posted 05-22-2002 06:14 PM               

Archaeological Cover-ups
-- A Plot to Control History? --

The scientific establishment tends to reject, suppress or ignore evidence that conflicts with accepted theories, while denigrating or persecuting the messenger.

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Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 9, Number 3 (April-May 2002)
PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. editor@nexusmagazine.com
Telephone: +61 (0)7 5442 9280; Fax: +61 (0)7 5442 9381
From our web page at: www.nexusmagazine.com

by Will Hart © 2002
Email: Wrtsearch1@aol.com

"THE BRAIN POLICE" AND "THE BIG LIE"

Any time you allege a conspiracy is afoot, especially in the field of science, you are treading on thin ice. We tend to be very sceptical about conspiracies--unless the Mafia or some Muslim radicals are behind the alleged plot. But the evidence is overwhelming and the irony is that much of it is in plain view.

The good news is that the players are obvious. Their game plan and even their play-by-play tactics are transparent, once you learn to spot them. However, it is not so easy to penetrate through the smokescreen of propaganda and disinformation to get to their underlying motives and goals. It would be convenient if we could point to a plumber's unit and a boldface liar like Richard Nixon, but this is a more subtle operation.

The bad news: the conspiracy is global and there are many vested interest groups. A cursory investigation yields the usual suspects: scientists with a theoretical axe to grind, careers to further and the status quo to maintain. Their modus operandi is "The Big Lie"--and the bigger and more widely publicised, the better. They rely on invoking their academic credentials to support their arguments, and the presumption is that no one has the right to question their authoritarian pronouncements that:
1. there is no mystery about who built the Great Pyramid or what the methods of construction were, and the Sphinx shows no signs of water damage;
2. there were no humans in the Americas before 20,000 BC;
3. the first civilisation dates back no further than 6000 BC;
4. there are no documented anomalous, unexplained or enigmatic data to take into account;
5. there are no lost or unaccounted-for civilisations.
Let the evidence to the contrary be damned!

Personal Attacks: Dispute over Age of the Sphinx and Great Pyramid

In 1993, NBC in the USA aired The Mysteries of the Sphinx, which presented geological evidence showing that the Sphinx was at least twice as old (9,000 years) as Egyptologists claimed. It has become well known as the "water erosion controversy". An examination of the politicking that Egyptologists deployed to combat this undermining of their turf is instructive.

Self-taught Egyptologist John Anthony West brought the water erosion issue to the attention of geologist Dr Robert Schoch. They went to Egypt and launched an intensive on-site investigation. After thoroughly studying the Sphinx first hand, the geologist came to share West's preliminary conclusion and they announced their findings.

Dr Zahi Hawass, the Giza Monuments chief, wasted no time in firing a barrage of public criticism at the pair. Renowned Egyptologist Dr Mark Lehner, who is regarded as the world's foremost expert on the Sphinx, joined his attack. He charged West and Schoch with being "ignorant and insensitive". That was a curious accusation which took the matter off the professional level and put the whole affair on a personal plane. It did not address the facts or issues at all and it was highly unscientific.

But we must note the standard tactic of discrediting anyone who dares to call the accepted theories into question. Shifting the focus away from the issues and "personalising" the debate is a highly effective strategy--one which is often used by politicians who feel insecure about their positions. Hawass and Lehner invoked their untouchable status and presumed authority. (One would think that a geologist's assessment would hold more weight on this particular point.)

A short time later, Schoch, Hawass and Lehner were invited to debate the issue at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. West was not allowed to participate because he lacked the required credentials.

This points to a questionable assumption that is part of the establishment's arsenal: only degreed scientists can practise science. Two filters keep the uncredentialled, independent researcher out of the loop: (1) credentials, and (2) peer review. You do not get to number two unless you have number one.

Science is a method that anyone can learn and apply. It does not require a degree to observe and record facts and think critically about them, especially in the non-technical social sciences. In a free and open society, science has to be a democratic process.

Be that as it may, West was barred. The elements of the debate have been batted back and forth since then without resolution. It is similar to the controversy over who built the Giza pyramids and how.

This brings up the issue of The Big Lie and how it has been promoted for generations in front of God and everyone. The controversy over how the Great Pyramid was constructed is one example. It could be easily settled if Egyptologists wanted to resolve the dispute. A simple test could be designed and arranged by impartial engineers that would either prove or disprove their longstanding disputed theory--that it was built using the primitive tools and methods of the day, circa 2500 BC.

Why hasn't this been done? The answer is so obvious, it seems impossible: they know that the theory is bogus. Could a trained, highly educated scientist really believe that 2.3 million tons of stone, some blocks weighing 70 tons, could have been transported and lifted by primitive methods? That seems improbable, though they have no compunction against lying to the public, writing textbooks and defending this theory against alternative theories. However, we must note that they will not subject themselves to the bottom-line test.

We think it is incumbent upon any scientist to bear the burden of proof of his/her thesis; however, the social scientists who make these claims have never stood up to that kind of scrutiny. That is why we must suspect a conspiracy. No other scientific discipline would get away with bending the rules of science. All that Egyptologists have ever done is bat down alternative theories using underhanded tactics. It is time to insist that they prove their own proposals.

Why would scientists try to hide the truth and avoid any test of their hypothesis? Their motivations are equally transparent. If it can be proved that the Egyptians did not build the Great Pyramid in 2500 BC using primitive methods, or if the Sphinx can be dated to 9000 BC, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. Orthodox views of cultural evolution are based upon a chronology of civilisation having started in Sumeria no earlier than 4000 BC. The theory does not permit an advanced civilisation to have existed prior to that time. End of discussion. Archaeology and history lose their meaning without a fixed timeline as a point of reference.

Since the theory of "cultural evolution" has been tied to Darwin's general theory of evolution, even more is at stake. Does this explain why facts, anomalies and enigmas are denied, suppressed and/or ignored? Yes, it does. The biological sciences today are based on Darwinism.

Pressure Tactics: The Ica Stones of Peru

Now we turn to another, very different case. In 1966, Dr Javier Cabrera received a stone as a gift from a poor local farmer in his native Ica, Peru. A fish was carved on the stone, which would not have meant much to the average villager but it did mean a lot to the educated Dr Cabrera. He recognised it as a long-extinct species. This aroused his curiosity. He purchased more stones from the farmer, who said he had collected them near the river after a flood.

Dr Cabrera accumulated more and more stones, and word of their existence and potential import reached the archaeological community. Soon, the doctor had amassed thousands of "Ica stones". The sophisticated carvings were as enigmatic as they were fascinating. Someone had carved men fighting with dinosaurs, men with telescopes and men performing operations with surgical equipment. They also contained drawings of lost continents.

Several of the stones were sent to Germany and the etchings were dated to remote antiquity. But we all know that men could not have lived at the time of dinosaurs; Homo sapiens has only existed for about 100,000 years.

The BBC got wind of this discovery and swooped down to produce a documentary about the Ica stones. The media exposure ignited a storm of controversy. Archaeologists criticised the Peruvian government for being lax about enforcing antiquities laws (but that was not their real concern). Pressure was applied to government officials.

The farmer who had been selling the stones to Cabrera was arrested; he claimed to have found them in a cave but refused to disclose the exact location to authorities, or so they claimed.

This case was disposed of so artfully that it would do any corrupt politician proud. The Peruvian government threatened to prosecute and imprison the farmer. He was offered and accepted a plea bargain; he then recanted his story and "admitted" to having carved the stones himself. That seems highly implausible, since he was uneducated and unskilled and there were 11,000 stones in all. Some were fairly large and intricately carved with animals and scenes that the farmer would not have had knowledge of without being a palaeontologist. He would have needed to work every day for several decades to produce that volume of stones. However, the underlying facts were neither here nor there. The Ica stones were labelled "hoax" and forgotten.

The case did not require a head-to-head confrontation or public discrediting of non-scientists by scientists; it was taken care of with invisible pressure tactics. Since it was filed under "hoax", the enigmatic evidence never had to be dealt with, as it did in the next example.

Censorship of "Forbidden" Thinking: Evidence for Mankind's Great Antiquity

The case of author Michael Cremo is well documented, and it also demonstrates how the scientific establishment openly uses pressure tactics on the media and government. His book Forbidden Archeology examines many previously ignored examples of artifacts that prove modern man's antiquity far exceeds the age given in accepted chronologies.

The examples which he and his co-author present are controversial, but the book became far more controversial than the contents when it was used in a documentary.

In 1996, NBC broadcast a special called The Mysterious Origins of Man, which featured material from Cremo's book. The reaction from the scientific community went off the Richter scale. NBC was deluged with letters from irate scientists who called the producer "a fraud" and the whole program "a hoax".

But the scientists went further than this--a lot further. In an extremely unconscionable sequence of bizarre moves, they tried to force NBC not to rebroadcast the popular program, but that effort failed. Then they took the most radical step of all: they presented their case to the federal government and requested the Federal Communications Commission to step in and bar NBC from airing the program again.

This was not only an apparent infringement of free speech and a blatant attempt to thwart commerce, it was an unprecedented effort to censor intellectual discourse. If the public or any government agency made an attempt to handcuff the scientific establishment, the public would never hear the end of it.

The letter to the FCC written by Dr Allison Palmer, President of the Institute for Cambrian Studies, is revealing:

At the very least, NBC should be required to make substantial prime-time apologies to their viewing audience for a sufficient period of time so that the audience clearly gets the message that they were duped. In addition, NBC should perhaps be fined sufficiently so that a major fund for public science education can be established.

I think we have some good leads on who "the Brain Police" are. And I really do not think "conspiracy" is too strong a word--because for every case of this kind of attempted suppression that is exposed, 10 others are going on successfully. We have no idea how many enigmatic artifacts or dates have been labelled "error" and tucked away in storage warehouses or circular files, never to see the light of day.

Data Rejection: Inconvenient Dating in Mexico

Then there is the high-profile case of Dr Virginia Steen-McIntyre, a geologist working for the US Geological Survey (USGS), who was dispatched to an archaeological site in Mexico to date a group of artifacts in the 1970s. This travesty also illustrates how far established scientists will go to guard orthodox tenets.

McIntyre used state-of-the-art equipment and backed up her results by using four different methods, but her results were off the chart. The lead archaeologist expected a date of 25,000 years or less, and the geologist's finding was 250,000 years or more.

The figure of 25,000 years or less was critical to the Bering Strait "crossing" theory, and it was the motivation behind the head archaeologist's tossing Steen-McIntyre's results in the circular file and asking for a new series of dating tests. This sort of reaction does not occur when dates match the expected chronological model that supports accepted theories.

Steen-McIntyre was given a chance to retract her conclusions, but she refused. She found it hard thereafter to get her papers published and she lost a teaching job at an American university.

Government Suppression and Ethnocentrism: Avoiding Anomalous Evidence in NZ, China and Mexico

In New Zealand, the government actually stepped in and enacted a law forbidding the public from entering a controversial archaeological zone. This story appeared in the book, Ancient Celtic New Zealand, by Mark Doutré.

However, as we will find (and as I promised at the beginning of the article), this is a complicated conspiracy. Scientists trying to protect their "hallowed" theories while furthering their careers are not the only ones who want artifacts and data suppressed. This is where the situation gets sticky.

The Waipoua Forest became a controversial site in New Zealand because an archaeological dig apparently showed evidence of a non-Polynesian culture that preceded the Maori--a fact that the tribe was not happy with. They learned of the results of the excavations before the general public did and complained to the government. According to Doutré, the outcome was "an official archival document, which clearly showed an intention by New Zealand government departments to withhold archaeological information from public scrutiny for 75 years".

The public got wind of this fiasco but the government denied the claim. However, official documents show that an embargo had been placed on the site. Doutré is a student of New Zealand history and archaeology. He is concerned because he says that artifacts proving that there was an earlier culture which preceded the Maori are missing from museums. He asks what happened to several anomalous remains:

Where are the ancient Indo-European hair samples (wavy red brown hair), originally obtained from a rock shelter near Watakere, that were on display at the Auckland War Memorial Museum for many years? Where is the giant skeleton found near Mitimati?

Unfortunately this is not the only such incident. Ethnocentrism has become a factor in the conspiracy to hide mankind's true history. Author Graham Hancock has been attacked by various ethnic groups for reporting similar enigmatic findings.

The problem for researchers concerned with establishing humanity's true history is that the goals of nationalists or ethnic groups who want to lay claim to having been in a particular place first, often dovetail with the goals of cultural evolutionists.

Archaeologists are quick to go along with suppressing these kinds of anomalous finds. One reason Egyptologists so jealously guard the Great Pyramid's construction date has to do with the issue of national pride.

The case of the Takla Makan Desert mummies in western China is another example of this phenomenon. In the 1970s and 1980s, an unaccounted-for Caucasian culture was suddenly unearthed in China. The arid environment preserved the remains of a blond-haired, blue-eyed people who lived in pre-dynastic China. They wore colourful robes, boots, stockings and hats. The Chinese were not happy about this revelation and they have downplayed the enigmatic find, even though Asians were found buried alongside the Caucasian mummies.

National Geographic writer Thomas B. Allen mused in a 1996 article about his finding a potsherd bearing a fingerprint of the potter. When he inquired if he could take the fragment to a forensic anthropologist, the Chinese scientist asked whether he "would be able to tell if the potter was a white man". Allen said he was not sure, and the official pocketed the fragment and quietly walked away. It appears that many things get in the way of scientific discovery and disclosure.

The existence of the Olmec culture in Old Mexico has always posed a problem. Where did the Negroid people depicted on the colossal heads come from? Why are there Caucasians carved on the stele in what is Mexico's seed civilisation? What is worse, why aren't the indigenous Mexican people found on the Olmec artifacts? Recently a Mexican archaeologist solved the problem by making a fantastic claim: that the Olmec heads--which generations of people of all ethnic groups have agreed bear a striking resemblance to Africans--were really representations of the local tribe.

STORMTROOPERS FOR DARWINISM

The public does not seem at all aware of the fact that the scientific establishment has a double standard when it comes to the free flow of information. In essence, it goes like this... Scientists are highly educated, well trained and intellectually capable of processing all types of information, and they can make the correct critical distinctions between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy. The unwashed public is simply incapable of functioning on this high mental plane.

The noble ideal of the scientist as a highly trained, impartial, apolitical observer and assembler of established facts into a useful body of knowledge seems to have been shredded under the pressures and demands of the real world. Science has produced many positive benefits for society; but we should know by now that science has a dark, negative side. Didn't those meek fellows in the clean lab coats give us nuclear bombs and biological weapons? The age of innocence ended in World War II.

That the scientific community has an attitude of intellectual superiority is thinly veiled under a carefully orchestrated public relations guise. We always see Science and Progress walking hand in hand. Science as an institution in a democratic society has to function in the same way as the society at large; it should be open to debate, argument and counter-argument. There is no place for unquestioned authoritarianism. Is modern science meeting these standards?

In the Fall of 2001, PBS aired a seven-part series, titled Evolution. Taken at face value, that seems harmless enough. However, while the program was presented as pure, objective, investigative science journalism, it completely failed to meet even minimum standards of impartial reporting. The series was heavily weighted towards the view that the theory of evolution is "a science fact" that is accepted by "virtually all reputable scientists in the world", and not a theory that has weaknesses and strong scientific critics.

The series did not even bother to interview scientists who have criticisms of Darwinism: not "creationists" but bona fide scientists. To correct this deficiency, a group of 100 dissenting scientists felt compelled to issue a press release, "A Scientific Dissent on Darwinism", on the day the first program was scheduled to go to air. Nobel nominee Henry "Fritz" Schaefer was among them. He encouraged open public debate of Darwin's theory:

Some defenders of Darwinism embrace standards of evidence for evolution that as scientists they would never accept in other circumstances.

We have seen this same "unscientific" approach applied to archaeology and anthropology, where "scientists" simply refuse to prove their theories yet appoint themselves as the final arbiters of "the facts". It would be naive to think that the scientists who cooperated in the production of the series were unaware that there would be no counter-balancing presentation by critics of Darwin's theory.

Richard Milton is a science journalist. He had been an ardent true believer in Darwinian doctrine until his investigative instincts kicked in one day. After 20 years of studying and writing about evolution, he suddenly realised that there were many disconcerting holes in the theory. He decided to try to allay his doubts and prove the theory to himself by using the standard methods of investigative journalism.

Milton became a regular visitor to London's famed Natural History Museum. He painstakingly put every main tenet and classic proof of Darwinism to the test. The results shocked him. He found that the theory could not even stand up to the rigours of routine investigative journalism.

The veteran science writer took a bold step and published a book titled The Facts of Life: Shattering the Myths of Darwinism. It is clear that the Darwinian myth had been shattered for him, but many more myths about science would also be crushed after his book came out. Milton says:

I experienced the witch-hunting activity of the Darwinist police at first handÉit was deeply disappointing to find myself being described by a prominent Oxford zoologist [Richard Dawkins] as "loony", "stupid" and "in need of psychiatric help" in response to purely scientific reporting.

(Does this sound like stories that came out of the Soviet Union 20 years ago when dissident scientists there started speaking out?)

Dawkins launched a letter-writing campaign to newspaper editors, implying that Milton was a "mole" creationist whose work should be dismissed. Anyone at all familiar with politics will recognise this as a standard Machiavellian by-the-book "character assassination" tactic. Dawkins is a highly respected scientist, whose reputation and standing in the scientific community carry a great deal of weight.

According to Milton, the process came to a head when the London Times Higher Education Supplement commissioned him to write a critique of Darwinism. The publication foreshadowed his coming piece: "Next Week: Darwinism - Richard Milton goes on the attack". Dawkins caught wind of this and wasted no time in nipping this heresy in the bud. He contacted the editor, Auriol Stevens, and accused Milton of being a "creationist", and prevailed upon Stevens to pull the plug on the article. Milton learned of this behind-the-scenes backstabbing and wrote a letter of appeal to Stevens. In the end, she caved in to Dawkins and scratched the piece.

Imagine what would happen if a politician or bureaucrat used such pressure tactics to kill a story in the mass media. It would ignite a huge scandal. Not so with scientists, who seem to be regarded as "sacred cows" and beyond reproach. There are many disturbing facts related to these cases. Darwin's theory of evolution is the only theory routinely taught in our public school system that has never been subjected to rigorous scrutiny; nor have any of the criticisms been allowed into the curriculum.

This is an interesting fact, because a recent poll showed that the American public wants the theory of evolution taught to their children; however, "71 per cent of the respondents say biology teachers should teach both Darwinism and scientific evidence against Darwinian theory". Nevertheless, there are no plans to implement this balanced approach.

It is ironic that Richard Dawkins has been appointed to the position of Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He is a classic "Brain Police" stormtrooper, patrolling the neurological front lines. The Western scientific establishment and mass media pride themselves on being open public forums devoid of prejudice or censorship. However, no television program examining the flaws and weaknesses of Darwinism has ever been aired in Darwin's home country or in America. A scientist who opposes the theory cannot get a paper published.

The Mysterious Origins of Man was not a frontal attack on Darwinism; it merely presented evidence that is considered anomalous by the precepts of his theory of evolution.

Returning to our bastions of intellectual integrity, Forest Mims was a solid and skilled science journalist. He had never been the centre of any controversy and so he was invited to write the most-read column in the prestigious Scientific American, "The Amateur Scientist", a task he gladly accepted. According to Mims, the magazine's editor Jonathan Piel then learned that he also wrote articles for a number of Christian magazines. The editor called Mims into his office and confronted him.

"Do you believe in the theory of evolution?" Piel asked.

Mims replied, "No, and neither does Stephen Jay Gould."

His response did not affect Piel's decision to bump Mims off the popular column after just three articles.

This has the unpleasant odour of a witch-hunt. The writer never publicly broadcast his private views or beliefs, so it would appear that the "stormtroopers" now believe they have orders to make sure "unapproved" thoughts are never publicly disclosed.

TABOO OR NOT TABOO?

So, the monitors of "good thinking" are not just the elite of the scientific community, as we have seen in several cases; they are television producers and magazine editors as well. It seems clear that they are all driven by the singular imperative of furthering "public science education", as the president of the Cambrian Institute so aptly phrased it.

However, there is a second item on the agenda, and that is to protect the public from "unscientific" thoughts and ideas that might infect the mass mind. We outlined some of those taboo subjects at the beginning of the article; now we should add that it is also "unwholesome" and "unacceptable" to engage in any of the following research pursuits: paranormal phenomena, UFOs, cold fusion, free energy and all the rest of the "pseudo-sciences". Does this have a familiar ring to it? Are we hearing the faint echoes of religious zealotry?

Who ever gave science the mission of engineering and directing the inquisitive pursuits of the citizenry of the free world? It is all but impossible for any scientific paper that has anti-Darwinian ramifications to be published in a mainstream scientific journal. It is also just as impossible to get the "taboo" subjects even to the review table, and you can forget about finding your name under the title of any article in Nature unless you are a credentialled scientist, even if you are the next Albert Einstein.

To restate how this conspiracy begins, it is with two filters: credentials and peer review. Modern science is now a maze of such filters set up to promote certain orthodox theories and at the same time filter out that data already prejudged to be unacceptable. Evidence and merit are not the guiding principles; conformity and position within the established community have replaced objectivity, access and openness.

Scientists do not hesitate to launch the most outrageous personal attacks against those they perceive to be the enemy. Eminent palaeontologist Louis Leakey penned this acid one-liner about Forbidden Archeology: "Your book is pure humbug and does not deserve to be taken seriously by anyone but a fool." Once again, we see the thrust of a personal attack; the merits of the evidence presented in the book are not examined or debated. It is a blunt, authoritarian pronouncement.

In a forthcoming instalment, we will examine some more documented cases and delve deeper into the subtler dimensions of the conspiracy.

References and Resources:

¥ Cremo, Michael A. and Richard L. Thompson, Forbidden Archeology, Govardhan Hill, USA, 1993.

¥ Cremo, Michael A., "The Controversy over 'The Mysterious Origins of Man'", NEXUS 5/04, 1998; Forbidden Archeology's Impact, Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing, USA, 1998, website http://www.mcremo.com.

¥ Doore, Kathy, "The Nazca Spaceport & the Ica Stones of Peru", http://www.labyrinthina.com/ica.htm; see website for copy of Dr Javier Cabrera's book, The Message of the Engraved Stones.

¥ Doutré, Mark, Ancient Celtic New Zealand, Dé Danann, New Zealand, 1999, website http://www.celticnz.co.nz.

¥ Milton, Richard, The Facts of Life: Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, Corgi, UK, 1993, http://www.alternativescience.com.

¥ Steen-McIntyre, Virginia, "Suppressed Evidence for Ancient Man in Mexico", NEXUS 5/05, 1998.

¥ Sunfellow, David, "The Great Pyramid & The Sphinx", November 25, 1994, at http://www.nhne.com/specialrepots/spyramid.html.

¥ Tampa Bay Tribune, October 12, 2001 (Darwinism/evolution quote), http://www.tampatrib.com.

posted 05-22-2002 07:28 PM            

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Forbidden History - Covered Up Again!
5-3-2

Note - This is not a new posting...it is 1-2 years old but well worth a second reading... http://www.viewzone.com/oklahoma.southend.html

Following our last report of an unusual stone structure found in the East Oklahoma area, several samples of the layered and mitred stones were analyzed. The striations appeared to be the result of extreme heat and rapid cooling over many -- perhaps several hundred -- years. This was expected since the structure appears to be a huge smelt for refining gold ore. Certainly this was not the work of the indiginous population in North America. Gold crystals and red mercury oxide were found in traces on the specimen that Viewzone examined.

We were just about to form an expedition to the site when another huge foundation was located nearby. Some symbols, possibly First Tongue, were described on one of the stones. But, sadly, the site was abruptly shut down and the excavations were bulldozed with earth by some arm of our own government. An informed source close to the family that owns the land reported that the family was threatened with harm if they allowed anyone to dig on their land in the future. They were told to forget what they saw. This type of threats remind one of the aftermath of Roswell in the late 40's.

The results of the burial are pictured above. At Viewzone we receive many such reports from all over the globe. Ancient sites that appear to be very old are shut down or quickly buried by the host governments. Why?

We asked an individual from New Zealand to tell us why some of his country's ancient sites were being covered up. Here is his reply:
Hello Gary & team,

You ask why archaeological sites and significant information is being hidden by government officials...in the US and elsewhere around the world? I suppose one could write a whole book on the probable answers to that question, but in the end it would all boil down to "power & control".

The eradication of archaeological sites & artifacts is most certainly going on in the Australia/ New Zealand region, where "concealment teams" are being employed to both destroy or seal away from sight any traces of anomalous discoveries. In the last few years the New Zealand teams have removed/ buried/ concealed: A trilithon/ obelisk arrangement, composed of about 5 component sets, from the Wairaki area of New Zealand's central North Island. The "Artiamuri Stones", registered by Captain Mair in the 1800's and described by him as the 2nd most significant site he'd seen in New Zealand...these were, seemingly, pushed into a river by a "Forestry Department" bulldozer.

A number of burial caves containing large stature skeletons with red, brown & blond hair. These skeletal remains are a most unwelcome find, as the ancient individuals were very definitely of Indo-European ethnic origin. Platted samples of their red or brown hair used to be on display at the Auckland Museum...but have long since been removed from public scrutiny. An ancient stone jetty on a northern river estuary. A beautifully hollowed out and fashioned communal dwelling/ assembly area in a limestone cliff. This was at Castlehill in New Zealand's South Island. A friend who revisited it in recent weeks found that the entranceway had been collapsed...undoubtedly by explosives.

These few examples represent some of the skullduggery going on, officially, to throw a spanner in the works of normal scholastic pursuit within the confines of New Zealand. A gentleman named Tristan Rankin, who runs the Australian web site: http://www.awarenessquest.com/ complains about similar clandestine, insidious "concealment team" interference in Australian archaeological endeavors. A friend of mine, in recent years, had a long talk with a New Zealand girl called Lisa Kerr. She'd done extensive traveling, like many young New Zealanders, who head out on their traditional OE (overseas excursion).

Lisa, amongst several jobs she got around the world, worked for a while with the New Mexico Park's Department. During her term of employment there was a big "washout" in one of the Park regions and I'm assuming it was up in Pueblo country around Taos. The flash flood scoured out embankments and in doing so a large number of anomalous skeletons were exposed. Lisa and her colleagues were assigned the task of gathering up the remains and placing them into crates. Also in attendance at the site were Smithsonian Institute officials and FBI agents.

Each day as Lisa and the other Park's Department employees went onto the site, they were searched for cameras. Similarly they were searched as they left the site each day to make sure they weren't removing artifacts. They were also obliged to sign "secrecy documents" ensuring that they would never divulge details of their participation in this undertaking. The reason for this degree of secrecy stems from the fact that the skeletons were of people who were about 8 feet tall. They had six fingers on each hand and six toes per foot. They also had a strange, double row arrangement of teeth.

The crates containing the recovered remains, at the termination of work, were taken away by the Smithsonian officials and, undoubtedly, will never be seen again. Strangely enough, there is a report of two similar skulls having been found in New Zealand's far north around the beginning of the 20th century. Lisa later had official "hassles" when trying to come home to New Zealand and was severely grilled by US government functionaries as she attempted to depart from the US.

The short answer as to why there is suppression of true archaeological and historical evidence in New Zealand appears to be due, in part, to the ambitions of big business and the multinationals. Using "indigenous rights" legislation as leverage, large parcels of New Zealand natural resources and wealth are wrestled out of the hands of the New Zealand populace. They then fall into the hands of a small number of corrupt, so-called, "indigenous" leaders/ representatives, who turn around and sell "exploitation rights" to big business.

The vast majority of New Zealand's Maori people (Polynesian...officially designated indigenous) derive no benefit from these massive financial "payouts" or from the acquisition of "redistributed" resources.

Privately owned farms and large tracts of land are being gobbled up by the "Waitangi Tribunal" and big business is the final beneficiary. Our corrupt politicians are little more than an executive arm to the multinationals and take their orders from the World Bank.

That's the simple, superficial answer, but the tentacles of control go much deeper. One would have to probe age-old, long established, "control-freak" organizations to find out why they perceive "forbidden archaeology" to represent such an undermining danger. Maybe there's a large element of "religious" interference, wherein those large organizations, with influences reaching who knows where, see an inherent danger to the story they tell and product they promote. I can't fathom the fullness of this insanity, but realize we must all work quickly to photograph and record as much as possible of the ancient traces before "big brother" erases them forever.

Best wishes,
Martin Doutré www.celticnz.co.nz

ViewZone Magazine
http://www.rense.com/general24/forb.htm

posted 05-22-2002 07:56 PM               

Exposing A Scientific Coverup

by J. Douglas Kenyon

In 1966 respected archeologist Virginia Steen-McIntyre and her associates on a U.S. Geological Survey team working under a grant from the National Science Foundation were called upon to date a pair of remarkable archeological sites in Mexico. Sophisticated stone tools rivaling the best work of Cro-magnon man in Europe had been discovered at Hueyatlaco, while somewhat cruder implements had been turned up at nearby El Horno. The sites, it was conjectured, were very ancient, perhaps as old as 20,000 years, which, according to prevailing theories, would place them very close to the dawn of human habitation in the Americas.

Steen-McIntyre, knowing that if such antiquity could indeed be authenticated, her career would be made, set about an exhaustive series of tests. Using four different, but well accepted, dating methods, including uranium series and fission track, she determined to get it right. Nevertheless, when the results came in, the original estimates proved to be way off. Way under as it turned out. The actual age was conclusively demonstrated to be more like a quarter of a million years.

As we might expect, some controversy ensued.

Steen-McIntyre's date challenged not only accepted chronologies for human presence in the region, but contradicted established notions of how long modern humans could have been anywhere on Earth. Nevertheless, the massive reexamination of orthodox theory and the wholesale rewriting of textbooks which one might logically have expected did not ensue. What did follow was the public ridicule of Steen-McIntyre's work and the vilification of her character. She has not been able to find work in her field since.

More than a century earlier, following the discovery of gold in California's Table Mountain and the subsequent digging of thousands of feet of mining shafts, miners began to bring up hundreds of stone artifacts and even human fossils. Despite their origin in geological strata documented at 9 to 55 million years in age, California state geologist J. D. Whitney was able subsequently to authenticate many of the finds and to produce an extensive and authoritative report. The implications of Whitney's evidence have never been properly answered or explained by the establishment, yet the entire episode has been virtually ignored and references to it have vanished from the textbooks.

For decades miners in South Africa have been turning up from strata nearly three billion years in age hundreds of small metallic spheres with encircling parallel grooves. Thus far, the scientific community has failed to take note.

Among scores of such cases cited in the recently published Forbidden Archeology (and in the condensed version The Hidden History of the Human Race) it is clear that these three are by no means uncommon. Suggesting nothing less than a massive cover-up, co-authors Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson believe that when it comes to explaining the origins of the human race on earth, academic science has cooked the books.

While the public may believe that all the real evidence supports the mainstream theory of evolution with its familiar timetable for human development (i.e., Homo Sapiens of the modern type going back to only about 100,000 years) Cremo and Thompson demonstrate that, to the contrary, a virtual mountain of evidence produced by reputable scientists applying standards just as exacting, if not more so, than the establishment has been not only ignored but, in many cases, actually suppressed. In every area of research, from paleontology to anthropology and archeology, that which is presented to the public as established and irrefutable fact is indeed nothing more, says Cremo, than a consensus arrived at by powerful groups of people.

Is that consensus justified by the evidence? Cremo and Thompson say no.

Carefully citing all available documentation, the authors produce case after case of contradictory research conducted in the last two centuries. Included are detailed descriptions of the controversy and ultimate suppression following each discovery. Typical is the case of George Carter who claimed to have found, at an excavation in San Diego, hearths and crude stone tools at levels corresponding to the last interglacial period, some 80,000-90,000 years ago. Even though Carter's work was endorsed by some experts such as lithic scholar John Witthoft, the establishment scoffed. San Diego State University refused to even look at the evidence in its own back yard and Harvard University publicly defamed him in a course on Fantastic Archeology.

What emerges is a picture of an arrogant and bigoted academic elite interested more in the preservation of its own prerogatives and authority than the truth.

Needless to say, the weighty (952 page) volume has caused more than a little stir. The establishment, as one might expect, is outraged, albeit having a difficult time ignoring the book. Anthropologist Richard Leakey wrote, Your book is pure humbug and does not deserve to be taken seriously by anyone but a fool. Nevertheless, many prestigious scientific publications including The American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Geo Archeology, and the British Journal for the History of Science have deigned to review the book, and while generally critical of its arguments, have conceded, though grudgingly, that Forbidden Archeology is well written and well researched. Some indeed recognize a significant challenge to the prevailing theories. As William Howells wrote in Physical Anthropologist, To have modern human beings...appearing a great deal earlier, in fact at a time when even simple primates did not exist as possible ancestors, would be devastating not only to the accepted pattern, it would be devastating to the whole theory of evolution, which has been pretty robust up until now.

Yet despite its considerable challenge to the evolutionary edifice, Forbidden Archeology chooses not to align itself with the familiar creationist point of view nor to attempt an alternative theory of its own. The task of presenting his own complex theory which seeks, he says, to avoid the false choice, usually presented in the media between evolution and creationism Cremo has reserved as the subject of a forthcoming book Human Evolution. On the question of human origins, he insists, we really do have to go back to the drawing board.

As the author told Atlantis Rising recently, Forbidden Archaeology suggests the real need for an alternative explanation, a new synthesis. I'm going to get into that in detail. And it's going to have elements of the Darwinian idea, and elements of the ancient astronaut theory, and elements of the creationist nature, but it's going to be much more complex. I think we've become accustomed to overly simplistic pictures of human origins, whereas the reality is a little more complicated than any advocates of the current ideas are prepared to admit.

Both Cremo and Thompson are members of the Bhaktivedanta Institute the Science Studies Branch of the International Society for Krishna consciousness. Cremo and Thompson started their project with the goal of finding evidence to corroborate the ancient Sanskrit writings of India which relate episodes of human history going back millions of years.

So we thought, says Cremo, if there's any truth to those ancient writings, there should be some physical evidence to back it up but we really didn't find it in the current textbooks. They didn't stop there though. Over the next eight years Cremo and Thompson investigated the entire history of archeology and anthropology, delving into everything that has been discovered, not just what has been reported in text books. What they found was a revelation. I thought there might be a few little things that have been swept under the rug, said Cremo, but what I found was truly amazing. There's actually a massive amount of evidence that's been suppressed.

Cremo and Thompson determined to produce a book of irrefutable archeological facts. The standard used, says Cremo, (meant) the site had to be identifiable, there had to be good geological evidence on the age of the site and there had to be some reporting about it, in most cases in the scientific literature. The quality and quantity of the evidence they hoped would compel serious examination by professionals in the field, as well as by students, and the general public.

Few would deny that they have succeeded in spectacular fashion. Much in demand in alternative science circles, the authors have also found a sympathetic audience among the self-termed sociologists of scientific knowledge, who are very aware of the failure of modern scientific method to present a truly objective picture of reality. An upcoming NBC special, The Mysterious Origins of Man draws heavily upon Cremo and Thompson's suggestion that there is a knowledge filter among the scientific elite which has given us a picture of prehistory which is largely incorrect.

The problem, Cremo believes, is both misfeasance and malfeasance. You can find many cases where it's just an automatic process. It's just human nature that a person will tend to reject things that don't fit in with his particular world view. He cites the example of a young paleontologist and expert on ancient whale bones at the Museum of Natural History in San Diego. When asked if he ever saw signs of human marks on any of the bones, the scientist remarked, I tend to stay away from anything that has to do with humans because it's just too controversial. Cremo sees the response as an innocent one from someone interested in protecting his career. In other areas, though, he perceives something much more vicious, as in the case of Virginia Steen-McIntyre. What she found was that she wasn't able to get her report published. She lost the teaching position at the university. She was labeled a publicity seeker and a maverick in her profession. And she really hasn't been able to work as a professional geologist since then.

In other examples, Cremo finds even broader signs of deliberate malfeasance. He mentions the activities of the Rockefeller foundation, which funded Davidson Black's research at Zhoukoudian (in China). Correspondence between Black and his superiors with the Foundation shows that research and archeology was part of a far larger biological research project, (from the correspondence) thus we may gain information about our behavior of the sort that can lead to wide and beneficial control. In other words, this research was being funded with the specific goal of control. Control by whom? Cremo wants to know.

The motive to manipulate is not so hard to understand. There's a lot of social power connected with explaining who we are and what we are, he says. Somebody once said knowledge is power. You could also say power is knowledge. Some people have particular power and prestige that enables them to dictate the agenda of our society. I think it's not surprising that they are resistant to any change.

Cremo agrees that scientists today have become a virtual priest class, exercising many of the rights and prerogatives which their forebears in the industrial scientific revolution sought to wrest from an entrenched religious establishment. They set the tone and the direction for our civilization on a worldwide basis, he says. If you want to know something today you usually don't go to a priest or a spiritually inclined person, you go to one of these people because they've convinced us that our world is a very mechanistic place, and everything can be explained mechanically by the laws of physics and chemistry which are currently accepted by the establishment.

To Cremo it seems the scientists have usurped the keys of the kingdom, and then failed to live up to their promises. In many ways the environmental crisis and the political crisis and the crisis in values is their doing. And I think many people are becoming aware that (the scientists) really haven't been able to deliver the kingdom to which they claimed to have the keys. I think many people are starting to see that the world view they are presenting, just doesn't account for everything in human experience.

For Cremo we are all part of a cosmic hierarchy of beings, a view for which he finds corroboration in world mythologies. If you look at all of those traditions, when they talk about origins they don't talk about it as something that just occurs on this planet. There are extraterrestrial contacts with gods, demigods, goddesses, angels. And he feels there may be parallels in the modern UFO phenomenon.

The failure of modern science to satisfactorily deal with UFOs, extra-sensory perception or the paranormal provides one of the principle charges against it. I would have to say that the evidence of such today is very strong, he argues. It's very difficult to ignore. It's not something that you can just sweep away. If you were to just reject all of the evidence for UFOs, abductions and other kinds of contacts coming from so many reputable sources, it seems we have to give up accepting any kind of human testimony whatsoever.

One area where orthodoxy has been frequently challenged is in the notion of sudden change brought about by enormous cataclysm, versus the gradualism usually conceived of by evolutionists. Even though it has become fashionable to talk of such events, they have been relegated to the very distant past supposedly before the appearance of man. Yet some like Immanual Velikovsky and others have argued that many such events have occurred in our past and induced a kind of planetary amnesia from which we still suffer today.

That such catastrophic episodes have occurred and that humanity has suffered from some great forgettings, Cremo agrees. I think there is a kind of amnesia which when we encounter the actual records of catastrophes, it makes us think, oh well, this is just mythology. In other words, I think some knowledge of these catastrophes does survive in ancient writings and cultures and through oral traditions. But because of what you might call some social amnesia, as we encounter those things we are not able to accept them as truth. I also think there's a deliberate attempt on the part of those who are now in control of the world's intellectual life to make us disbelieve and forget the paranormal and related phenomena. I think there's a definite attempt to keep us in a state of forgetfulness about these things.

posted 05-22-2002 08:39 PM            

Things have really been turned on their heads by our fine academics. Barring John Anthony West from participating in a conference by the AAAS because he didn't have a doctorate, now that is hilarious. Guess who else didn't have a doctorate? That's right, Charles Darwin himself.

posted 05-23-2002 12:45 AM            

And that's hardly fair, from my point of view. I've read a lot, can and do practice the scientific method, yet I couldn't even get into a colloquium of scientists to present a paper, no matter how good my ideas were and how much I had to offer.

But, on the other hand, for every good idea that's squashed because the proponent didn't have the degree, a bunch of bad ones are squashed because the Perfessors' Club keep people from pinning their hopes on what is simply Bad Science.

Sometimes the nuts get through the net and, despite any acceptance from the science bureaucracy, get enough attention to have people buy into their theories, often with horrific results.

A prime example of this was Profim Lysenko, a fraud who believed that quick-generation mutations could be caused by actions that simply can't be passed on genetically. The prime example of Lysenkoism was if you cut off the tails of puppies when they're born and cut off the tails of all their offspring, sooner or later, the puppies will start to be born tailless! The frightening thing about Lysenko is that one of his biggest fans was a Georgian named Josef Vissarionevitch Dzugashvili, better known as Stalin. Ol' Joe bought into Lysenko's ideas because they underpinned the Marxist belief in the "inevitable improvability" of man. Any other teaching of genetics was banned from 1930 until the mid-1950s, and Soviet (now Russian) science STILL hasn't recovered!

And there are the equally famous frauds, like Konstantin Velikovsky and his hypothesis of ‘colliding worlds’, and Erich von Daniken’s 'Chariots of the Gods' scam, and on and on. Fortunately, although they sold a lot of books and were popular with non-scientists for a while, the scientific establishment ignored them and they’re pretty much forgotten today.

Then there’re guys who have some interesting hypotheses, but tend to be a bit sloppy in their presentation of them. A case in point is the late Thor Heyerdahl, whose hypotheses about prehistoric travel and trade between South America and the Pacific, as well as travel between Egypt and Mesoamerica, was spoiled because he made a few too many leaps in logic – and didn’t have the PhD! Never taken seriously by the establishment, Heyerdahl’s work has been overlooked and cast aside; we have lost what may be some sound and valid research that give insights into the way mankind spread thought the world.

I won't go into the later hypotheses of Nikola Tesla.

And there’s Kennewick Man, the proto-Caucasoid skeleton found in Washington state and independently verified to be about 9 kyears old. The archaeologists where ordered by the government to return the bones to the local Indians, since it was “impossible” that anything that old could be anything but proto-Amerinds who slid through the Bering Land Bridge. Ironically, this was a case of Political Power overcoming the Perfessor Power, since the folks who fought against the government’s order to re-bury the skeletons (and lost, of course) were superbly credentialed in their field. Oh, well…

So sometimes good research gets lost because the researcher didn’t know the Secret Password to get into the Perfessor’s Clubhouse. So why am I in favor of all the Peer Review and Credentials and stuff?

Because, when the system works (and it usually does) it tends to filter out 90 percent of the BS (Bad Science). Sure, sometimes they screw up and bad science and fraud gets through (cf. the recent stories on a researcher from Lucent Technologies) and sometimes good work gets blown off, but it’s still the best approach we have. When I read something in a juried journal, I am reasonably sure that it’s Good Science, and I – like everyone here – simply don’t have the time or expertise to determine most of these complex ideas myself. I have to rely on somebody, and I – like most of the ‘establishment’ – have hitched my wagon to the Perfessor’s Club.

Even though I don’t have the Secret Password.

posted 05-23-2002 11:33 AM               

Well, while doing archaeological research, I have had my share of debunkers, professional achaeologists who have tried to tell me that what I had found were nothing more than glacial erratics even without viewing the evidence firsthand. Only one skeptical archaeologist, that had bothered to see what I had, was actually quite astonished by the overwhelming evidence that I had concerning a previously unknwn advanced stoneworking culture that had inhabited my little part of New England.

The major problem that I have found with archaeology is that quite a few members of the local archaeological community is that they hire themselves out to rich developers as archaeological consultants and very rarely do any type of field investigation, nor do they ead up on any of the recent findings provided by such organizations as the Smithsonian Institution whom has stated that some of the oldest clovis-type artifacts are located in New england and not up in Alaska. Nor do they take time to listen to all the oral histories that were passed down from generation to generation, stating that strange bearded men, that fit the description of Minoan explorers, were seen in America many centuries ago.

One may think that the ancient cultures of Europe did not have the technology or ships capable of makng long journies across the sea though some forty years before Columbus was born, the Chinese had ships that were over a hundred feet long. - With the recent discovery of a possible ancient city submerged off the coast of Cuba, peraps these ancient explorers did not have to travel all that far to reach America.

------------------------------------------------------------------
May 19, 2002
Explorers to Return to Ocean Floor

HAVANA- Floating aboard the Spanish trawler she chartered to explore the Cuban coast for shipwrecks, Paulina Zelitsky pores over yellowed tomes filled with sketches and tales of lost cities - just like the one she believes she has found deep off the coast of western Cuba.

Zelitsky's eyes grow wide as she runs her small hand over water-stained drawings of Olmec temples in a dog-eared 1928 study of Mexican archaeology.

The Russian Canadian explorer compares the shapes with green-tinted sonar images captured in March while studying the megalithic structures she discovered two years ago off Cuba's Guanahabibes Peninsula.

Amid piles of sonar-enhanced maps is a well-worn copy of "Comentarios Reales de las Incas," or "Royal Commentaries of the Incas," a classic of Spanish Renaissance narrative by the son of an Inca princess and a Spanish conquistador. Zelitsky is particularly fascinated by Garcilaso Inca de la Vega's account of ancient ruins at the bottom of Lake Titicaca, Peru. "You would not think that a reasonable woman of my age would fall for an idea like this," chuckled Zelitsky, a 57-year-old offshore engineer who runs the exploration firm Advanced Digital Communications of British Columbia, Canada.

Zelitsky passionately believes the megalithic structures her crew discovered 2,310 feet below the ocean's surface could prove that a civilization lived thousands of years ago on an island or stretch of land joining the archipelago of Cuba with Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, about 120 miles away. The unusual shapes first appeared on the firm's sophisticated side-scan sonar equipment in the summer of 2000, during shipwreck surveys off Cuba's western coast, where hundreds of vessels are believed to have sunk over the centuries.

The company is among five foreign firms working with Fidel Castro's government to explore the island's coast for shipwrecks of historical and commercial interest. But the mysterious shapes have become the focus of this crew's exploratory efforts. Puzzled by the shapes with clean lines, the team has repeatedly returned to the site - most recently in March - for more sonar readings, more videotapes of the megaliths with an unmanned submarine. The crew left in mid-May for a month. Evidence for Zelitzky's hypothesis is far from conclusive, and has been met with skepticism from scientists from other countries who nevertheless decline to comment publicly on the project until scientific findings have been made available.

Submerged urban ruins have never been found at so great a depth. Elsewhere in the Caribbean, the ruins of Jamaica's Port Royal are located at depths ranging from a few inches to 40 feet below the ocean surface. The once raucous seaside community was controlled by English buccaneers before it slid under the waves in earthquakes beginning in 1692.

Located at just 20 feet are the mysterious megalithic structures discovered in the 1960s and 1970s in the sound between the Bahamas islands of North and South Bimini. Scientific expeditions there have produced inconclusive results about the shapes' origins. Back in Cuba, a leading scientist recently admitted there is no easy explanation for the megalithic shapes found by Zelitsky's crew. The shapes on the sonar maps look like walls, rectangles, pyramids - rather like a town viewed from the window of an airplane flying overhead.

"We are left with the very questions that prompted this expedition," geologist Manuel A. Iturralde Vincent, research director of Cuba's National Museum of Natural History wrote March 13. At the time he was visiting the area aboard the 270-foot long Ulises, the Spanish trawler Zelitsky outfitted with sophisticated computer and satellite equipment for her surveys.

In his written comments, later delivered at a scholarly conference here, Iturralde concluded it was possible the structures were once at sea level, as Zelitsky theorizes. Because of the large faults and an underwater volcano nearby, Zelitsky supposes the structures sank because of a dramatic volcanic or seismological event thousands of years ago.

Providing some support for that argument, Iturralde confirmed indications of "significantly strong seismic activity." Zelitsky shies from using the term "Atlantis," but comparisons are inevitable to the legendary sunken civilization that Plato described in his "Dialogues" around 360 B.C. There have been untold, unsuccessful attempts over the ages to find that lost kingdom.

One common theory is that Atlantis was located on the Aegean island of Thera, which was destroyed by a volcanic eruption nearly 3,600 years ago. Zelitsky does, however, mention known archaeological monuments when discussing her find.

Numerous photographs are scattered throughout a video show of the megaliths, showing well-known ancient sites: the 1st century fortress of Masada high above the Dead Sea, Britain's circular monument of Stonehenge, the Roman fortress of Babylon in Cairo, the walls of Chan Chan, Peru, whose inhabitants were conquered by the Incas. Perhaps, Zelitsky mused, the megaliths off Cuba are remains of a trading post, or a city built by colonizers from Mesoamerica.

Those civilizations were far more advanced than the hunters and gatherers the Spaniards found upon arriving here five centuries ago. Zelitsky admitted much more investigation is needed to solve the mystery. But that doesn't keep her from believing, or from smiling slyly as she opens her agenda for 2002 to the first page. Written there are the words Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei uttered under his breath at the height of the Inquisition, right after abjuring his belief that the Earth revolved around the sun. "E pur si muove," it reads - "Nevertheless, it does move."
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/archives/2002/may/19/ 051907529.html?Explorers+Return+To+Study+'City'+

posted 05-23-2002 11:49 AM               

Origins was a nice article that was written by the President of the New England Antiquities Research Association, an organization that I have been a member of since 1999. There is a link mentioned in the article concerning an interview with Dennis Stanford, a Paleo Anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution, that no longer works, but Krissa managed to find the interview and posted the right link.

ORIGINS
The First Americans -Hot on the Trail
Reproduced from The NEARA Journal, Volume XXXI, No.1 Summer 1997 page 1-3.

quote:

---

A cluster of questions about the 'first Americans' has challenged the scientific community and intrigued the public probably ever since Columbus bumped into the Bahamas en route to the Indies. The questions have been phrased in a variety of ways, but essentially they can be summarized as follows:
1 - Where did 'native Americans' come from originally?
2 - When did they come?
3 - How many migrations took place and when?
4 - What routes were used?
5 - Did they travel by land or by sea, or both?
6 - Who else might have followed the original migrants to these shores in more recent millennia, right up to 1492?

---

Northern Clans, Northern Traces - Interview With Smithsonian Paleo Anthropologist Dennis Stanford

quote:

---

If you read your textbooks, Clovis are thought to be the first people into the New World, (North America) via Siberia. But when you look at the archeology of Siberia, which we have now had ample opportunity to do in the last few years, there really is not much in Siberia that is a direct Clovis predecessor.

Consequently, we've been - or at least, I've been, convinced that Clovis is a New World invention and developed from a population of people that were already in North America. In fact, the Smithsonian has been working along with researchers in Tennesee and in the Southeast in particular where we have the largest (and oldest) concentration of Clovis artifacts anywhere in North America. But if Clovis did develop in the Southeast, who did Clovis develop from? When did that happen? And where did those people come from? Was it Siberia or was it someplace else?

---

posted 06-21-2002 12:37 AM               

World's Oldest Boat Found in Desert
By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News

June 17 — The world's oldest known boat, built 7,000 years ago out of tarry, bitumen-covered slabs, has been found in an unlikely place: the Kuwaiti desert.

If the assessment of British and Kuwaiti archaeologists is correct, the slabs, found covered on one side with barnacles and warehoused in a stone building at a site called As-Sabiyah, would push back the date for the oldest known boat by more than 2,000 years.

According to an upcoming paper in the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies and a paper published in the June 7 issue of the journal Science, the current oldest boat record-holder is a vessel found in an Egyptian tomb dating to 3,000 B.C.

Evidence for log canoes, thought to be more like rafts than boats, goes back much further, to 8,000 B.C.

The age of the entire As-Sabiyah site, including the boat remains, has been carbon-14 dated to 5,511-5,324 B.C. Robert Carter, an archaeologist at University College London and the expedition's field director, believes that the slabs belonged to a boat because they have reed impressions on one side and barnacles on the other.

Carter said bitumen, which is still crushed with fish oil and coral and used today by some Middle Eastern boat builders, likely formed a waterproof seal around vessels constructed out of reed bundles tied together with ropes and string.

He also believes that the bitumen-covered reed boats were used to carry people and goods between Mesopotamia, As-Sabiyah (which he thinks was then a peninsula within the Tigris-Euphrates River area), and the Central Gulf region.

If the theory is correct, it could explain why ancient Mesopotamian pottery often turns up many miles to the south on the Persian Gulf's western shores, according to the Science report.

"We do not know the race of the people trading at As-Sabiyah," Carter told Discovery News. "It is (safe) to say that people from the Arabian Peninsula were involved, along with people from Mesopotamia."

Carter is more confident about what goods were traded, based on finds at the site. These included pierced pearls likely used for jewelry, pottery, shells, spindle whorls probably used to spin wool, bead necklaces, mother of pearl buttons, and flint and obsidian stones. He believes that livestock and fish also were traded.

Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky, professor of archaeology at Harvard University, questions whether the As-Sabiyah boat was used for trade, due to its apparently small size, and suggests that it was just a fishing boat for locals. He also hints that remains of even older vessels may be found in future due to evidence for ancient boating, such as clay boat models.

posted 07-12-2002 02:33 PM               

Fossil discovery is closest yet to 'missing link' – but complicates mankind's family tree.

By Mark Sappenfield | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

SAN FRANCISCO – At the southern fringes of the Saharan sand dunes, a team of French scientists has come closer than ever before to finding the holy grail of anthropology: the missing link between humans and their ape forebears.

In one of the most inhospitable places on the planet, buffeted by sand storms and seared by average high temperatures well over 100 degrees F. in summer, a 10-year mission has unearthed the complete skull of what is believed to be the oldest human ancestor yet found – between 6 million and 7 million years old.

It is one of the most significant discoveries in the history of anthropology.The skull sheds light on the crucial, yet largely unknown period 6 million to 10 million years ago, when the human lineage is thought to have branched off from apes.

Already, its characteristics and location are forcing anthropologists to rethink their most basic tenets – from where the human line originated to how and when it developed.

The result, say scientists, will likely be one of the most fecund periods of paleoanthropology, as researchers seek similar fossils across Africa in an attempt to understand how this peculiar cranium fits into the ever more complicated story of human evolution.

"This is the first time that we've been able to take a glimpse of the world that connected us to the tree of life," says Bernard Wood, an anthropologist at George Washington University in Washington. "That's a pretty big deal."

Until now, that epoch had been an almost complete mystery. Although it held the secrets of mankind's beginnings, all the hominid fossils found from that time couldn't fill a locker at the YMCA.Lacking a fossil record to look at, many scientists held to the traditional idea of human development: that human ancestors originated in eastern Africa and – at least in the earliest years – could be traced along a single ancestral line to today's Homo sapiens.

The ancient skull, reported in this week's issue of the journal Nature, emphatically refutes those notions.For one, it is unlike anything scientists could have imagined, with a strange mixture of a chimp-like brain case and a more human face. The combination of features point to a diversity of hominids, even at that earliest stage of development, with perhaps a half dozen or so species all emerging at once.

"There was a lot of variation out there," says Daniel Lieberman, an anthropologist at Harvard University who has seen the skull. "We've been connecting the dots when most of the dots have been missing."What's more, it was found along the shores of a dry lake in the country of Chad, 1,500 miles west of the east African rift valleys often called "the cradle of humankind."

For years, lead researcher Michel Brunet has tilted mostly unsuccessfully against the long-held theory that hominids emerged from the Great Rift Valley around Kenya then spread westward across Africa and into the broader world. Now, in the hominid he has named Toumai, or "hope of life" in the local language, he has proof that the earliest prehumans covered a larger area.Indeed, the skull, startling in its quality and completeness, has opened up the entire continent to exploration.

"It's almost a challenge to the rest of the community," says Dr. Wood. "There is really good evidence out here, now we just have to find it."In some ways, Toumai is merely the continuation of a trend. During the past decade, scientists' understanding of more-recent periods of human evolution – from 1 to 4 million years ago – have undergone a renaissance.

Findings in China and the former Soviet republic of Georgia have shifted the timeline of when hominids spread out from Africa. A discovery in Kenya last year suggested that many different species of hominids lived in eastern Africa 3.5 million years ago – showing that hominids developed in fits and starts, thus debunking the theory that humans followed one uninterrupted line of evolution from prehistory to the present.Today's report merely moves that diversity further into the past.

Yet that revelation is both tantalizing and troublesome. True, scientists now have a closer glimpse of what the "missing link" might have looked like. But if several species of hominids split from chimpanzees at the same time across Africa, how can anthropologists know which line is the "true" line – the one that gave rise to today's Homo sapiens – as opposed to all the others?

The simple answer is that, for now, they can't. Toumai may be one of humanity's direct ancestors. He may not be. Few scientists will speculate. Some have even proclaimed the search for the "missing link" all but dead, believing it impossible to determine which species is mankind's evolutionary precursor.

The nature of science, however, is to answer questions, and for that reason many researchers say Toumai could mark the beginning of a new era.

posted 07-16-2002 12:30 PM               

Suva - Mysterious skeletal remains of what appears to be a 3 000-year-old giant have been unearthed on a South Pacific island, but the bones' discovery has rattled local archaeologists who say poor treatment of the remains may have lost vital information.

Little is known about the highly unusual find, which includes a skull bearing strange holes drilled into its cheekbones, with authorities keen to keep the controversial discovery under wraps.

According to sources, the body, found at Lomaiviti, an island to the north of here, predates European exploration of the Pacific and it is believed the man was originally from the Solomon Islands.

The body was discovered last week by a Solomon Islander from the University of the South Pacific (USP), alongside examples of Lapita pottery - artefacts created by a group of Melanesians believed to have been the founders of modern Polynesia.

Measuring 1.9 metres (six foot six), the body is unusually large considering its age and origin. Pictures of its skull show the holed cheekbones, a feature unseen in previous discoveries, according to Fiji Museum sources.

The head of pre-history archaeology at the museum, Sepeti Matararaba, said the discovery of the body and pottery was "significant".

"As for the skeleton remains, I will still have to see it ... it is a significant find for us. "Studies done there now would enlighten us more on the early travelling habits in those times. We have found similar pottery on neighbouring islands of the group. "Once they are dated, we can know the exact patterns of living and the kind of activities during those early occupations. It is really very good news."

But the skeleton has already caused controversy with experts voicing concern over its treatment at the hands of "cowboy" archaeologists.

One senior Fiji Museum source said a relocation of the remains may have destroyed vital information and museum experts should have been consulted earlier.

"These cowboy archaeologists, a bit like parachute journalists, are allowed such field trips but by law, if they were find something as significant as a skeleton, especially of the suspected period of existence, the Museum must be informed," the senior official said.

"It is also only logical that our field staff who are trained for such excavations are informed of such developments considering their skills and tools, paramount of course is the creation and maintenance of our historical database."

Patrick Nunn, the supervisor of the archaeological team analysing the remains at USP would not comment and said on Sunday "we have decided to keep our find under wraps". - Sapa/AFP
http://www.news24.com/News24/Technology/Science_Nature/0,1113,2-13-46_1213556,00.html

posted 07-18-2002 07:39 PM            

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Archaeological Cover-ups-A Plot to Control History?

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posted 07-20-2002 09:57 AM            

as quoted from the original article Krissa posted:

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Shifting the focus away from the issues and "personalising" the debate is a highly effective strategy

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The ever present Ad Hominem tactic, widely used by debunkers and recognized by scholars as a fallacy in logic. I wonder why these 'experts' are forced to rely on such desperate measures to refute scientific data, and this is accepted??

posted 07-20-2002 07:35 PM               

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“Engrained ‘Pabulum’ is protected, nurtured, and becomes gospel… If one is not a camp follower, then one is denied admittance to the Academic Bordello, and its inane doctrines…

As they say, “Been There - Done That.” Twenty-seven years teaching Earth Sciences was my lesson in the dumbing of America: Curricula and texts disappeared; fun and games prevailed; Scientific method abandoned.

In the last three years leverage from on-high and an early retirement package eased me out of my life work or so I thought…” (Charles Boyle, 7-28-98)

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posted 07-26-2002 08:47 AM               

Hoople reported on another thread that they are still trying to hide the truth. This time it's Oklahoma.

posted 08-23-2002 10:17 PM               

Ancient skull found in Thames

LONDON (AP) -- A Bronze Age man whose skull was fished out of the River Thames survived one of Britain's earliest forms of brain surgery, archeologists said Tuesday.

The 4,000-year-old skull, found in October, has a 4.5-centimetre by three-centimetre hole in the top, suggesting the man had undergone trepanation, a procedure in which a portion of the skull is removed from a living patient.

The bone had re-grown around the hole, indicating the patient -- an adult male who lived around 1750 BC -- survived the operation, performed without anesthetic.

"Trepanning is probably the oldest form of surgery we know," said Simon Mays, an expert on human skeletal remains with the conservation group English Heritage.

"The trepanning on this skull would have been carried out with a scraping tool, probably a flint, using great care to avoid piercing the brain."

The procedure was long thought to cure headaches and migraines by relieving pressure in the head. It