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WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG

The Question of How Life Began

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.

BOOK OF JOB 38:4

SEMUAN BEGINNINGS

The very ancient word semu (the root of words like seminal, inseminate, semen, semolina, etc.) can be understood in terms of raw beginnings, for it applies to the inchoate world and is no longer potent once a planet has attained maturity. Think of semu as a gestative period: in the youth of our world, each species was “brought into existence . . . using special processes which are not operative today [e.a.]”1 Creationists call this “a period of special constructive processes”2 (in stark contrast to evolution’s ploddingly slow and continual process of change and transmutation).

A formative age, quite different from our own, has been recognized by scientists like Immanuel Velikovsky; even the late S. J. Gould posited “developmental locking” after the Cambrian, thus ending the age of flexibility in which body plans were established. “No new phyla have emerged since the Cambrian age, 500 million years ago.”3 The Paleozoic Era (which began with the Cambrian Period) was a time of great pliancy, an inscrutable plastic power, an arcane force, which “cannot be seen . . . at the present time.”4

The earth ceased to bear, like a woman worn out by age.

LUCRETIUS, ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE

Darwin, for his part, could only imagine that life itself began “in a warm little pond”5; indeed, the best analogy for semu today is the green scum that accumulates on ponds and pools of water.

Figure 10.1. Semu icon.

Let a sign be given to man so that he may comprehend semu. And so the jellyfish and the green scum of water^*125 . . . [are] permanently coming forth in all ages, so that man could understand the age of semu, when the earth . . . [was] covered over with commingled atmosphere and corporeal substance called semu . . . in this day the earth does not produce semu abundantly.

OAHSPE, BOOK OF JEHOVIH 5:4

Figure 10.2 shows a pool of water with a negative current escaping. What is that current? Something on the order of “fluctuating electrical fields” are thought to account for the origin of life on Earth,6 living things having developed through the agency of some bioenergy field. Roughly equivalent to electromagnetic energy, vortexian currents escape through Earth overnight: these (atmospherean) currents are to Earth in the day-light, and from Earth in the night. A pool of water is charged during the day with the positive current, but during the night the negative current escapes upward from the water. The resulting decomposition is called semu, a mucilaginous substance that floats on the surface of the water. “In a few days this semu, by motion, assumes certain defined shapes, crystalline, fibrous and otherwise, like the strange configurations of frost on a windowpane. . . . They float against the ground . . . and take root and grow. . . . No seed was there. This new property is called Life.”7

Figure 10.2. Pool of water showing negative current escaping.

Indeed, Anaximander of Miletas (550 BCE) thought that life first started in sea slime; electrolytes of seawater are, after all, similar to the internal fluids of living organisms. Thus has the root of life come to be conceived of as a sort of primitive cell floating around in the “primordial soup.” A soft gelatinous matter (“abysmal slime”) taken from the ocean bed during dredging operations was once named bathybius, apparently an amorphous protein compound, capable of assimilating food, a diffused formless protoplasm.

Scientists like to point out that (1) comets hold organic molecules, possible building blocks of life, and (2) interstellar space is filled with clouds of dust containing microorganisms, cellulose, and other organic matter. Consisting of dust, air, water, heat, and colloids, a kind of protoplasmic substance fell to Earth from nebulous regions in the firmament; as it is said in the Popul Vuh: “From fogs, clouds, and dust, creation came,” just as other scriptures say that out of earth and atmosphere conjoined, “He created the trees of the earth and the flesh of animals.”8 Meteorites contain up to 30 percent organic compounds such as hydrocarbons and chlorophyll. And with precursors of DNA found in the Murchison meteorite (which crashed in Australia in 1969), the ashes of dead stars, comets, and dust grains are now thought to contain the ingredients for life.

Figure 10.3. Plate 39 from Oahspe, Earth in semu.

The new science that I am studying also looks at coalification as a nonterrestrial dynamic. “There is a time for semu; and a time for falling nebulae to bury deep the forests and semuan beds, to provide coal and manure for a time afterward. . . . If luts, a time of destruction, followed soon after a semuan period, when portions of the earth were covered with rank vegetation, it charred them, penetrating and covering them up. Most of the coal-beds and oil-beds in the earth were made this way. . . . Luts belongs more to an early age of a planet, when the nebulous clouds in its outer belt are subject to condensation, so as to rain down on the earth these corporeal showers.”9 Thus did condensed nebula (dust and stones and water combined) cover up the forests; it fell like hot molten iron, and the trees were beaten down, covered up, and burnt to blackness.

The formation of coal seams, then, belongs to formative times, in the Paleozoic’s Carboniferous Period, when the first amphibians appeared. The profusion of plant life buried in the Carboniferous suggests a high concentration of carbon dioxide in the coal period; thus with CO2 locked up in coal deposits, the atmosphere would then be cleared, now suitable for terrestrial vertebrates—air-breathing reptiles.

Such deep vertical beds (some one hundred feet) are not formed today, nor is oil any longer being formed.10 Forty-foot high standing trees buried in coal seams bely the Darwinian (and uniformitarian) view of long and slow compression by overlying rocks; for it was pressure, rather than time, that caused coalification—and quickly done! If the average rate of deposition of sediments is something like 0.2 mm per year, “such a slow rate would be quite incapable of burying and fossilizing entire forests, dinosaurs, or even a medium-sized tadpole.”11 Exposed, they would simply rot away.

Figure 10.4. Depiction of coal found compressed between layers of rock.

SOMETHING CAN’T COME FROM NOTHING

Ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes out of nothing). It was during our planet’s travel through the semuan firmament that life began on the face of Earth. It was not “random mutations” that led to cellular life.

Just as the brain of Shakespeare was necessary to produce the famous plays, so prior information was necessary to produce a living cell. . . . Life cannot have had a random beginning.

FRED HOYLE AND N. C. WICKRAMASINGHE, EVOLUTION FROM SPACE

Could RNA molecules have been formed by a chemical accident in the primordial slime? Are men “raised like Vegetables out of some fat and slimy soil?” quoth Richard Bentley (1692).12 This idea was called, contemptuously, the “gospel of dirt” by Thomas Carlyle. Today, exponents of the “Godless particle” (Higgs Boson) say: “creating ‘stuff ’ from ‘no stuff’ seems to be no problem at all—everything we see could have emerged as a purposeless quantum burp in space.”13

Figure 10.5. Plate 6 from Oahspe, picturing Earth in the Semuan firmament.

Could life have been burped from nonliving matter, as Ernst Haeckel thought of his Urschleim (primordial slime)? Or is life actually a property of matter, as eighteenth-century enlightenment materialism suggested? Or is there instead an animating principle, an unseen power, a force? James Churchward, so ahead of his time, stressed the difference between elements (matter) and force (energy). Isn’t matter, of itself, dead, inert? Ironically, science, having thoroughly debunked the old theory of spontaneous generation of matter, invokes it once again, with molecules—godless particles—somehow self-assembling and jump-starting all life.

Yet, as biologist Michael Behe sees it, “staggering difficulties . . . face an origin of life by natural chemical process. In private many scientists admit that . . . [we] have no explanation for the beginning of life. . . . The involvement of some intelligence is unavoidable.”14

There is no evidence in the oldest rocks on Earth of any prebiotic matter. Could viruslike particles have “evolved” into cells? Are we descended from viruses? If so, can anyone explain how a protein molecule evolved? “The odds of the chance evolution of a protein,” said Francis Hitching “is about one in 10⁶⁰⁰.”15 Did mineral surfaces magically spring to life, organizing key molecules? Did volcanic sources “synthesize” amino acids? What catalyzed the synthesis of compounds?

Can experimental design apparatus really simulate conditions of baby Earth? Yes, say those whose claim comes out of laboratories: starting in the 1950s, radiation or other energy sources were applied to simple gases, obtaining a by-product of amino acids. Critics, though, think such claims are misleading; it would be “an outrageous fluke for amino acids . . . in a polypeptide chain . . . [to mutate properly] which is well known to geneticists and yet nobody seems prepared to blow the whistle.”16

Nurs’ d by warm sun-beams in primeval caves, Organic life began beneath the waves. . . . Hence without parent by spontaneous birth, Rise the first specks of animated earth.

ERASMUS DARWIN, “THE TEMPLE OF NATURE”

Do you mean to tell me, then, that inert dust found a way to become a living thing? Evolution overall is the idea that things made themselves (with a little push from nature—warm sunbeams perhaps). Today it is said that nonliving matter somehow gave rise to life; somehow a few particles of matter managed to arrange themselves spontaneously into living structures.

Geologist George Frederick Wright, however, found it hard to believe “that plant life has had the power of taking upon itself the forms and prerogatives of animal life. . . . It is impossible rationally to believe that a principle of life is the product of chemical forces [which are] but the machinery of a mill. . . . If anyone wishes to believe that the marvelous adaptive capacities of plant life sprang from the dead forces of nature, he is at liberty to do so, but at the risk of his reputation for sanity.”17

Figure 10.6. George Frederick Wright, turn-of-the-century American geologist.

Notwithstanding scientific feint, inert matter shows no potential to organize itself. How could complex information codes be generated without intelligence? I am one who doubts it. Just as consciousness cannot be put to matter, so too is life itself independent of matter, something more than “atoms in a bag.”

Particles had to have a form of awareness that let them know how to behave.

PETER J. BOWLER, EVOLUTION: THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA

THE QUICKENING . . . AND THE COOLING

The molecules needed for life are widely distributed in the universe.

ERNST MAYR, WHAT EVOLUTION IS

Perhaps, offers the materialist, life was engendered by the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, or in a volcanic setting of “fire and mire.” Perhaps it was “bolts of lightning” that turned simple chemicals to organic molecules, like the mythical Zeus hurling thunderbolts at Earth. The problem here is that macromolecules tend to fragment, not form, under such highenergy barrages. Asking chemical reactions to produce life from nonlife is about the same as asking favorable mutations to make a man out of a monkey. Organic molecules are a collection of parts. What would make them gel?

I rained down semu on the earth; and by virtue of My presence I quickened into life all the living. Without seed I created the life that is in them. . . . Thus made I him out of the dissolved elements of every living thing that had preceded him.

OAHSPE, BOOK OF JEHOVIH 5:14 AND BOOK OF INSPIRATION 6:19

The ray of light that goeth out of Me taketh root in mortality, and thou art the product. Thou wert nothing; though all things that constitute thee, were before. These I drove together, and quickened. Thus I made thee.

OAHSPE, BOOK OF INSPIRATION 1:7–10

Elements (matter) are one thing; forces (energy) are the other. The formula of life entails not only ingredients (elements, raw materials) but also a force, an unseen dynamic, the power behind things, the punch, the spark, the quickening. Some ineffable cause or power, thought Alfred Russel Wallace, “must necessarily come into action when protoplasm appeared.”18 Indeed it was in ancient Indian cosmogony just such a quickening power, wielded by the High Lord of the Upper Heavens, when he sent whirlwinds abroad, which gathered in the substance of the world egg, and rained it down upon Earth. “Thus did Eolin touch the earth with His quickening hand, and instantly all the living were created.”19

This quickening is also expressed in Genesis’s “breath of life,” as it is in AmerInd creation (Algonquin and Blackfeet) wherein Manito first molded men from Earth’s clay, then breathed life into them. Among the Chinese, it was the deity Nu Kua who made the first humans out of clay from the banks of the Yellow River, then quickened them with the breath of life. The breath of life is also a part of anthropogenesis in Hawaii, Australia, and the Kei Islands of Indonesia.

Here is the Oahspe version of creation: “In the Semuan Age, the time of ripeness, all the living were quickened into life, for the earth had moved into its season for the bringing forth of living creatures. . . . [With] the triumphant entry of oxygen to the earth’s surface. . . . [came] the gestative age for the animal kingdom, a time of propagation. . . . Those that were quickened into life, and not attached to the earth by fibers or roots, were called animals . . . created not in pairs only, but in hundreds of pairs and in thousands and millions of pairs. . . . And, in time, semu covered the earth abroad with Asu, till hotu came and the creation of new living things ceased.”20 And this was approximately 75,000 years ago. Man was the last creation in semu, and his advent was a thing apart from the anthropoid apes or any other of our “fellow primates.” With the advent of Asu man at 80 kya, there would surely be no time for Darwin’s evolution, which entails the accumulation of small changes over vast eons, measured by current orthodoxy in the millions of years. (See figure 10.7.)

Some say the physical evolution of man ended 72 kya. Curiously, this is the date given for the advent of Ihin man and also for the following:

• the first AMHs in Altai, Russia
• the first modern Chinese21
• Europe’s Fontéchevade Man, who was essentially like ourselves, allowing us to “date our species as in existence perhaps seventy thousand years ago”22
• the deepest divergence in an evolutionary tree, developed by genomic studies23
• the Welsh genome, where the biggest difference (eight mutations) is among individuals who shared a common ancestor ca 80 kya24
• the common ancestor of European and Australian Aborigine (dated to 70 kya); while New Guinea mtDNA traces back to 77 kya25
• the cognitive explosion, which some say occurred around 73 or 70 kya,26 matching India’s Ramayana, which traces the beginning of writing and culture to an ancient white race some 70 kya

Also suggesting the advent of man between 80 and 70 kya is the work of a Native Cree archaeologist who has created a database of the oldest sites in the New World—with five hundred entries ranging back as far as 80 kya, just as Native American mtDNA sequences from a Northwest tribe trace back to 78 kyr. While the earliest engraved object in America dates to 70 kya,27 American grinding tools and pollen of cultivated corn have been dated between 70 and 80 kya.

HOW OLD IS THE EARTH, REALLY?

Just as the age of man may be a great deal younger than we are taught, the age of Earth itself has, I believe, been greatly overestimated. Modern science speaks of billions of years for Earth’s age. Darwin assumed there were virtually no limits to the time in which natural selection operated, positing, in effect, a perpetual motion machine. For example, he estimated more than 300 myr for the time in which the Wealdon deposits of England had eroded, “a mere trifle of geological time.”

Figure 10.7. Ages of the planet as told in Oahspe. By the ancients, the four seasons of manifestation were termed semu, hotu, adu, and uz, corresponding respectively to: birth/time of creating, growing and maturing, harvest and senility, and, finally, time of destruction and rest. In semu a planet is ripe for the bringing forth of living creatures. Then it enters hotu, for it is past the age of begetting, even as the living who are advanced in years. Next it enters adu, and nothing can generate upon it. Finally comes uz, and it is spirited away into unseen realms.

Yet Darwin’s contemporaries (and the following generation) found evidence for a younger Earth; hence, in the second edition of Origin, Darwin confessed his rashness; and in yet later editions he quietly withdrew his bloated estimate, which “proved to be immensely above that of the reputable geologists and physicists of the time.”28 Darwin’s 300 myr was then reduced to 70 myr at the outside, while his son, Sir George Darwin, would calculate a geological history for Earth no older than 100 myr, perhaps as little as 50 myr (as against today’s claim of 4.6 billion).

In fact, some scientists are saying that erosion rates indicate that the continents are no older than 20 myr29 (versus the orthodox two and a half billion); other geologists believe that figure is somewhere between 25 and 70 myr.30 Lord Kelvin (who discovered the second law of thermodynamics as well as absolute temperature, which is measured today in Kelvin degrees), calculated Earth’s age^*126 based on how long it took to cool down to its present crustal temperature. Kelvin’s thermodynamics was itself based on the principle that energy always becomes less available; therefore hot bodies always cool down.

Kelvin counted 98 myr since the solidification of Earth’s crust. His new science was a blow to the evolutionist’s uniformitarianism, for Earth’s age now appeared to be but a fraction of what Darwin’s theory required. This, of course, was disputed vigorously by evolutionists, who required many more millions even billions of years for their theories to hold. We might also wonder why 95 percent of animal phyla are said to be no older than 40 myr.

The geologic column, argued one critic, is but “a public relations tool for the general theory of evolution.”31 It all comes back to the requirements of Darwinian gradualism. The great maverick scientist, Immanuel Velikovsky, an inspiration to Einstein, thought, like Kelvin, Earth much younger than generally believed. If the Darwinian establishment today says Earth cooled down enough to make oceans and rocks 3.8 billion years ago, there are still some intrepid scientists who contend that the maximum age of the oceans is only 62 million years. Darwin’s “partner” in evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, dated the oldest rocks to no more than 28 myr.

Geologists with no ax to grind for deep time or Darwinism have fixed the limits of geologic time (age of Earth) at about 70 myr. In 1862, Darwin himself became worried whether there was in fact enough time for the accumulation of such minute changes (in animal species) to amount to such large effects, when Kelvin, that year, said Earth was less than a 100 million years old—the time needed for it to have cooled down to its present temperature. Comte de Buffon was an Enlightenment naturalist who pointed out that living forms could only have been produced when Earth cooled down to a temperature suitable for life. Based on the geothermal gradient observed in mines, he calculated our planet cooled sufficiently to support life 70 kya. Although his work was criticized, and “hot origin” almost dropped out of science, his idea of gradient was later validated. Buffon also calculated that in another 70,000 years the planet would be so chilled as to sustain no life on its surface.^*127 The gradual cooling of Earth, he thought, had eliminated the warm-loving fauna of an earlier day, while many of today’s existing species will, in time, perish from the same cause.

EXTINCTIONS: A TIME TO LIVE AND A TIME TO DIE

From the time of semu to uz, creatures are born and die. Why do most species (99 percent) go extinct? (Most vertebrates have gone extinct after a tenure of about a million years on Earth.) Failure to adapt, of course, is the stock explanation. Or a species vanishes because it has successfully evolved to something else; the parent species disappears or is replaced after it changes into the daughter species. Or so they say. Evolutionists also contend that certain species went extinct because they had become too “specialized” to a particular niche, which then changed, making new (impossible) demands. Such species presumably failed to come up with “favorable mutations,” as selection required. All this, in my view, is pure speculation. Species do not really overspecialize or wear out (another theory). Certain animals have simply failed to propagate, including men.

I have come to think of most extinctions, quite simply (and parsimoniously), as a function of heat loss; in this view, only those plants and animals better equipped to withstand cooler-drier conditions persist. (Indeed, Afrocentrists, as we will see in the next chapter, use global cooling and drying to explain the critical change from one fossil type of hominid to the next.) In the animal kingdom, the mass extinction events that eliminated dinosaurs or trilobites were, in my understanding, due to chill kill.

The story begins with hot Earth. “As a testimony to man, behold the earth was once a globe of liquid fire!”32 In the beginning, a planet comes forth as a molten mass of hot, undisciplined gases. Once stabilized and cooled, it matures. And after the span of ages, it goes out like a candle in the firmament—cold and dry, slackening in its dotage, in velocity, moisture, heat, and light—until extinct. This should be axiomatic. Buffon, Lyell, Leibniz, Kelvin, Descartes, and many other scientists besides recognized the cooling state of Earth.

A slowing Earth is a cooling Earth: Earth is aging now, with slower rotation and weaker electromagnetic field. And as Earth’s rotation slows, the solar day lengthens. Because of steady slowing, an extra second (a “leap second”) is added to atomic clocks from time to time to make up for the lag. Speed also correlates with heat, as demonstrated in October 2006 when astronomers announced the fastest known planet, named SWEEPS-10, with a “year” just ten hours long and a surface temperature of about 3,000 degrees Farenheit.^*128

In the new-old science, the temperature of a planet depends on its axial velocity,^†129 which is rapid in the youth of a world and slowing with age. Although the textbooks might say otherwise, I believe temperature loss (through slowing) is an intrinsic feature of planetary life and the probable cause of most animal extinctions. Indeed, I propose using this model to date the advent of man to ca 80,000 BP, at which time the average temperature on the planet fell to 98 degrees. Frankly, this cooling, 80 kya, is the opposite of orthodox science, which has things warming up during an interglacial period at around 75 kya (and lasting supposedly until 10 kya).

At the time of the quickening of animal life, Earth, according to the structure of coral fossils, made its daily rotation in what would now be twenty-one hours and forty minutes. This would give a difference, in animal heat, of 2.5 degrees, which is to say that large animals, now extinct, had an average body temperature 2.5 degrees higher than at present. In other words, three hours and twenty minutes’ loss in axial motion produced a loss of 2.5 degrees of vortexian (ambient) heat.

As the decline in axial speed indicates, a fraction of a second is lost every century, and as that motion is diminished, so is heat; just so, can the aging of any planet be observed in the diminishing of its atmospheric warmth and breadth. Today, only a few miles above ground level, hardly 122,000 feet up, the temperature above tropical regions is as cold as above the polar regions. In very small increments, and over a great span of time, the atmosphere of our world has lost both amplitude and heat. Picture a time-lapse viewing of Earth in formation: a rapidly rotating fiery furnace begins to decelerate. The flashing heat subsides, in degrees, along with decrease in axial motion. Now the atmospheric canopy begins to cool. The surface world becomes, at last, habitable.

And over the eons, when the temperature finally falls to 98 degrees, Earth is ripe for the bringing forth of human creatures. According to this scheme, we can place the quickening of man at eighty thousand years ago, at the very end of the Semuan age. To find the time of first man, we place his temperature at 98 degrees Fahrenheit for optimum health. Four below normal will be the end of the period of man’s inhabitation of Earth. After the vortexian radiation reaches this period (94 degrees F), man will cease to propagate, and so, become extinct on Earth.^*130

“The earth upon which we live is but a cooling planetary mass,” stated George Frederick Wright on page one of Origin and Antiquity of Man. In his view, Earth “became fit for the habitation of man only during recent geological ages. A few million years ago the heat upon the surface of the earth was so great that it would have been impossible for man to have endured.”

Twentieth-century scientist Louis Alvarez popularized the idea that an asteroid struck Earth at the K-T boundary (Cretaceous-Tertiary), causing major extinctions through a disruption of the food chain. Can we blame mass extinctions on catastrophes? In the Alvarez model, immense clouds of asteroid dust would have blocked sunlight. (The reader might be interested in finding out more about dark periods in chapter 4 of my book Time of the Quickening. For example, in the age of Thor, ca 15 kya, “the lands of earth were covered in darkness (nebulous period) [due to] a veil over the face of the sun.”33) But some mass extinctions did not involve an impact. If mass extinctions are caused by catastrophes, why do some species survive and others perish? We recall that the Devonian extinction effected mostly shallow water invertebrates; of course, it was coldest in the shallows.

At the critical point of heat loss, a species ceases to propagate. The time of begetting has a beginning and an end for all the living. With cooling, “bison genetic diversity plummeted. . . . Cold and dry conditions dominated.” Horses also went extinct (in Alaska) at that time.34 Every species has its own temperature threshold (cold tolerance)—critical not only to its own metabolism but also to the food chain it feeds off. There is a time of genesis and a time of old age for all individuals, all species, even all worlds.

Scientists Comte de Buffon, Richard Owen, Thomas Henry Huxley, Isaac Asimov, and others agree on this much: cooling was the cause of the dinosaur extinction—not a giant asteroid (à la Alvarez) or solar flares charging Earth with lethal levels of ultraviolet radiation or even because they had become “overspecialized.” Only this: With a loss of 2 or 3 degrees in body temperature, the empire of the saurians came to an end; other large animals also went out of existence. The apparently abrupt ending of the giant reptiles, as Gerald Heard saw it in The Sources of Civilization, was “probably connected with the close of a vast period of equable warm conditions and the onset of a new age in which the winters were bitterer . . . in the cold, the reptile falls into anesthetic coma.”

The hulking saurians were just too big to burrow and hibernate (like the smaller animals, which did survive), and the temperature probably dropped too low to hatch their eggs. Good-bye giant reptiles, hello little mammals. Loss of heat is evident by the kinds of animals that succeeded them: the fur- and feather-bearing creatures, sheathed in fatty layers and adapted to a cooler clime.

Figure 10.8. Wing Anderson’s chart indicating 144,000 years as total lifespan of humanity. With mankind now 72 kyr, we are halfway through the Age of Man; in other words, our procreation period is to last another 72 kyr. And whereas the first half of the age of man was focused on corporeal things, the second half is to be spiritual, ushering in the world community of nations and cosmic understanding.^*131

Even as certain species of animals have ceased to propagate, and have become extinct, so shall it be with man . . . [when] the earth will have fulfilled its labor.

OAHSPE, SHA’MAEL, PLATE 40, BOOK OF COSMOGONY AND PROPHECY

Eight degrees of vortexya, in this reckoning, is the sum of man’s existence on Earth, which is a span of 144,000 years, called the grand cosmic day or human season, within which mankind is born (semu), matures (hotu), and passes into old age (adu) and death (uz). (See figure 10.8.)

HOMINID EXTINCTIONS

What has caused hominid extinctions in the past? Amalgamation? Catastrophe? Genocide? The Ihins of Shem and Ham became extinct by amalgamation (EBA) after 12 and 21 kyr respectively (more on EBAs in chapter 12). There have also been many natural disasters that have decimated the tribes of man. Asuans, for example, were destroyed by a kind of brimstone falling on the five divisions of Earth, approximately 72 kya.35 In very recent time, several Andamanese groups were wiped out in the 2004 Boxer Day tsunami. As for genocide, all the Old World Ihins were exterminated before the flood. Eight thousand years ago all the Druks of Heleste (southeast Europe) were exterminated as well as the hoodas (Druks) of Arabinia, at the hands of the Ihuans who slaughtered them right and left; degenerate Ihuan-Druks were pursued without mercy by the more civilized pure Ihuans.36 In addition, the extermination of Negrito groups is not hard to discover in the record: the aboriginal people in Japan, reddish-skinned pygmies, were wiped out by the Ainu. Similar histories tell of death-dealing cave fires, which eliminated the Nittevo (Sri Lanka), the Ebu Gogo (Flores), and the Taiwanese Negritos who were brutally trapped and massacred, according to their destroyers, the Saisyat. In America, the scenario is almost identical: the Paiutes once launched a war against the marauding Druks (giants cannibals): “My people gathered wood and began to fill up the mouth of their cave.”37 They set it afire, totally exterminating the tribe of red-haired cannibals.

Archaeological evidence of other massacres includes the upper layers of Mohenjo Daro, where groups of contorted skeletons were apparently massacred. The Tasmanians were exterminated by the new settlers. On Easter Island, the Short Ears exterminated the Long Ears in the thirteenth century. There have been far too many holocausts to mention—religious, political, territorial, tribal.

Have yet other races been eliminated by neutering? The Ihins made eunuchs of the ground people and Yaks; later, the Ihuans also neutered the Yaks and ground people “wherever they came upon them.” Later on the Ongwee-ghan made eunuchs of their Ihuan enemies.38

And what about extinction through sterility? The Yaks were barren and died off—tens of millions of them. But even then, they were not extinct, so many had been produced. Starvation and disease have also killed off whole populations. An ancient Hittite text, for example, refers to such a time: “barley and wheat throve no more, oxen, sheep and humans ceased to conceive.”39 Sterility of people and barren fields is also described in the related flood myths of the Assyrians.

This rule follows on all worlds; that with the culture of the corporeal senses, man becomes vigorous, strong, and independent; and with the culture of the spiritual senses, they become weak, sensitive and dependent. In the first case, they ultimately become selfish and wicked; in the second case, they become impotent, and unadapted to corporeal life, and thus become extinct. On all worlds . . . [are] provided these two seasons: a season for the development of the corporeal senses, and a season for the development of the spiritual senses.

OAHSPE, BOOK OF OSIRIS 12:6–8

Figure 10.9. Plate 40 from the Oahspe, Sha’mael. “A time shall come when the earth shall travel in the roadway of the firmament, and so great a light will be therein that the vortex of the earth shall burst, even as a whirlwind bursteth, and lo and behold, the whole earth shall be scattered and gone, as if nothing has been. But ere the time cometh, My etherean hosts shall have redeemed man from sin. Nor shall the inhabitants of the earth marry, for the time of begetting will be at an end. . . . The earth will have fulfilled its labor, and its services will be no more under the sun.”

Figure 10.10. Homo limpus. Cartoon by Marvin E. Herring.

The earth gives away of its substance into atmospherea over hundreds of years; and the fields become barren and cease producing; and certain animals become barren . . . and their species go out of existence. Man is subject to the same forces; when the earth is in the giving-off period, behold, man ceases to desire of the earth.

OAHSPE, BOOK OF DIVINITY 15:8

RACIAL DIVERSITY AND SKIN COLOR

Since the ancestors of man were almost certainly tropical . . . they may have been black-skinned.

ASHLEY MONTAGU, MAN: HIS FIRST TWO MILLION YEARS

Man came forth in the tropics and he was naturally of rich complexion. Nahsu was the Egyptian name for the dark races: N + ahsu? Now some have said it is insensitive to represent our remote ancestors as dark skinned. The editors of National Geographic replied (June 1997) to such a charge by saying: “Since early humans originated in Africa, it is speculated that they displayed a dark skin adaptation to tropical climate.”

Certainly in the animal kingdom, the peculiar colors of many species closely resemble the soil or foliage of their habitat, concealment giving them a better chance at survival. The skins of mortals were also “colored according to their surroundings, some light, some dark, and some red, or yellow, or copper-colored.”40

Hooton described our earliest forebears as of brown-yellow skin tone, which accords with their tropical beginnings. Past eras on our planet, as I have argued, were warmer and wetter. With little difference in climate zones, all places on Earth were warm. Until the mid-Pleistocene, all humans lived in warm or mild climates,41 layers below the Aurignacian exhibiting tropical fauna (rhino, elephant, hippo). There were hippos and crocodiles in Europe in the third interglacial period; hippos and rhinos in North America as well, the giant size of many fossils indicating the tropical temperature that once prevailed even at today’s temperate latitudes.

And “the skin of afarensis [Au] was dark.”42 The pithecanthropines, after them, also had “heavily pigmented skin,”43 indeed the ground people were brown and black.44 Dixon’s proto-Australoid and proto-Negroid types were people of tropical origin with deeply pigmented skin. “According to their respective places and the light upon semu, so quickened I them in their color, adapted to their dwelling places.”45

Oahspe scholar and archivist Reverend Joan Greer, who has been studying deep genealogy, says that according to DNA studies, some black people have a higher percentage of Caucasian genes than some people with white skin. Says Greer: “Skin color would seem to have little to do with our genetic makeup.” The point is, for racial classification, coloring is only one of many factors. In fact, Carleton Coon discarded the term Negroid as useless, as the dark skin it implies is found at equatorial latitudes all around the globe, not just Africa. Caucasian he defined not by skin color but by skull measurements, nasal index, and other criteria.

Accordingly, Caucasian sometimes includes dark-complected people, as in India, Southern Arabia, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Australian Aborigines and prehistoric Americans also show various Caucasoid features. In his autobiography, Adventures and Discoveries, Coon pointed out that “skin color was not uniquely racial. . . . Australoids and Negroids [are both] black. Nor did it [color] go with skulls and body skeletons necessarily. Thus the Somalis could be Caucasoid in face and build and Negroid in pigmentation. . . . Some Somalis . . . trim, erect, and elegant . . . were quite European looking.”

When I bring a new world into the time of semu, My presence quickens the substance into life; and according to the locality and the surroundings [e.a.] I bring forth the different species.

OAHSPE, BOOK OF JEHOVIH 5:13

Racial features appear to have been set in their mold from the time of quickening, which is to say, in the beginning—rather than as last-minute revisions, which evolutionists, particularly of the out-of-Africa school, maintain. Adam, in Mohammedan legend, being the first man, was created when God sent his angels to fetch handfuls of earth from different depths and of different colors; hence mankind were of different hues—from the beginning. The story is almost identical among the Hopi Indians: Spider Grandmother gathered four colors of mud—black, white, red, and yellow—with which she created the four races of man, each with its own language.

Darwin’s version of racial differences was determined by sexual selection: the races slowly differentiated themselves from their neighbors, influenced by slightly different standards of beauty. Thus, by a process of sexual selection, the characteristics of tribe and race came to be fixed. Wallace, however, was inclined toward the polygenist position, whereby the various races became differentiated before the time of Homo sapiens. As noted elsewhere, it is generally believed that culture (which is virtually synonymous with H. sapiens) brings a halt to physical evolution. As Gertrude Himmelfarb phrased it: “The ascendancy of mind, by putting an end to the evolution of man’s physical structure, fixed the different races in their different and permanent features.”46

Now this is exactly the opposite of both (1) Brace’s view that “changes in the cultural adaptive mechanism . . . [were] responsible for changes in face form and skin color,” and (2) Sherwood Washburn’s position that “the great antiquity of races is supported neither by the record nor by evolutionary theory.”47 Mexican Indians and Mongolians, according to this setup, share a common descent; but since crossing Beringia, “the Indians have evolved into a separate race.”48 It was also Hooton’s position that the races of man were established late, in the H. sapiens stage (ending ca 20 kya), by means of isolation, inbreeding, and mutation. Le Gros Clark also argued that the different races came about only after H. sapiens was established.

Nothing of the kind happened, according to the polygenists. The French school of protohistorians, for example, attribute separate origin to the races—black, white, yellow, red—which arose on different continents. Coon and Weidenreich and today’s multiregionalists also see distinctive racial traits expressed early on in the different H. erectus groups in different places: each of the four major evolutionary centers, in this view (and my own), was also a racial center. Evidence from Upper Cave Choukoutien, as Weidenreich saw it, indicated that differentiation of races had taken place long before the Upper Paleolithic. Coon, looking at the same cave specimens, saw Sinanthropus as the ancestor of all Mongoloids, while each of the other races evolved independently on their own turf, from an early type. Coon was able to demonstrate resemblances between pre–H. sapiens hominids and some of the living people of the same region, thus allowing racial characteristics to predate the appearance of modern man.

But under the strained theory of monogenism, which posits a single origin for all human beings, there should be no such resemblance. Coon, in this regard, challenged the monogenistic idea that in a short 20 or 30 or even 40 thousand years, the different races of H. sapiens could have taken shape. To him, the races of man were far older than H. sapiens and could not possibly descend (monogenetically) from a single regional stock. Neither can the highly respected, more recent, work of Vincent Sarich and Allan Wilson (on genetic distance) assign the formation of different human races to the skimpy span of 30 or 40 kyr, an implausibly short run of time for natural selection to do its work. The recency of races is also debatable on the basis of developmental locking and the end of the semuan phase 80 kya, as discussed above.

Yet out-of-Africa’s monogenism (single cradle of man) requires the races to be formed later in time. But I think the polygenists are right; men were cast in their mold (Negroid, Mongoloid, and so on) from the beginning, for each was raised up in their own division of Earth. It is monogenism’s spurious common ancestor that forces us to adopt “racial separation from a single root.” But the races never separated; in fact, they did the opposite—they came together!

Let’s look at this supposed ancestral tree: Do all living things really descend from a single entity that floated around in the primordial soup some 3 or 4 bya? The “wonderful unity in all living things” does not necessarily imply a common ancestor, but it is interpreted nonetheless as if it did, thus endorsing Darwinism “with a thundering voice for the validity of evolution theory.”49

Scientists, finding that our cerebral cortex is similar to the neurons inside the head of the ragworm (a lowly marine creature), then jump to the conclusion that “they were too similar to be of independent origin . . . [and] we must share a common ancestor.”50

Yes, DNA does confirm the basic biochemical identity of organisms, from bacteria to man. Fine. But these happen to be the same chemical elements throughout the cosmos, according to Harold Urey, Nobel Prize winner. Molecular unity does not prove we all come from one common ancestor, simply that this is how life is built. The fact that all life-forms have similar DNA patterns does not mean or even suggest we are all derived from the same batch. All we can conclude with certainty is that the blueprint is a mutual one.

On page 73 of his book, The Neck of the Giraffe, Francis Hitching makes a discovery. Based on the inviolacy of DNA’s germ plasm, “biology is forced into a precarious assumption: the first living creature must have had within itself the entire genetic potential to grow into—to create—every one of the trillions of plants and creatures that have lived since.” A bit of a stretch, don’t you think?

So now it is time to reevaluate the myth of the common ancestor. Ultimately this doctrine is the only way to banish the Creator’s hand from the web of life—even though we are reduced to the absurdity of postulating that all life evolved from one single common ancestor, say, bacteria, fungi, or the single-cell eukaryotic forms. Fred Hoyle rebuts this daring claim: “No evolutionary connection has ever existed . . . between so-called prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, between bacteria and yeast cells. . . . Evolution from a common stock? . . . We doubt that a terrestrial evolutionary connection ever existed between the plant and animal kingdom. . . . There is no reason why some of the categories [taxa, i.e., different species] . . . should not always have been separate.”51

Whenever it has been impossible to demonstrate a phyletic link (biological sequence in time) from one hominid to the next, the problem (which is really a death blow to Darwinism) vanishes simply by invoking a common ancestor! In the context of race origins, the imagined common ancestor (a dark African of the modern type, as discussed in chapter 11) simply branched out to whites on the one hand, yellows on the other, and so on. And the same falsehood posits an unknown common ancestor, even farther back in time, a creature that led to apes on one branch and to humans on another. The mythical common ancestor has become the understudy for the still missing link, but it remains promiscuous guesswork and intellectual jugglery.

Did Glasgow grow from a seed yielded by Edinburgh?

JOSEPH PRIESTLEY, LETTERS TO A PHILOSOPHICAL UNBELIEVER

Despite certain perfunctory merits of a “tree” (or bush) representing the ascent of man, such diagrams take for granted the evolution of all living things from one all-purpose progenitor, a single taproot. With man, however, we need always to look for (at least) two ancestors, for we are all hybrids!

The concept of a common ancestor is actually a relic of eighteenth century thinking, entertained by Darwin’s own grandfather Erasmus and his, Erasmus’s, contemporaries Diderot, Buffon, and Lamarck. Not only does this simple-minded model have all hominids branching off an ultimate anonymous ancestor, but the same setup is proposed for the Order of Primates: somewhere in the deep dark past, man and ape shared a common ancestor, then went their separate ways. As we’ve noted, that ancestor has never been found, despite an ambitious search. Nor have the required intermediates turned up.

Figure 10.11. Ancestral tree devised by Ernst Haeckel in 1899. In the 1970s Norman Macbeth wrote about these supposed ancestors of ours, which are however, as Norman Macbeth points out in Darwin Retried, “still present, although their former siblings are said to have worked up to human status. Thus one and the same ancient stock split into one group with astonishing plasticity, and another group with almost total rigidity. This is very hard to swallow.”

This much-pampered school of anthropogenesis, Darwin’s community of descent, has students of the problem forever searching for (but not finding): a common ancestor for Au and H. erectus; a common ancestor for Neanderthal and H. sapiens; a common ancestor shared by Neanderthals, mods, and Denisova, and so on down the line.

According to this scheme, time and evolution inexorably carry us further away from the body type of our shared ancestor. Darwin the monogenist believed in a common ancestry of the black and white races; Keith, along the same lines, thought “the extent of the differences between black and white indicates that the racial separation of the modern type of man must be placed far back in time.” He argued that the farther back we trace European and Negro, “the more the white and black ancestral forms should come to resemble each other. . . . There is good reason to think [the different races] have descended from a common ancestor. Yet this ancestor may show no sign or trace of the new feature. [Isn’t that odd?] We have in such cases to suppose that an evolutionary bias may be latent in . . . the ancestral stock. . . . We cannot explain the facts unless we accept [this] principle.”52

Principle? What kind of sorcery is this, planting a “bias or tendency” in our nonexistent, phantom progenitor? And isn’t this bias or tendency so like the Platonic essentialism, vitalism, or teleology that evolutionists laugh to scorn?

There is no coherent way to demonstrate that all the racial diversity among human beings came from a single ersatz ancestor who changed color like a chameleon. The races cannot honestly be traced back to, and did not differentiate from, a common stock; each race has its very own history. Negritos and Australians, for instance, “do not share a common ancestry but merely interbred.”53 And this is indeed what Dixon taught: “The existing varieties of man are to be explained not as . . . from a single ancestral form, but as developed by amalgamation . . . of several quite discrete types.”54 As for Coon, one researcher has written: “The only scholar who tried to offer us a coherent alternative [to Darwinian monogenism and single origin] is Professor Carleton Coon. . . . [in whose] monumental Origin of Races he tells us that the human race does not descend from a single ancestor but represents various types of Homo erectus. . . . which evolved independently of one another . . . in different parts of the world.”55

The bogus common ancestor Eve—the subject of the next chapter—is allegedly everyone’s mother, at least according to DNA spokespersons. Microbes, however, tend to “swap sections of DNA. . . . Cells have picked up chunks of DNA from completely different species to form new, hybrid genomes. Thus the idealized view of an unbroken branching history of DNA evolution from parent to daughter is invalid. There is no single common ancestor.”56