Evidence that contradicts Darwinism exists, but very systematically it is shielded from public eye.
Among the ancient Sanskrit writings are the Puranas, or histories. The Puranas tell of human civilizations that have come and gone from this planet for hundreds of millions of years, in the course of cyclical time. The basic unit of this cyclical time is called the kalpa, or day of Brahma. The day of Brahma lasts 4.3 billion years. The day of Brahma is followed by a night of Brahma, which also lasts 4.3 billion years. The days follow the nights endlessly in succession . During the days of Brahma, life, including human life, is manifest in the universe. During the nights, life is not manifest. According to the ancient Sanskrit calendars, we are now about two billion years into the current day of Brahma. A Vedic archaeologist would therefore expect to find evidence for human presence going back around two billion years.
These concepts of human history are somewhat different than the concepts we have received from Charles Darwin and his modern followers. The Darwinists say that the first apes and monkeys came into existence about 40 million years ago. The first ape-men came into existence around five or six million years ago, and the first human beings like us came into existence around 100,000 years ago. And they say that all of the physical evidence discovered by scientists support this particular account and no other. But over the past 150 years, archaeologists have discovered huge amounts of evidence showing that human beings like ourselves have existed since the very beginning of the history of life on earth, just as the Puranas say.
WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE?
Some people ask, "If there is so much evidence showing that humans like us have existed for hundreds of millions of years on this planet, then why don't we hear much about it?" The reason is the existence of a process of "knowledge filtration" in the world of science. The "knowledge filter" is the current Darwinist concept of recent human origins. Reports of evidence that conform to this concept will be found in textbooks. But reports of evidence that contradict this concept are filtered out.
Let's look at some examples. First we will consider artefacts and foot prints. In the middle of the nineteenth century, gold was discovered in California, and miners came there from all over the world. To get the gold, the miners were digging tunnels into the sides of mountains, through the solid rock. One of the mountains was Table Mountain, in the gold mining region of California. Sometimes, hundreds of meters inside these tunnels, the miners were finding stone tools and weapons, hundreds of them, at many different locations in the gold mining region. These objects, which were the kind made by humans, not ape-men, were found in layers of rock belonging to the lower part of the geological period called the Eocene, which means they would be around 50 million years old.
The discoveries from the California gold mines were reported to the scientific world by Dr. J.D. Whitney, the state geologist of California. He wrote a massive book about these discoveries, which was published by Harvard University in the year 1880. But we do not hear much about these discoveries today. That is because of the process of knowledge filtration.
The scientist responsible for the knowledge filtering in this case was Dr.William B.Holmes. He was a very influential anthropologist working at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He said, "If Dr.Whitney had understood the theory of human evolution, as we understand it today, he would have hesitated to announce his conclusions, despite the imposing array of testimony with which he was confronted." In other words, if the facts did not fit the theory of human evolutions, the facts had to be put aside, and the person who reported them had to be discredited. And that is exactly what happened.
Now let's consider a case from the more recent history of archaeology. In 1979, Mary Leakey found dozens of footprints at a place called Laetoli, in the East African country of Tanzania. She said that the footprints were indistinguishable from those of modern human beings. But they were found in layers of solidified volcanic ash that are 3.7 million years old. According to standard views, humans capable of making such prints should not have existed that long ago. So how do scientists explain the Laetoli footprints.
They say that there must have existed in East Africa 3.7 million years ago some kind of ape-man who had feet just like Outs. And that is how the footprints were made. That is a very interesting proposal, but unfortunately there is no physical evidence to support it. Scientists already have the skeletons of the ape men who existed 3.7 million years ago in East Africa. They are called Australopithecus. And the foot structure of Australopithecus is quite different from that of a modern human being. The only creature known to science that has a foot just like that of a modern human being is a modern human being. Therefore, if we want to stick to the facts, Mary Leakey found evidence that humans like us existed millions of years ago.
Scientists who find things that should not be found sometimes suffer for it professionally. One such scientist is Dr.Virginia SteenMcIntyre, an American geologist.
In the early 1970s, some American archaeologists discovered some stone tools and weapons at a place called Hueyatlaco, in Mexico. They included arrowheads and spear points. According to archaeologists, such weapons are made and used only by humans like us, not by ape-men.
At Hueyatlaco, the artefacts were found in the bottom layers of the trenches. Of course, the archaeologists wanted to know how old the objects were, so they called in some geologists. Among the geologists who came to date the site was Virginia Steen-McIntyre. Using four of the latest geological dating methods, she and her colleagues from the United States Geological Survey determined that the artefact bearing layer was 300,000 years old. When this information was presented to the chief archaeologist, the chief archaeologist said, "That is impossible. There were no human beings in existence 300,000 years ago anywhere in the world." And what to speak of North America. The current doctrine is that humans did not enter the Americas any earlier than 30,000 years ago. So what happened? The archaeologists refused to publish the date of 300,000 years.
Virginia Steen -Mcintyre tried to get the true age of the site known and because of this, she began to get a bad reputation in her profession. She lost a teaching position she held at a university and all of her opportunities for advancement in the United States Geological Survey were blocked.
Thomas E. Lee of the National Museum of Canada found advanced stone tools in the glacial deposits at Sheguiandah , on Manitoulin Island in northern Lake Huron . Scientists aged them at least 65,000 to 125,000 years old. For those adhering to standard views on history, such ages were unacceptable.
Thomas E.Lee complained: "The site's discoverer [Lee] was hounded from his Civil Service position into profound unemployment: publication outlets were cut off; the evidence was misrepresented by several prominent authors … ; tons of artefacts vanished into storage bins of National Museum of Canada; for refusing to fire the discoverer, the Director of the National Museum, was himself fired and driven in to exile; official positions of prestige and power were exercised in an effort to gain control over just six Sheguiandah specimens that had not gone undercover; and the site has been turned into a tourist resort … Sheguiandah would have forced embarrassing admissions that the Brahmins did not know everything. It would have forced the rewriting of almost every book in the business. It had to be killed. It was killed."
Early in the twentieth century, the Belgian geologist A. Rutot made some interesting discoveries in his country. He found hundreds of stone tools and weapons in layers of rock 30 million years old. The objects are still in the collections of the Royal Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels but are no longer displayed to the public.
How far back in time can we go with this evidence? In December of 1862, a scientific journal called The Geologist reported the discovery of a complete, anatomically modern human skeleton 90 feet (30 meters) below the surface of the ground, in Macoupin County, Illinois, in the United States . According to the report, directly above the skeleton was an unbroken layer of slate rock, over a meter thick, extending horizontally for many meters in all directions. The presence of this unbroken layer of rock rules out intrusive burial. According to modern geological reports, the layer of rock containing tlle skeleton is 300 million years old.
Up to this point, all of the finds we have discussed were either made by professional scientists, or were reported in the professional scientific literature. But if this evidence for extreme human antiquity really is there in the layers of the earth, then we might expect that people other than professional scientists might be finding it. And their reports, although they might not appear in the pages of scientific journals, they might appear in the pages of more ordinary literature. I think we can predict that this should be happening. And in fact it does happen. Let us consider an interesting report from the Morrisonville Times, a newspaper published in the little town of Morrisonville, Illinois, in the United States, in the year 1892. It tells of a woman who was putting a big piece of coal into her coalburning stove. The piece of coal broke in half, and inside she found a beautiful gold chain, ten inches long. The two pieces of coal were still attached to the ends of the chain, demonstrating that the chain had been solidly embedded in the coal. From the newspaper report we were able to determine the mine from which the coal came. According to the Geological Survey of the State of Illinois, the coal from that mine is about 300 million years old, the same age as the human skeleton found in the same state.
Let's go back to the scientific literature. In 1852, Scientific American reported that a beautiful metallic vase emerged from five meters deep in solid rock near the c ity of Boston. According to modern geological reports, the age of the rock at this place is 500 million years old.
The oldest objects documented in Human Devolution are some metallic spheres found over the past twenty years by miners at Ottosdal, in the Western Transvaal region of South Africa. The objects are one or two centimetres in diameter. Most interesting are the parallel grooves that go around the equators of the spheres. The spheres were submitted to metallurgists for analys is. The metallurgists said they could see no way in which the spheres could have formed naturally in the earth, indicating they are the product of intelligent work. The spheres come from mineral deposits over two billion years old.
We have been told by the Darwinists that all the physical evidence ever discovered by scientists supports their picture of human origins, which has human beings like us coming into existence about 100,000 years ago. I think we can safely say that is not true. There is a chain of discoveries going from 100,000 years ago all the way back to two billion years. It is interesting that the ancient Sanskrit writings say humans have been present on earth for two billion years. In this article, we have just looked at artefacts and footprints. What about human bones? Some very ancient human bones have been found, and we will review them in the next article.
Michael A. Cremo (Drutakarma Dasa) is a disciple of Srila Prabhupada and research associate of the Bhaktivedanta Institute.