Human origin - forbidden by history
“Research into prehistoric times is in crisis today,” wrote Colin Renfew in the foreword to his book Before Civilization. - Archaeologists all over the world have already realized that much of what is written about prehistoric times in existing textbooks is, to put it mildly, inadequate: much of this is completely wrong. Errors, of course, were expected, because new materials were discovered during archaeological excavations, and this will undoubtedly lead to new conclusions. But the real shock was what could, in principle, have been foreseen a few years ago: everything we know about the prehistoric era is based on several assumptions, and none of them can now be taken as reasonable."
Renfew considers such revolutionary changes to be so dangerous to fundamental views of the past that scientists will now inevitably be forced to lean towards a new paradigm and move to a completely different structure of thinking.
For example, all students who study ancient history were taught that the oldest stone monuments are the Egyptian pyramids, that the first artfully man-made places of worship were discovered in Mesopotamia, that metallurgy, as well as architecture and other sciences and crafts originated in the Middle East, and it was from there that civilization spread its fruitful and all-encompassing influence over Europe and Great Britain.
And now, Renfew sighs bitterly, it was a real shock for us to find out that all these assumptions turned out to be wrong: “The megalithic crypts in Western Europe turned out to be older than the pyramids … The impressive temples of Malta were built earlier than their stone counterparts in the Middle East. Copper production was already in full swing in the Balkans, while in Greece it was not yet dreamed of; that is, the development of metallurgy in Europe proceeded in an absolutely independent way. And the famous Stonehenge was completed, it seems, when Britain was in the early Bronze Age, well before the start of the Mycenaean civilization in Greece. In fact, Stonehenge, this wonderful and mysterious structure, may now be considered the oldest astronomical observatory in the world. The traditional view of ancient history is now being refuted at every step."
Probably, nowhere do traditional views on ancient history seem so contradictory and confusing as in the field of determining the genetic ancestor of modern man. The mystery of origin is a detective melodrama in which an incredible number of fantastic characters emerge with false clues, while each of them at first seems to be the most reliable and reliable, but very soon it turns out that here, sadly, it does not smell of authenticity. New evidence indicates that modern man is much older than academics anticipated, and that modern civilizations evolved much earlier than orthodox timelines would allow. And after traces of a person, dating back to 70,000 BC, were discovered in southern California, of those people who persistently call America the New World,perhaps soon it will be easy to call intellectual "brakes".
The most well-established theory of human origins, according to which the Middle East is considered the "cradle of civilization" and the place of human youth, is already under serious attack: much older metal alloys and pottery were discovered in Thailand. Bronze artifacts dating back to 3600 BC, in the words of one expert, "challenge all the assumptions about the development of our modern culture that have existed for a long time." The fragments of pottery, which are 600 years older than similar samples of pottery found in Mesopotamia, indicate that pottery could have come to the Middle East from Southeast Asia, and not vice versa, as was believed for a long time.
Western archaeologists began probing layers in east Africa for evidence that the earliest primates originated from there, between two and five million years old. 1976 August - Tanzanian officials announce that the skull of a creature has been found on Lake Ndutu, which could be considered a "missing link." According to one of the officials: "This skull is remarkable in that it can be an evolutionary link between the" Peking man "and Homo sapiens (that is, actually a man), because it has characteristics that are characteristic of both species."
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Although the "Ndutu Man" was found along with objects that, according to radiocarbon analysis, were almost 500,000 years old, already in July 1976, Chinese scientists announced the discovery of teeth and stone utensils proving that the so-called "Yuanmo Man" lived in places where the modern province of Yunnan is located, more than 1.7 million years ago. New China News said, "This dating increases the age of the great apes found in China by over a million years." Red Flag magazine wrote: "It is now established that the time when the monkey began to make tools, and the" Beijing era "of human evolution are separated from each other by a much longer period of time."
Sometimes it seems that previously undiscovered “lost civilizations” are emerging from the earth with incredible frequency. 1976 November 28 - Public exploration begins for the first time in ruins near La Paz, Bolivia. Carlos Onse Sanguinez, Bolivia's national director of archeology, said the Mollo culture used trapezoidal architecture long before the Inca empire. Mollo created a huge kingdom in the Andes for the XIII-XIV centuries before the Incas. Thus, although the trapezium has always been considered an innovation of the Incas, in our time there is no doubt that the secret of the majestic massive buildings, which have been a mystery to archaeologists for centuries, was discovered by people much earlier.
Italian archaeologist Paulo Mattai chose Syria as a hunting ground for his prehistoric Shangri-La. In the north of the country, which for a long time was considered only the territory of nomadic nomads, he and his group found almost 15,000 tablets in the royal palace of the previously unknown kingdom of Elba. The tablets turned out to be records of historical events from 2,500 to 2,400 BC. and were written in letters very similar to the biblical Hebrew alphabet, which did not change over the next several centuries.
Mattai believes that the tablets serve as "proof of the existence of a new world that rivaled the ancient kingdoms of Egypt and Mesopotamia" and represent "an important new chapter in world history."
The Corozal Project, a joint venture between the British Museum and the University of Cambridge, has been excavating Mayan ceremonial centers since 1973. One of the expeditions conducted research on the monument they erected, which has the oldest recorded date found in the New World - "not later than the first century BC, and possibly one or two centuries earlier."
Radiocarbon analysis of a charred wood from Cuello, Belize, has shown that it dates back to 2600 BC. Researchers believe that such data shift "the emergence of Mayan settlements and civilization itself on the Yucatan Peninsula to the III century BC, that is, 1,700 years earlier than those known to date."
Homo erectus, the familiar Peking Man and Javanese Man, lived approximately 500,000 years ago. They are considered the most ancient of our ancestors. Since the discovery made at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania in 1960, the beginning of the Homo erectus era has been pushed back more than a million years. Then, in August 1972, Richard Leakey and his young collaborator Bernard Ngeneo found fragments of a skull in the steep slopes of a ravine that was in the gray-brown wastelands east of Lake Rudolph in Kenya. This finding could also split any known form of rigid thinking about human genealogy.
"We need to either throw this skull away, or change our theories about ancient people," Leakey said about the 2.8 million-year-old find, which he tentatively identified as characteristic of the modern human species.
"It just doesn't fit into any of the past models of human origins," Leakey continued in an article published in National Geographic in June 1973. A surprisingly large skull, according to Leakey, “leaves no stone unturned from the point of view that all earlier remains should be ordered and sorted according to the sequence of evolutionary changes. It seems that there were different types of ancient man, some of them developed large brains much earlier than is commonly believed."
Researchers from Leakey's group named our unknown cousin "the 1470 man," after the registration number assigned to the model by the National Museum of Kenya.
“It was obvious that the skull was missing the prominent brow ridges - the drooping eyebrows - characteristic of Homo erectus,” Leakey said. “And the skull, although three times older than Homo erectus, is almost the same size. … In the laboratory of Dr. Alan Walker… our preliminary estimates of 800 cm3 were confirmed. For comparison, later specimens of Homo erectus skulls have a cranial volume of 750 to 1100 cm3 (the average volume of a modern human brain is about 1400 cm3)."
Richard Leakey's discoveries convinced him that there could be several models of ancient man - "geographical or regional varieties of the same species." Leakey is convinced that anthropologists will one day be able to “trace the path of the remains of an ancient man from East Rudolph, no less than 4 million years ago. There, perhaps, we will find evidence of the existence of a common ancestor and man as a species with Australopithecines (almost people).
1974, October 17-18 - A French-American expedition led by Dr. Karl Johansson of Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland) recovered 4 million years old human remains from a volcanic grave. This stunning exhumation not only threatens to destroy all modern theories of the origin of our species, but also rehabilitates the Middle East as the birthplace of man.
Johansson recalled how the researchers jumped with excitement, finding the jaw of an extinct species of hyena, and at that very moment Alemneu Asfyu of the Ethiopian Antiquity Administration simply flew up the hill. “He was so agitated that he couldn't even talk,” said Johasson. "He found the palatine bone and teeth of a man over three million years old."
The group continued to work and found a whole upper jaw, half of the upper and half of the lower jaw, with all teeth intact. Preliminary dating indicated that the fragments could be 4 million years old. A couple of days later, Johansson said, "We have expanded our knowledge of the human species by almost a million and a half years."
Although these remains were found in the Afar region of northeastern Ethiopia, new finds indicated that Johansson believed that the birthplace of man was not Africa, but the Middle East. On the surface of volcanic sediments on the banks of the Khadar, a tributary of the Awash River, just 100 miles from the Red Sea, where Africa and the Arabian Peninsula were once connected by an isthmus, remains 4 million years old have been found.
"The small size of the teeth in the found jaws leads us to the hypothesis that humans ate meat 4 million years ago and may have used tools, probably made of bone, to hunt animals," Johansson said. "It also means that there must have been some kind of social cooperation and some kind of communication systems already then."
Science Digest (1975, February) wrote: “The bones lie at a stratigraphic level 150 feet beneath a volcanic layer that is 3-3.5 million years old. So when Johansson claims the bones are almost 4 million years old, you can trust that."
While some orthodox archaeologists and anthropologists finally get confused in discussions, trying to bring the date of human origin beyond one million years, there are more and more erratic finds that indicate that a person is much older. At the same time, these finds have appeared and continue to appear, generation after generation. Here is a letter that was published in Nature in 1873 on March 27:
… Mr. Frank Calvert recently discovered something near the Dardanelles that he sees as definitive evidence of human existence during the Miocene period. Mr. Calvert has previously sent me bones and shells from this layer, which, at my request, have been carefully studied by Buck and Guine Jeffries. Now he has found a piece of bone that may have belonged to a dinoterium or mastodon. On the convex side of this bone, a horned quadrupedal animal "with a curved neck, a diamond-shaped chest, a long body, straight front legs and wide paws" is carved. He also says that there are traces of seven or eight other figures, which, unfortunately, have almost disappeared. In the same layer, he found flint flakes and several bones, broken as if they were trying to extract bone marrow from them.
This discovery speaks not simply of the existence of man in the time of Miocene; it indicates that a person has made some progress, at least in the arts. Mr. Calvert assures me that there is no doubt about the geological age of the layer in which these samples were found … (John Lubbock).
The Miocene is the lower layer of the Tertiary period, and its geological age is approximately 100 million years. Frank Cousins, in his book Fossil Man, discusses human remains found in Italy, at Castenedolo and Olmo, which seem to be additional evidence of human existence in the Tertiary.
1860 - Professor Ragazzoni, a geologist and lecturer at the Technical Institute in Bresci, discovered fragments of the human cranial vault in a layer of coralline moss from the Pliocene glaciation (about 10 million years ago). He began to search further and found several more skull fragments. When he showed his findings to his colleagues at the institute, they were received with the greatest distrust.
Twenty years later, one of Ragazzoni's friends, digging the same hole in which the skull fragments were found, found the scattered remains of two children's skeletons. They were left in place for Professor Ragazzoni to inspect and examine. Later, in the same layer, the skeleton of a woman was found in a twisted position.
1883 Professor Sergi, an anthropologist, visited Ragazzoni in Bresci and conducted his own examination of human remains found in the Pliocene layer at Castenedolo. The fragments were still in the parent rock in which they were found, and Professor Sergi announced: yes, these are the remains of two children, male and female, similar to the modern type of man.
The anthropologist went with Ragazzoni to the excavation from which such curious remains were recovered. There he made a new slice of the layer himself. He made sure that Ragazzoni was in no way mistaken in the interpretation of his findings. In other words, the human remains were actually in the intact layers of the Pliocene epoch, and they belonged to a species that is fully consistent with modern man.
1863 - during the construction of the railway south of Arezzo, in the upper reaches of the Arno River, a pit 15 meters deep was dug. This happened just at the time when the skull was removed from the ground at Olmo.
I. Kochchi, curator of the Geological Museum in Florence, said that the skull was at a depth of almost 15 meters, in a sediment that formed at the bottom of an ancient lake. The blue clay in which the skull was found was assessed by Signor Kochi as early Pleistocene deposits. At the same level as the human skull, the remains of an elephant and an early form of the Pleistocene horse were found.
There are also extremely annoying reports of human remains in coal beds. If a person existed in the Carboniferous period, that is, in the one to which the formation of all massive coal seams belongs, then we will have to say that the age of the ancestors of modern people is already estimated at 600 million years. Here is an example from Otto Stutzer's book Geology of Coal:
Animal remains are extremely rare in coal seams. The animals that inhabited the huge coal swamps were terrestrial forms, and their bodies after death decayed as quickly as the animals that lived in primeval forests and peatlands. In the coal collection of the Mining Academy in Freiberg, there is a mysterious human skull, consisting of brown coal, a mixture of iron and manganese and phosphate brown iron ore, but its origin is unknown. This skull was described by Karsten and Dehenin in 1842.
It will soon become clear to even the most rationalistic scientists that the mystery of our origin is becoming more and more confusing, turning into a completely hopeless jumble of conflicting data and dubious claims. The human family tree clearly has more ramifications than any professional anthropologist has assumed. Among other things, even the most daring and risky scientists understand that if their more conservative colleagues decide to simply cut off the branch on which he created his advanced theory, then the position he won will immediately collapse.
Currently, we can analyze data on the origin of a person, which looks like the following.
There is an agreement among scientists dealing with the origin of humans: modern man, Homo sapiens, became the dominant species about 40,000 years ago, and on Earth it has existed for about 80,000 years.
The Cro-Magnons, the tall, beautiful prehistoric race of Europe, are considered the same species as modern man; it could have been swallowed up by Homo sapiens.
The Neanderthal, classified as Homo sapiens, existed between 150,000 and 50,000 years ago.
Other remains of intelligent people have been found that testify to the greater antiquity of the species. They have been found at Suanscombe (England) and Steinheim (Germany); they are believed to be 250,000 years old. According to some researchers, the remains found in Hungary are 500,000 years old.
Remains belonging to the human species, but not in its modern form Homo sapiens, are called the remains of Homo erectus, Homo erectus. Within this classification, there are remains from Heidelberg, Germany, 350,000 years old; finds from China (Sinanthropus) - 400,000 years old; remains from Java (Pithecanthropus) - from 400,000 to 700,000 years.
The remains of creatures that are not directly related to the human species, but are anthropoid and, thus, part of the hominid family, may possibly be on the line of evolution leading to modern man. These are Australopithecines, including the zinjanthropus of Dr. Louis Leakey. Age - 1.75 million years. Dr. Leakey also believed that Homo habilis was a hominid from the same period.
Dr. Richard Leakey's "Man 1470", whom he tentatively identified as human, is 2.8 million years old. Most likely, most scientists working on human origins will not accept such an identification.
This also applies to the Ethiopian émigré from the Middle East, Dr. Johansson, who is even older - four million years.
Richard Leakey's prediction is that one day anthropologists will be able to find a common ancestor of "almost human" and a true human, which is 4 million years old. At the moment, this point of view is held by a minority.
1967, February 13 - Newsweek magazine wrote: “There is nothing more meager than evidence for human evolution: a collection of several hundred fossilized skulls, teeth, jaws and other fragments. Physical anthropologists, however, turned out to be much more inventive when reading all these reports: there are just as many versions of ancient human history as there are anthropologists who put forward them."
Newsweek summarizes several facts that almost all scientists agree: “The accepted age of creatures that could stand and had teeth resembling human is 1.7 million years … The first appearance of hominids, a family different from apes, the only surviving member of which is modern man … refers to 1.4 million years ago."
B. Steiger