A. A Brief Review of Cremo and Thompson’s Critique of Evolutionary Theory
One of the dogmas of
the standard model concerns the discovery of Java Man, a
“protohuman hominid” that was discovered
In Middle Pleistocene deposits generally given an age of 800,000 years. The discovery became a benchmark. Henceforth, scientists would not expect to find fossils or artifacts of anatomically modern humans in deposits of equal or greater age. If they did, they (or someone wiser) concluded that this was impossible and found some way to discredit the find as a mistake, an illusion, or a hoax. Before Java man, however, reputable nineteenth-century scientists found a number of examples of anatomically modern human skeletal remains in very ancient strata.666
After citing a series
of reports and papers from such scientists concerning human remains
from a date prior to the “evolutionary benchmark” of Java man,
Cremo and Thompson observe that a similar set of papers and reports
exists in support of the standard theory. One is left with the
unpleasant alternative of rejecting both types of reports, or
accepting both.
However, if one
accepts the first set of reports,
Then we must accept the existence of intelligent, tool-making beings in geological periods as remote as the Miocene, or even the Eocene. If we accept the skeletal evidence presented in these reports, we must go further and accept the existence of anatomically modern human beings in these remote periods. This not only contradicts the modern theory of human evolution, but it also casts grave doubt on our whole picture of the evolution of mammalian life in the Cenozoic era.667
The Miocene era is
generally understood to run from approximately 25 to 5 million
years ago, and the Eocene from 50 or 55 to 45 million years ago.
Thus, Cremo and Thompson’s work has the happy benefit of providing
its readers with a veritable catalogue of “pre-evolutionary”
evidence, widely reported in the literature of the day, that
subsequently was forgotten, or worse, hushed up. In any case, they
outline a substantial case that mankind is indeed of far greater
antiquity than modern standard models will
countenance.
For the Cosmic War
Hypothesis, however, the antiquity of mankind is a given. What must
be explained, rather, is the level of cultural achievement of this
“paleoancient man,” or lack of it, for as we have already seen, the
War Hypothesis demands that at some point between 3,200,000 and
65,000,000 years ago, there existed a sufficiently advanced culture
- human or otherwise — in order to wage the war, if one accepts the
dates of Van Flandern’s Exploded Planet Hypothesis as chronological
benchmarks. This problem is acknowledged by Cremo and Thompson
themselves in no uncertain terms, even though they most decidedly
are not concerned with any version of
the Cosmic War Hypothesis.
Up to this point, most of the evidence we have considered gives the impression that even if humans did exist in the distant past, they remained at a somewhat primitive level of cultural and technological achievement. One might well ask the following question. If humans had a long time to perfect their skills, then why do we not find ancient artifacts indicative of an advancing civilization?In 1863, Charles Lyell expressed this doubt in his book Antiquity of Man: “Instead of the rudest pottery or flint tools... we should now be finding sculptured forms, surpassing in beauty the master-pieces of Phidias or Praxiteles; lines of buried railways or electric telegraphs, from which the best engineers of our day might gain invaluable hints; astronomical instruments and microscopes of more advanced construction than any known in Europe, and other indications of perfection in the arts and sciences.”668
Cremo and Thompson
then go on to list a very suggestive catalogue of anomalous
archeological artifacts that would seem to indicate some level of technological sophistication, even if
not “astronomical” or “microscopic” devices, although as they also
observe, such artifacts are very rare, and dispersed throughout the
world.