from the US, Canada, Europe, Asia and South America of sightings of these hairy creatures are from seemingly credible sources.

The book reports the story of a capture of an almas woman in the nineteenth century near the Caucasus. She remained with the humans who called her Zana; she mated with a human male and had children. Some of her grandchildren were seen in 1964 by a man who reported they had “prominent chewing muscles and extra strong jaws.” Zana died in the 1880s. The authors did not trek to this far wilderness in search of Zana's descendants, so this report is really heresay, but it is interesting. What the authors call “wild men” have been seen all over the world and many cultures accept them as a fact. How can we be sure the bones that are supposed to be our ancestors are not their ancestors?

This book has been criticized because the authors belong to a religious sect that believes mankind is millions of years old. The fact that they believe this does not negate the research they have done, but it does mean they began in hopes of proving man to be older than the accepted dates. Could they have been selective in what they chose to include, being just as blindsided as the scientists they accuse of ignoring evidence that doesn't corroborate their beliefs? I don't know, but the mountain of material they have meticulously compiled here is impressive. The book has been controversial and author Cremo has even written a follow-up book to discuss the feedback they’ve gotten since the release of Forbidden Archeology. They have uncovered so much material and presented it so professionally that A rcheologists, Anthropologists and Paleontologists have had to at least consider the content of this book.

Should we push back our dates for human existence? The evidence presented by Cremo and Thompson is compelling, but there are some other possible explanations, especially regarding the evidence pointing back hundreds of millions and billions of years. For instance, time travlers could account for some of these anomalies. Humans who went back in time could have left these indicators of their presence. Another explanation is that humans (or intelligent beings) from other planets came here and left behind those items. Perhaps the earth has been repeatedly visited over those billions of years. Are these explanations easier or more difficult to accept than believing the human race is billions of years old?

Any of these theories means a major revision of accepted beliefs. Forbidden Archeology has ruffled some academic feathers with its claims of a human race going back millions of years. Is the book beleivable? Seekers always keep an open mind; read it yourself and you be the judge.