Among the "traces of aliens" mentioned by supporters of paleocontacts, there are strange holes in the fossil turtles. According to Erich von Daniken, Alexander Kazantsev and some other researchers of paleoartefacts, the holes were pierced by "alien bullets" or burned by lasers in time immemorial.
“In one of the British museums, the skull of a Neanderthal man, which is about forty thousand years old, is kept,” Kazantsev wrote in his article “From Space to the Past”. “Found in a lead mine near Broken Hill in Rhodesia. His left temporal bone was pierced like a bullet …
The round hole does not border on cracks that would certainly have arisen if an ancient inhabitant of the Earth was wounded with a spear, arrow, tusk … It is known that a bullet pierces glass like this. There is no right temporal lobe of the skull, as it should be for a bullet wound … The find was made long before there was any talk about aliens armed with firearms."
Skull from Zambia with "bullet hole"
Photo: kosmopoisk.ru
Damaged areas close-up
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Photo: kosmopoisk.ru
If Kazantsev is right, we have only two possibilities: either the skull is dated incorrectly, or tens of thousands of years ago someone fired at our ancestors from a perfect weapon. Considering that it was found at a depth of more than 18 meters, the variant with aliens seemed quite likely to many.
Alas, in Kazantsev's presentation, everything resembles an anecdote about winning: “True, but it was not academician Ambartsumyan, but locksmith Petrosyan, he did not play the lottery, but did not win, but lost”. First, the skull is not about 40,000 years old, but from 125,000 to 300,000 years old. He was found on June 17, 1921 by the Swiss miner Tom Zwiglaar, and not in a lead mine, but in a limestone cave.
Anthropologist Arthur Smith Woodward called it Homo rhodesiensis ("Rhodesian man"). Of course, he was not a Neanderthal (most likely, this is a variety of Homo heidelbergensis, that is, "Heidelberg man"). Neanderthals have never lived in Africa! And one more detail that was added over time: now Rhodesia is called Zambia.
Until recently, skeptics assumed that the skull could be pierced by lightning, some object, accelerated by a tornado to great speed, and even a meteorite. But everything turned out to be much simpler. In 1994 P. Montgomery and his colleagues studied the skull using modern equipment and reported their findings in the Journal of Archeological Science, Vol. 21, p. 331-337.
Firstly, the hole 8 mm in diameter was not the cause of death: its edges began to heal. Secondly, on the same side of the skull, traces of the pathological process that damaged the bones are still visible. Scientists have identified, in addition to the hole, three more zones of destruction. The traumatic nature of the hole was categorically ruled out. As for the pathological process that destroyed the bone, opinions were divided, but most likely it was a granuloma. The cause of death was sepsis, which killed the unfortunate.
Kazantsev, talking about the "shot through the skull", soon learned that there is something similar in the USSR:
“Professor K. K. Flerov … invited me to his place at the Paleontological Museum of the USSR Academy of Sciences and showed me the skull of a bison, which is also about 40 thousand years old, it was found in Yakutia, and it also had something like a bullet wound on its forehead. His forehead was damaged as if by a bullet that had flattened against it, which pierced it in a cumulative way - not with metal, but with air pressed against the bone.
However, it is important that the wound was alive … The gigantic beast, apparently, was only seriously wounded, since the bullet did not hit the brain. And he survived. A granule, bone formation is visible along the edges of the wound. The wound has been healing for at least another year."
Bison skull from the Museum of Paleontology
Photo: kosmopoisk.ru
Thanks to the articles by Alexander Petrovich, "the skull of a bison with a bullet hole" gained worldwide fame. Italian ufologist Roberto Pinotti decided to find out the point of view of Konstantin Flerov himself. The answer he received was not what he wanted, so the letter was published only seven years later in the magazine "Сlypeus" (1972, No. 3):
“In the Paleontological Museum of the USSR Academy of Sciences, there is indeed a bison skull of interest with a round hole on its forehead. It is possible that it was pierced by the horn of another bison during a fight between males. However, it is more likely that this hole is a trace of the activity of parasites. We have other skulls with many holes already starting to grow.
Original letter from K. K. Flerov (from Y. Morozov's archive)
Photo: kosmopoisk.ru
A similar phenomenon is known for many modern domestic animals. There is no evidence that this is a trace of the activities of "aliens" from other planets. I think these are purely fantastic considerations of A. P. Kazantsev."
A typical hole in the skull from Kerma
Photo: kosmopoisk.ru
In recent years, near Kerma in Sudan, numerous skulls with traces have been found, which they too hastened to attribute to "alien bullets". This time, these neat, round holes were deliberately made during trepanation.
According to anthropologist D. Martin of Southern Illinois University, Kerma residents have invented a revolutionary form of trepanning with a hand drill. The aliens were again innocent.
