Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

The same assumption might easily be made about even the crudest stone tools. Leakey stated in her book: “An interesting present-day example of unretouched flakes used as cutting tools has recently been recorded in SouthWest Africa and may be mentioned briefly. An expedition from the State Museum, Windhoek, discovered two stone-using groups of the Ova Tjimba people who not only make choppers for breaking open bones and for other heavy work, but also employ simple flakes, un-retouched and un-hafted, for cutting and skinning” (M. Leakey 1971, p. 269). Nothing, therefore, prevents one from entertaining the possibility that anatomically modern humans might have been responsible for even the crudest stone tools found at Olduvai Gorge and the European eolith sites.

At present, we find that humans manufacture stone tools of various levels of sophistication, from primitive to advanced. We also find evidence of the same variety of tools in the Pleistocene, Pliocene, Miocene, and even as far back as the Eocene. There are examples of relatively crude stone tools, such as those found by Ribeiro in Miocene formations in Portugal (Section 4.1). And there are also advanced stone tools, similar to those used by modern Indians in North America, from formations of Eocene antiquity in California (Section 5.5).

The simplest explanation is that anatomically modern humans, who make such a spectrum of tools today, also made them in the past. Continuity of tool types suggests continuity of toolmakers. We might call this the hypothesis of stasis. Alternatively, the evolutionary hypothesis requires us to reject all advanced stone tool industries from periods earlier than the Late Pleistocene. As for the remaining crude stone tools, we must reject the ones found in geological contexts older than the earliest Pleistocene or the latest Pliocene. We must then propose that various grades of subhumans made crude stone tools in the Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene, and then when modern humans came along in the Middle and Late Pleistocene, they also made identical crude tools along with more advanced ones.

All in all, the hypothesis of stasis allows us to account for all the reported evidence in a more straightforward fashion. The only anomaly in this account of stasis is the absence of evidence for advanced civilization, with its intricate metallic productions and complex stone architecture, in very ancient times. Abundant evidence for such civilization appears to extend back only a few thousand years. There are, however, intriguing hints of the existence of advanced civilization millions of years ago. This evidence, reported in Appendix 2, is, however, not very extensive.

Granting the stasis hypothesis, we must therefore ask the following question. Why are there so many scientific reports of stone tools and cut bones indicating the presence of anatomically modern humans tens of millions of years ago yet so little evidence of more advanced civilization for the same time periods?

Here is one possible explanation. Although the scientists who reported much of the evidence contained in this book were prepared to find signs of a human presence in times far more ancient than allowed by current evolutionary theory, these scientists were themselves evolutionists. As such, they believed that in the past culture was more primitive than today. Therefore, they probably would not have given serious consideration to any evidence of advanced culture in very ancient times.

Did they encounter such evidence but refuse to report it? We cannot say for certain. What we do know is that evidence for advanced civilizations in very ancient times has been reported, but not often by scientists. Many of the reports have come from miners. Such reports are far more likely to turn up in old newspapers than scientific journals. We suspect that many finds suggestive of advanced civilizations in very ancient times have not been reported at all.

It is thus possible that our data base for the study of human origins and antiquity is quite incomplete. But what evidence we do have suggests that anatomically modern humans have been manufacturing stone tools of various degrees of sophistication since the Miocene and earlier.

To further complicate the picture, one could imagine Homo sapiens coexisting millions of years ago with species of humanlike apes, unrelated to human beings in any evolutionary sense. These humanlike creatures may have also been able to manufacture very crude stone implements. There are in fact reports from Central Asia of a living ape-man-like creature, the Almas, which is said to break stones for use as tools (Section 10.8), just like modern humans. Indeed, this is what the unedited record of skeletal remains and stone implements actually suggests—that human beings of modern type and more primitive creatures have been coexisting since time immemorial and manufacturing a whole array of tool types, from the crudest to the most advanced.