Liechtenstein’s Daily Bell features Vedic (Hindu) creationist Michael Cremo on “Forbidden Archeology, Our Billion-Year-Old Human History and the Spiritual Satisfaction of the Vedas” (Sunday, May 22, 2011 – with Anthony Wile):
Daily Bell: Tell us about your book, Forbidden Archeology , and why it is so controversial in the West. Give us its main thesis.[ … ]
Michael Cremo:In the 1970s, American archeologists led by Cynthia Irwin Williams discovered stones tools at Hueyatlaco, near Puebla, Mexico. The stone tools were of an advanced type, made only by humans like us. A team of geologists, from the United States Geological Survey and universities in the United States, came to Hueyatlaco to date the site.
Among the geologists was Virginia Steen-McIntyre. To date the site, the team used four methods—uranium series dating on butchered animal bones found along with the tools, zircon fission track dating on volcanic layers above the tools, tephra hydration dating of volcanic crystals, and standard stratigraphy. The four methods converged on an age of about 250,000 years for the site. The archeologists refused to consider this date. They could not believe that humans capable of making the Hueyatlaco artifacts existed 250,000 years ago.
In defense of the dates obtained by the geologists, Virginia Steen-McIntyre wrote in a letter (March 30, 1981) to Estella Leopold, associate editor of Quaternary Research:
“The problem as I see it is much bigger than Hueyatlaco. It concerns the manipulation of scientific thought through the suppression of ‘Enigmatic Data,’ data that challenges the prevailing mode of thinking. Hueyatlaco certainly does that!
Not being an anthropologist, I didn’t realize the full significance of our dates back in 1973, nor how deeply woven into our thought the current theory of human evolution has become. Our work at Hueyatlaco has been rejected by most archaeologists because it contradicts that theory, period.”
This remains true today, not only for the California gold mine discoveries and the Hueyatlaco human artifacts, but for hundreds of other discoveries documented in the scientific literature of the past 150 years.
Is it credible? Cremo is, I expect, pushing the envelope, but he raises a critical question: How much of the current timeline is intended to lend credence to existing theories of human evolution, so that inconvenient facts get quietly dropped out?
What if human history is not the steady Ascent of Man portrayed in TV broadcasts on evolution, but a series of rising and falling waves? Maybe we should think about Göbekli Tepe and the anti-kythera a bit more.