Miocene humans

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HUMAN DEVOLUTION:
A VEDIC ALTERNATIVE TO DARWIN'S THEORY

By Alexandra Alter
Religion News ServiceWashington, July 3--(RNS) What's a creationist doing bashing Darwin at the World Archaeological Congress?Michael Cremo, a research associate at the Bhaktivedanta Institute for consciousness studies in California, is not picketing outside. He's arguing that human civilization may have existed millions of years before the accepted dates, making the self-described Hindu creationist something of a unique voice in the ongoing debate between Darwinists and creationists.Cremo, who has spent more than 20 years looking for evidence of ancient human civilizations, is now pressing the scientific community to be more tolerant of different metaphysical views.In a radical departure from both Darwin's theory and Christian creationism, Cremo comes at the question of evolution from the Hindu understanding of time as cyclical. It was his study of the Puranas--sacred Sanskrit texts that speak of ancient civilizations--that led him to search for evidence of "extreme human antiquity."While presenting his paper "Archaeology in the Service of Darwinism" to a group of seasoned archaeologists last week (June 26), Cremo told his rapt audience that archaeologists have overlooked a large body of evidence that contradicts Darwinian evolution. He buoyantly described a mortar and pestle that were found lodged in an fossilized riverbed dated to about 30 million years ago, noting that no fissures in the rock formation could account for their presence there."When operating from a different metaphysical perspective, I seem to see the evidence in a different light," he said, adding that these discoveries are not well known today because they contradict Darwinian principles of evolution, Cremo said.Although his 1994 book "Forbidden Archaeology" is a top seller among archaeology books on Amazon.com, Cremo hasn't enjoyed the same warm reception from the scientific community. Now in his 50s, Cremo has sp ent nearly 20 years fighting "Darwinian fundamentalists" who he claims have dismissed evidence proving the existence of human beings as early as 2 billion years ago. According to most scientists, the first anatomically modern humans appeared about 100,000 years ago."The problem is, there's so much evidence against it," said Eugenie Scott, physical anthropologist and director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends teaching evolution in public schools. "For his view to be right would require answers that he can't provide."Professor Jonathan Marks, a biological anthropologist at the University of North Carolina who reviewed Cremo's book in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, said Cremo relies on poorly documented 19th century archaeological finds."What Cremo does in `Forbidden Archaeology' is he takes all this stuff that has been confined to the rubbish pile and says, `Look at all this evidence that archaeologists have ignored,"' Marks said. "It's not evidence at all. He believes humans existed in the Precambrian era, but the world was a very different place then. There was no oxygen, there was no life; without multi-cellular organisms, there wouldn't have been anything for them to eat."But for Cremo, the periodic disappearance of life from Earth is merely a glitch in an endless process of creation and destruction that is laid out in Hindu sacred scriptures.One unit of Vedic time, known as the day of Brahma, lasts about 4 billion years, he explained. Each day of Brahma is divided into 14 periods called manvantaras--after Manu, Hinduism's Adam--which last about 300 million years and are punctuated by a devastation, after which all life forms have to be reintroduced. The lifeless early Precambrian, in Cremo's view, was one of those times."I was surprised to find there was so much evidence that is consistent with the Puranas," he said.For example, the current day of Brahma began 2 billion years ago, the rough date that most paleontologists give to the beginning of life on the planet, he said. Moreover, most paleontologists agree that there have been six extinction events in the history of the planet; likewise, six devastations have happened in the current day of Brahma according to Vedic time.But where Cremo finds common ground with paleontologists, he diverges from biblical creationist theory. Young Earth Creationism, based on the Book of Genesis, dates the advent of humans to about 6,000 years ago and the origins of the Earth to 10,000 years ago.Some prominent Christian creationists, however, approve of Cremo's work because of his efforts to prove that humans coexisted with ancient primates rather than evolving from them."Christian creationists would disagree with me about the age of the Earth, but they would agree that humans were there since the beginning," Cremo said, adding that Islamic scholars have also written him and complimented his work.Dennis Bonnette, a professor of metaphysics at Niagara University and author of "How Humans Evolved," a study of evolution and creationism from a Catholic perspective, said Cremo's book has opened doors for creationists of all creeds."It does provide credible evidence that the standard view on human evolution may be incorrect," Bonnette said. "Paleoanthropology may be consistent with both the Hindu Vedic and the Catholic perspective. There is plenty of room for different metaphysical perspectives."Although their ideas draw scorn from the scientific establishment, researchers like Cremo and Bonnette have ample company in the creationist camp. A 2001 Gallup Poll showed that 45 percent of Americans believe God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years, while only 12 percent believe human beings evolved from less advanced forms over millions of years. Thirty-seven percent said the process of evolution is guided by God.Like many creationists, Cremo rejects the idea that human evolution resulted from a series of random accidents."A cyclical concept of time doesn't rule out evolution; neither does the Bible," Cremo said. "But Darwinist scientists believe evolution was a completely material process with no intelligence behind it."In his forthcoming book, "Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin's Theory," set to be released by Torchlight Press this September, Cremo describes how humans first exist with God on the level of pure consciousness before they take on material bodies.Cremo, who practices a theistic strain of Hinduism known as Vaishnaism, began searching for evidence to corroborate the Vedic idea of ancient human civilizations in 1984. It was his spiritual teacher, the late Bhativedanta Swami, whom he met in India in the 1960s, that inspired Cremo to begin his scientific search."My simple goal was to show that human civilization has been around for the day of Brahma," he said.It may require a lot more digging and some more reliable dating methods to get scientists on board, however."Theories get overturned consistently in science," Marks said. "But one of the standards we use is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."Copyright 2003 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be reproduced without written permission.

Also, I wouldn't count on the fact he believes in Atlantis, but there was a time when, gasp, some dared to believe in Troy!

Divine Nature
by Michael A. Cremo and
Mukunda GoswamiAccording to Divine Nature, the real cause of the global environmental crisis is an underlying lack of spiritual understanding. The authors systematically demonstrate that most proposed solutions are only palliative and that humankind must undergo a profound change in consciousness to live in an environmentally sound way.

Michael, your books, Forbidden Archeology and Hidden History of the Human Race, co-written with Richard L. Thompson, presented the thesis that mankind is an exceedingly ancient race which was contemporaneous with the apelike creatures from which humans supposedly evolved. About how far back was your research able to document the human race? What is the oldest "anomaly" you reported in your book?The oldest artifacts go back about 2 billion years. These are round metallic objects that have been over the past couple of decades by miners in South Africa. The objects come from a mine near a place called Ottosdalin, in the West Transvaal region. The objects are one or two inches in diameter. The ones we had analyzed by metallurgists turned out to be made of an iron ore called hematite. The most interesting feature of the objects is the parallel grooves that go around the center of each one. Some have four grooves, some three, some two, some only one. The metallurgists who examined them said they were not produced naturally. Therefore, the objects must have been manufactured by someone with humanlike intelligence. Yet they are found solidly embedded in mineral deposits over 2 billion years old.

The work is frustrating because it mixes together a genuine contribution to our understanding of the history of archaeology and paleoanthropology with a bewildering mass of absurd claims and an audaciously distorted review of the current state of paleoanthropology....Cremo and Thompson have little understanding of history and almost no understanding of the disciplines of paleoanthropology and archaeology. In the introduction, Thompson is identified as a generic "scientist" and "a mathematician," while Cremo is "a writer and editor for books and magazines published by the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust" (p. xix). Their naive approach to history is revealed in their discussion of the alleged discovery of broken columns, "coins, handles of hammers, and other tools" quarried from limestone in France between 1786 and 1788 (p. 104). In order to establish the credibility of this report they note that it was published in the American Journal of Science in 1820. They attempt to support their charge that modern scientists are dogmatic by observing that "today, however, it is unlikely such a report would be found in the pages of a scientific journal" (p. 104). The American Journal of Science in the 1820s published many reports that would not be found in modern science journals. Mermaids (Shillaber 1823), sea serpents (American Journal of Science and Arts, 1826), and the efficacy of divining rods for locating water (Emerson, 1821) were topics of interest to scientists of that era. That such material was presented in a 19th century journal with "Science" in the title is no measure of its reliability or its relevance to modern science; likewise, that modern marine biologists no longer consider mermaids a worthy subject for research is no measure of their dogmatism. Cremo and Thompson might disagree, however, for they devote an entire chapter to reports of "living ape-men" such as Bigfoot, which, even if true, contribute nothing to their thesis that anatomically modern humans lived in geologically ancient times. Chimpanzees are "ape-men" of a sort, sharing 99% of our genetic makeup, and their coexistence with Homo sapiens sapiens does no violence to evolutionary theory....Cremo and Thompson's ignorance of the basic data of archaeology is exemplified by their reference to the Venus of Willendorf as a work of "Neolithic" rather than Paleolithic art (p. 84) and their mistaken identification of a nondescript stone blade from Sandia Cave as a "Folsom point" (p. 93)....Cremo and Thompson's claim that anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens have been around for hundreds of millions of years is an outrageous notion. Accepting that there is a place in science for seemingly outrageous hypotheses (cf. Davis, 1926) there is no justification for the sort of sloppy rehashing of canards, hoaxes, red herrings, half-truths and fantasies Cremo and Thompson offer in the service of a religious ideology. Readers who are interested in a more credible presentation of the overwhelming evidence for human evolution should consult Ian Tattersall's wonderful recent book The Fossil Trail: how we know what we think we know about human evolution.

This review was previously published in Skeptic by the Skeptics Society, Vol 4, No 1, pp 98-100, 1996. Many thanks to Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society for making it available.

George Carter, the late Thomas Lee, and Virginia Steene-McIntyre are among those whose claims for very early humans in America have been met with unfortunate ad hominem attacks by some conservative archaeologists; but, regardless of how shamefully these scholars were treated, the fact remains that their claims have not been supported by sufficiently compelling evidence. Cremo and Thompson are wrong , however, when they condemn scientists for demanding "higher levels of proof for anomalous finds than for evidence that fits within the established ideas about human evolution" (p. 49). It is axiomatic that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

No, not at all. Nothing in physics, medicine, genetics, non-evo biology, zoology, etc,...nothing in chemistry or most any other field would be wrong, just evo claims on how humans arrived.That's it.

Here is the error in your thinking. The data does not contradict any actual evidence at all, in terms of human evolution, except perhaps the one claim of the curiously spherical balls.

But in terms of Miocene humans, there is no data this contradicts, just evolutionist conclusions about the data.

Evos stitch together a picture, often times out of fraudulent claims, based on partial data while ignoring the other data, and then claim this evidence is extraordinary.

There is not one single piece of data, related to human remains, that this data conflicts with. All this shows is that some of the so-called pre-human hominids were not actually early forms of humans, but either different species, or perhaps showing some of the extreme range of hominids.

Ironically, even though evos claim not accept teleology, these so-called more primitive hominid forms are considered more primitive and we more advanced due to a values judgment related to progress, that evolution is upward.

For example, Pakicetus was originally presented as a webbed foot semi-aquatic creature. There was absolutely no evidence for it having webbed feet, now being semi-aquatic. The only reason I can think of for depicting Pakicetus in this manner was to exagerrate and overstate the finding in an attempt to make the whale transition connection stronger.Interestingly, although now Pakicestus is presented as a rat-like hooved creature, he is still called a cetacean despite it not sharing any of the primary qualities that identify a cetacean (whale) as a cetacean.

This kind of reminds of how evos used the term "recapitulation." It took a long time but eventually evos admitted that "ontologeny does not recapitulate phylogeny", but they still maintained the term, "recapitulation" and kept the unproven claim of a phylotypic stage and some basic, but false and misleading claims, such as humans having gill slits, or gill pouches, embryos, and they kept using the term, recapitulation.That to me indicates a pattern of overstatement not connected to fact.