Alexander Sokolov, the author of the book Myths about human evolution”, finalist of the“Enlightener”award, editor-in-chief of the portal“Anthropogenesis. Ru”.
Probably the cult of ancestors in the blood of modern humans. Our childhood is filled with stories about fairy-tale times, always beginning with the words: "A long time ago …" Antiquity makes us tremble. The ancestors were wiser, they lived correctly, they probably possessed "secret knowledge" that their frivolous heirs had lost. We sigh respectfully when we touch a piece of the past - be it a piece of stone, a piece of a pot, or a copper coin. The gray-haired old man excites the imagination - it is full of secrets. Well, curiosity is good … Add a little more critical thinking and a little more knowledge. But the last point is really bad. What does a modern Russian remember from history? A mix of walking school lessons, adventure films and stories from tour guides. The history of the ancient world was especially unlucky: at school it is passed first of all,in the 5th grade. By the time an 11-year-old becomes an adult, even this meager store of knowledge will dry up. Meanwhile, the Internet and TV tirelessly feed the gullible viewer with sensations "hidden by official science." Thus, scientific knowledge is finally superseded by myths and delusions.
Although I do not have strict statistics, the analysis of letters, Internet comments, questions from listeners, as well as expert advice allowed me to compile the five "most-most" common in Russia misconceptions about ancient history. So…
1. The pyramids were built by someone unknown using mysterious technologies
So, the leaders of our hit parade are the Egyptian pyramids. Why, one wonders? What is the success of the popular brand “pyramids - mysterious structures of ancient civilizations”?
First, the pyramids are really striking in their size. The height of the Cheops pyramid is 140 m, until the Middle Ages it was the tallest architectural structure on the planet. Being near, a person feels his insignificance, our mind falls in front of a stone hulk.
They are also very ancient. The Cheops pyramid is 4500 years old! At that time, it seems, mammoths still roamed the earth?
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When the first wave of admiration subsided, a natural question arises: why is all this? We are told that this is just the tomb of the pharaoh. But gentlemen, you claim that thousands of people have been building it for 20 years. Did they have nothing else to do? And were there so many people in that era? For a modern city dweller who changes jobs every six months and cannot cope with two guest workers in the country, it seems absurd that somewhere and once - and even more so in ancient times - it could be different.
Egypt - in the recent past, an extremely popular resort. Millions of Russian citizens swam in the Red Sea, took a ride to Cairo, took pictures with the Sphinx in the background (you have to put your palm as if you are touching its beautiful stone face). Local energetic guides tried to entertain tourists - to the best of their imagination and poor knowledge of the history of their native country. With the light hand of enterprising tourists with video cameras, their pleasure trips turned into "research expeditions to the unsolved mysteries of Ancient Egypt."
Why are we being told that the Egyptians we know about from the textbooks “couldn't”? Well, firstly, the Egyptians did not have iron, and it is impossible to work with hard rocks with copper tools - how were the granite blocks for the pyramids mined? And how were multi-ton stones dragged over long distances? Manually, on yourself? Okay, you can hew, drag, fit several blocks, but there are more than two million of them in the Great Pyramid! It is impossible to imagine such a colossal work!
This is only a small part of the arguments adopted by the "pyramidiots" (a term proposed by Egyptologist Barbara Mertz), but even these points are enough to put an unprepared opponent on the shoulder blades.
However, Egyptologists, having heard such questions, are in no hurry to faint. The pyramids are not built of granite. The main material of the Great Pyramid, for example, is limestone, it is a fairly soft stone. The quarries, where most of the limestone for the pyramid was mined, are located 200 meters from it - they even preserved the markings. Probable limestone mining technology is described by Clark and Engelbach in their book Building and Architecture in Ancient Egypt. With the help of copper or stone tools, vertical grooves were knocked out along the contour of the block, and wedges were driven from below, by means of which the block was separated from the rock. In a number of ancient quarries, at the bottom of the unfinished blocks, there were recesses into which wedges were inserted.
Experiments show that moving a block weighing 2.5 tons (and this is the average weight of a block from the Great Pyramid) is quite within the power of a group of people using wooden rollers or sleds. On the ancient Egyptian fresco, you can see how people drag the 60-ton statue of Pharaoh Jehutihotep on a sled along special beds. In another fresco, we see a stone block with a sled being pulled by bulls.
Of course, the topic of building the pyramids does not end there. It would be worth talking about the technology of extracting granite, and about how materials for construction were transported along the Nile on ships, and how the Egyptians could drill and saw a stone with copper tools with abrasive - such experiments were successfully carried out by the experimental archaeologist Denis Stokes, and also Russian enthusiast Nikolai Vasyutin. Of course, many questions remain open. How exactly did the stone blocks rise to the desired height when building the pyramids? How did the Egyptians fit the pyramid blocks to each other? There are no records and images of these processes. However, Egyptologists are looking for and finding answers to these questions - staying within the framework of science, without involving aliens from Alpha Centauri. There is special literature on this topic - alas,pyramidiots are generally unaware of its existence.
What to add? The pyramids are the greatest monument to human labor. It is really difficult to imagine 20 years of joint efforts of thousands of Egyptians. Can you imagine the construction of the Great Wall of China - its length is more than 10 thousand kilometers? And imagine the work of nameless stonemasons, who for 90 years carved a 70-meter statue of Buddha in the rock in Leshan (China, VIII century AD).
Maybe we just don't know what an organized group of people is capable of with good positive (and negative) motivation?
2. Man is a product of genetic engineering of aliens
I have traveled a lot around the country and I can responsibly assert that every taxi driver at the airport knows that a person was brought to our Earth by aliens. The "alien" hypothesis is so popular that it invariably appears in various Internet polls on the topic "How did man come to be" along with the "evolutionary" and "religious" versions, and even got into some textbooks. Well, thank you TV!
In 2016, a sequel to the famous "X-Files" was released - so we should expect another surge of interest in the topic.
So, we are convinced that man did not arise in the process of natural evolution, but is the result of experiments on a certain "preparation" - a monkey or Pithecanthropus, in whose DNA alien genes were planted. The famous hunter for "ancient astronauts" Erich von Deniken explicitly states that the "autograph" of aliens is hidden in our genome.
Deniken claims that creatures that combined parts of different animals - sphinxes, people with animal heads and other ancient Egyptian mythical characters - are in fact mutants, victims of genetic experiments.
But the idea of "human - GMO" is most fully substantiated by another adept of paleocontact, who gave us stories about the Anunnaki from the planet Nibiru - Zacharia Sitchin. This author uses an argument commonly used by "classical" creationists. See how different humans are from monkeys, Sitchin says. If normal evolution has taken place, where is the transitional link? Why did man appear so quickly, so unexpectedly? We are the only species on the planet with intelligence. Who gave us such a gift? According to Sitchin and his followers, the answer lies in the ancient texts - you just need to be able to read them!
In Sumerian mythology, the gods create a person from a mixture of clay and the blood of one of the gods. Sitchin is a master of interpretation. He boldly declares that the word "clay" in the ancient text can be read as "egg." What is an egg? Well, of course, a female egg! Here is a description of the genetic experiment: the "blood" (sperm) of the deity fertilized the egg of the great ape.
But reading between the lines is not enough for Sitchin: he spotted genes of extraterrestrial origin among the results of the first sequencing of the human genome, published in Science and Nature in 2001. And to this day, at various "ufological" sites, one can find the statement that geneticists have found in human DNA "223 genes that are not found in anyone else on this planet," and, therefore, we got from aliens …
Alas, Sitchin either did not understand the results of the geneticists, or cheated (most likely both). Geneticists have reported genes specific to vertebrates, not just humans. Since a significant proportion of these genes are widely distributed among bacteria, but are absent in invertebrates, scientists have suggested that the genes came to vertebrates as a result of horizontal transfer from bacteria. But the alien version is much prettier!
True, then it should have been about the extraterrestrial origin of all fish, amphibians and reptiles.
So, what are the souls of the supporters of "alien GMO"? Poor knowledge of anthropology, misunderstood data from geneticists and questionable interpretations of ancient texts. With this approach, you can see references to aliens - spherical xenomorphs - and in the tale of the kolobok …
3. Found very ancient giants
The power of media exposure is amazing! Educated people regularly ask me questions about the "ancient giants", including even a biologist (though this happened only once). Giants, cyclops, people of enormous stature are heroes of numerous epics and legends. These creatures have found a place in the "mythology" of the XXI century. And these are not only articles on the Internet with colorful pictures. "Popular science" programs about ancient giants were shown on quite respectable television channels. And in 2014, yellowish news feeds spread the news: allegedly, according to the decision of the US Supreme Court, the Smithsonian Institution is to release classified documents about thousands of giant skeletons destroyed by "official scientists." "Competent sources" reported: publication is scheduled for 2015. 2015 has passed, but we did not wait for the publication …
But do the supporters of the "ancient giants" have real evidence? There are, and some!
First, spectacular photographs of huge skeletons and perfect preservation. Men-ants are swarming nearby, so the scale of the find becomes immediately obvious.
Secondly, eyewitness accounts - for example, peasants, who once found huge bones right in their garden. True, then these bones usually disappeared somewhere, but “I remember now, the skull was like that.” The reason for the disappearance of the giant bones is often called - the intrigues of "official scientists" who have selected priceless finds and hid in an unknown direction.
Thirdly, quotes from chronicles, diaries of medieval travelers describing encounters with giants on an exotic island, in Patagonia, in the snowy Himalayas or somewhere else at the end of the world …
Handsomely? Very. However:
- It is easy to make sure that the photographs of "huge skeletons" (usually the same, from article to article, from film to film) are a banal photomontage.
- In some cases, even the author of such pseudo-documents is known. For example, a popular photo "excavation of a huge skeleton" won a prize in 2002 at the "Archaeological Anomalies - 2" photo collage competition. Then the illustration got into yellow newspapers, which accompanied the photo with a story about "sensational finds in India." As a result, the author of the collage, a Canadian artist with the nickname IronKite, was forced to tell National Geographic magazine in detail about how he prepared this hoax.
- The stories of a peasant, even a colorful old man with a mustache, as well as the memoirs of sailors 500 years ago, are, alas, not proof. Otherwise, we will have to believe in the existence of "gates to hell" in the Pacific Ocean, whales disguised as islands, to which ships dock, and other fables that are full of "true" stories of medieval travelers. Honest eyes of an eyewitness cannot replace the main thing - the finds themselves - giant human bones or teeth. Words in words, but show us at least something tangible and, most importantly, normally documented! Alas, in this place adherents of "alternative science" for some reason become very shy: there are finds, but they cannot be presented.
Is a giant even possible from the point of view of science? It follows from the laws of physics that a person who has grown to several meters would not be able to move normally. His legs would have broken, crushed by the weight of his own body. Take a look at real giant animals - elephants or at least gorillas, at the shape of their bodies, at the thickness of their limbs. A primate, swaggering to the size of an elephant, and even upright, would have completely inhuman proportions.
So let the giants stay where they belong - in fairy tales and science fiction films.
4. Russia is the cradle of humanity. All descended from the Russians
In times of crisis, when there are no special reasons for pride around us, it remains to look for something to be proud of in the past. Patriotic citizens raise the merits of their great-grandfathers and deeds of the past centuries to the flag. Historical myths are used. The subject of special pride is the “national ancestral home”. It is THIS country that should be the place where the state, writing, mathematics, medicine, language first appeared - and where man was born in general. Probably, representatives of any state with the slightest national ambitions have made claims to the “primogeniture” at least once. Be it Great Britain, Korea, China, Georgia, Armenia, Israel … and, of course, Russia. Patriotism itself is not a bad thing.
But when history is spiced up with patriotism, for some reason historical science tends to end.
Isn't it nice to know that the people to which you belong are the oldest on the planet, and the human race arose not somewhere, but within the Moscow Ring Road or, at least, on the territory of the Russian Federation? If you really want to, you can always prove it - if you use a certain approach to evidence. It is enough that at least some kind of archeology exists on the territory of the country - preferably more ancient, of course. Now we need to proclaim this monument the oldest in the world, and its creators - the direct ancestors of the current population. For Russia, the approach works great. We have enough antiquities. Suffice it to mention such Stone Age sites as Kostenki (Voronezh region, more than 40 thousand years old) and Sungir (Vladimir region, 30 thousand years old).
On the Internet, it is easy to find a classic reconstruction of a Sungir man, accompanied by a pretentious signature like: "Slav, 30 thousand years ago." Kostenki in publications on nationalist sites famously dubbed "an old Russian settlement." Comes to curiosities. The pseudoscientist Andrei Tyunyaev took from an archeological article a plan of excavations on the territory of a sugar factory settling tank (village Byki, Kursk region). On this plan, the contour marked the boundaries of the sedimentation tank, and the dots - the sites of the Stone Age sites. Without batting an eye, Tyunyaev issued the scheme of the sump for the plan of an ancient Russian settlement of the Paleolithic era …
But jokes aside! Of course, our country has something to be proud of. However, humble yourself: the most ancient people of the modern type - whatever one may say - are found in Africa. These are, for example, the famous finds at the Omo (195 thousand years) and Herto (160 thousand years) locations. And the status of the most ancient sapiens of Eurasia was "stolen" from us by the Israeli Manot (more than 52 thousand years old. Oh, those Israelis).
But it's not even about that. Let's cool the patriotic fervor a little more - we are looking for scientific truth, and not indulge our pride, right?
Let's imagine that somewhere in a vacant lot a Stone Age site was found. Does this mean that a teenager living in a high-rise building a few kilometers from the parking lot is a direct descendant of the Cro-Magnons who hunted here in time immemorial? The teenager, of course, would like to think so … But his parents remember how just 20 years ago they flew here 1,500 kilometers away to earn money. In ancient times, there were no aircraft, however, since the Paleolithic, the population in this area, most likely, has changed many times. Back in the 19th century, archaeologists understood that migrations and wars sooner or later affect almost any inhabited part of the land, and genes are mixed in any way. In recent decades, this idea has been repeatedly confirmed by paleogenetic data.
Strictly speaking, we cannot even determine the racial identity of the people of the Upper Paleolithic - what can we say about their "nationality"? Any anthropologist will tell you that this concept is generally inapplicable to such a distant era.
So, looking for some kind of ancestor of the Russians in ancient times is a disastrous business. Each nation has many ancestors, and if any of them is found, then, most likely, it will be the ancestor of many more nations.
5. Our Earth is 6 thousand years old
The word "young earthlings" sounds proudly - it looks like the heroes of the "young guards". However, if there is anything heroic about young earth creationism, it is heroic ignorance of facts.
Young Earth advocates insist on a literal interpretation of the creation process described in the Bible. At the same time, they importantly call their ideology "scientific creationism". In fact, the "Young Zemlya" have a set of scientific proofs of their innocence. However, the backbone of this set has not changed for 100 years, and the starting point is not scientific data, but religious dogmas that cannot be questioned.
Therefore, although the "young people" like to talk about science, "scientific" here can only be used in quotation marks.
Many interesting things follow from the statements about the "young universe". There was no evolution. Transitional forms are forgeries. Humans lived alongside dinosaurs, trilobites, animal-toothed reptiles, and other fossil creatures. All dating methods that indicate the ancient age of the Earth and the Universe give erroneous results. The existing geological column, the distribution of fossils in the geological layers, is explained by the result of the Flood - a global catastrophe that completely transformed the appearance of our planet.
It would seem that in the 21st century, one can only sympathize with these poor fellows. However, the "young people" are not going to give up. They have their own conferences, institutes, museum workers, and in Russia even a creationist "Orthodox textbook of biology" was published, although it did not receive the stamp of the ministry.
The approach of the Young Zemlyans is typical of the opposition science: these figures are looking for white spots, problem areas in paleontology, geology, astronomy, physics, which they interpret in their favor.
However, if we agree for a moment that the world was created, according to Scripture, in six days 6,000 years ago, we are faced with a much larger heap of unsolvable scientific problems.
- How can we see the light of distant galaxies, millions or billions of light years away from us? After all, it turns out that when this light was emitted, the universe should not have existed yet?
- This or that dating method may give an error. But how can we explain that the consistent ancient age of the same object is given by two different methods at once? Are both results wrong? This can be compared to the likelihood that two randomly chosen clocks show the same wrong time.
For example, samples from the volcanic ash layer below which the famous Australopithecus Lucy skeleton was found were sent to two experts. The first one determined the age by the potassium-argon method, the second - by the fission track method.
Dating by both methods gave approximately 2.6 million years. Coincidence?
- Why do the remains of extinct animals lie in geological layers not randomly, but in a certain sequence? Creationists have a ready answer: they say, this is a consequence of antediluvian "zoning": large reptiles lived in the lowlands - dinosaurs, and mammals - on the hills; so they sank, each at his own height. However, this trick does not explain why marine animals are distributed in a similar way - plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs lie in layers with other Mesozoic lizards, and whales - higher, together with Cenozoic mammals. The sequential replacement of some organisms by others in the sediments is also preserved within individual groups of animals - be it birds or flying dinosaurs, amphibians, sea urchins. This is true for spores and pollen as well. Incidentally, since spores and pollen are abundant in sedimentary rocks,they are often used for dating geological rocks. The pollen penetrates everywhere, is able to be carried by the wind over great distances and hardly "escaped from the flood at different speeds." Why do spores and pollen of plants of different eras naturally replace each other in geological layers?
However, any argument can be easily broken with the help of two short phrases: "It was so pleasing to the Creator" and "Conspiracy of scientists." The idea of a world created by the Funky Creator along with dinosaur bones lying in the ground and light flying from distant galaxies is ingenious in its own way. And evil Darwinists, gluing "transitional forms" of the bones of people and monkeys in the basement, it is good to frighten children.
However, both the first and second statements cannot be refuted, and therefore - this is definitely not science.