INTRODUCTION
THE UNEXPECTED FAMILY TREE
How was the beginning of man? How was it with the first of the living?
OAHSPE, BOOK OF JEHOVIH, 6:8
IN THE DOCKET
As the world looks on, America the beautiful has a nasty squabble on its hands that won’t go away. We just can’t seem to agree on the right way to teach human origins to our schoolchildren. More than once, the U.S. Supreme Court has stepped in, slapping the wrist of Bible belt states that saw fit to introduce creation science to the curriculum.*1 Emotional, confrontational, and guileful, too, the schism between God-free science and intelligent design (ID) has laid bare a great divide in our country—and in our world.
The U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment—ironically?—favors the nonbelievers, for religious doctrines may not be imposed (by law) on Americans. Yet religious Americans themselves feel imposed upon by school boards that have swung to the science side, not allowing God or design into the discussion. Science and religion, argued one of Darwinism’s more fluent advocates in 1999, Stephen Jay Gould, are “totally separate realms.”1 Yet today, with the theory of everything (ToE) looming large on the science horizon, Gould may be proven quite wrong about this intellectual apartheid. The single axiom, the great unity, that final theory that has not yet been ferreted from nature, promises to be sweeping enough to include amoeba, galaxy—and God.
Gould was not above using condescending terms like ignorance, absurdity, and anti-intellectualism in his (1999) polemic against America’s “religious fundamentalists.” He frankly thought God “an illusion” and the concept of soul “antiquated” (Ever Since Darwin). Like-minded citizens (most recently in Kansas, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Ohio) resent the creationist agenda for “posing a threat to the minds of our children.” Could well-educated people “really believe that ID [intelligent design] can rival evolution?” asks New Scientist, the influential British magazine that is today’s leading anticreationist gladiator; they swear that this is one “battle we cannot afford to lose.”2
They are right. Intelligent design is an awesome rival that could put them all out of business. ID has been around a lot longer than “AD,” Darwin’s accidental design (I jump into the debate in chapter 8). Although ID is labeled a creation myth by opponents, evolution itself is beset with so many indefinites as to qualify as our own state mythology, an unimpeachable sacred cow. It is ironic that the word indoctrination, which was once applied to the overbearing dogmas of religious teaching, can now apply to the tenets of atheism and its pet theory—evolution.
Gould’s remarks in that 1999 article make it abundantly clear that evolution brooks no heretics, for it is “one of the greatest triumphs of human discovery . . . as well documented as any phenomenon in science, as strongly as the earth’s revolution around the sun”; therefore “no one ignorant of evolution can understand science.” At the end of this book you are holding, the Earth will still be revolving around the sun, but will inquiring minds be revolving around Darwin’s pedigree for man? I hope not.
THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN
If Darwin’s evolution was the subversive underdog in the mid-nineteenth century, to oppose it today is the subversive, even unthinkable thing. Freedom of thought and speech? Not really. The new religion of the intelligentsia is nonreligion. This is a one-party system with its own secret policing, a kind of oligarchy, poised to keep adversaries at bay. Few among the educated, commented American anthropologist C. Loring Brace, could doubt evolution. What was once a nineteenth-century struggling theory is now an idée fixe. Human descent with modification (from apes) is now “an established truth . . . [like] the existence of atoms.”3 Darwinism, declared evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, is “the greatest intellectual revolution experienced by mankind.”4 But grandstanding doesn’t make it so.
Politicized, the functionaries of evolution deliver explanations in standardized terminology that serves as the straitjacket of evolution; for example, the term Java ape-man clearly prejudices things in favor of a missing link. Anthropoid, which means “manlike,” includes apes, humans, and monkeys! Even the agreement on a superfamily called Hominoidea is biased, for it lumps together the great apes and ourselves. Australopiths (Au) are called bipedal apes,5 though, as we’ll see, they were humans, not apes. Very recently indeed (2010) Douglas Palmer, like most other British anthropologists, still refers to Australopithecus afarensis as “these apes.” (Au. afarensis, we will see in chapter 1, were the earliest humans—not apes at all.) But the deck is loaded: Definition of hominid? All primates more like man than ape.
Biased terminology sets the stage, the new word hominin means any descendant of the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, including humans and their ancestors, as well as apes (chimps and gorillas). But the common ancestor dogma is pure assumption, which I confront in chapter 10.
PALEOPOLITICS
The subtext of all this confidence, this bravado, is the tumbling house of cards called evolution, laced with self-congratulation and softened with false modesty: When older Darwinian ideas are trumped by new evidence, why, this only shows that evolution is a marvelously flexible, healthy, and self-correcting science. But this is really built-in deniability, clothed as flexibility. John Feliks, writing about this, has said: “There is one far-reaching and influential field in which the quality of self-correction is notably absent. This is the field of human origins.” Feliks goes on to comment that “the system of peer review in paleoanthropology is devoted entirely to belief in Darwinian evolution. . . . Conflicting evidence must be kept from publication.”6
Dean Falk calls it paleopolitics: The VIPs of evolution disagree about almost everything except evolution itself. To my mind, the extent of quibbling is proportionate to its ill-founded premise. Almost every important find is contested amid a maelstrom of conflicting fossil information. One new fossil find, and everything gets reclassified. Referring to Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, and Neanderthal, paleoanthropologist Marvin L. Lubenow writes: “I cannot think of any scenario that more clearly demonstrates the meaninglessness of these categories.”7 What this means is that there exist no clearly defined taxa in the whole of human evolution. And for a good reason: All the overlapping among these types of fossil men is due not to evolution but to hybridization. Taxonomy doesn’t stand a chance in the face of the ongoing amalgamations that this book is about. Again and again, the fossil record is an unsolvable puzzle of mosaics—each hominid type possessing hopelessly mixed racial traits.
Despite the disagreements and conflicts in this field, “disputation,” argues the professional skeptic Michael Shermer, “is at the heart of a robust science.”8 But is nonstop infighting and sub rosa backstabbing really a sign of health and openness? Such debates, moreover, are all within evolutionary theory not between evolutionary theory and something else. Of course, the only disputation allowed is among insiders who may disagree on their competing models, triggering vicious debates, but they close rank and circle their wagons with the approach of “the empty logic of Darwin’s doubters.”9
The case of H. sapiens remains open and unsolved. Detective work is at its best when you seek whys and wherefores, not when you approach with forgone conclusions. Oh, there might be suspects, but even persons of interest are supposedly innocent until proven otherwise. Today, studies couched in evolution’s special jargon are designed to exemplify human evolution, not to test it, not to put it on trial. All alternatives, goes the Darwinian cant, have been “thoroughly refuted.”10 So why do the refutations continue without stint? Helena Cronin calls critics of evolution “not even in the same league.”11 Censorship, I am afraid, is built into this bureaucracy of knowledge, which now basks in a near-perfect monopoly. When evolutionists refer to an alternate theory as discredited—know that this means it was shot down summarily by the evolution police: examples might include the lost race theory (see chapter 2) or high civilization in the Mesolithic.
Finds, no matter which science we are talking about, are interpreted to satisfy the leading theories of the day. As in any industry, career is at stake—grants, promotions, tenure, publications, professional reputation, respectability. One candid professor of paleoanthropology had this to say about the state of the art: “Human evolution is a big deal these days. Leakey’s world known, Johanson is like a movie star. . . . Lecture circuit. National Science Foundation: big bucks. Everything is debatable, especially where money is involved. Sometimes people deliberately manipulate data to suit what they’re saying.”12 Another frank observer noted that “as essential funding is brought more and more under centralized government control, researchers have no alternative but to concentrate upon the agenda set by the paradigm.”13
Play by the rules, or you’re out of the game. You cannot go out and dig without money; and it is harder and harder to be funded without a promise of groundbreaking work. Breakthroughs in evolution are the cash cow.
Scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done. . . . [T]he system works against problem-solving. Because if you solve a problem, your funding ends. . . . Scientists are only too aware whom they are working for. Those who fund research . . . always have a particular outcome in mind.
MICHAEL CRICHTON, STATE OF FEAR
THE TRUTH WILL OUT
We live in an age when the truth will out, perhaps even more than we bargained for—bubbling to the surface in unexpected ways. As for myself, for forty years I have sat by and just kept my mouth shut, knowing my confreres in anthropology were not doing justice to the story of man’s extraordinary origin. I had to go off the reservation to find out for myself if we are really apes who got culture and a great brain. Recently, in the course of writing about the little people (Homo sapiens pygmaeus),*2 the house of cards called human evolution came tumbling down on my head. I knew I could not turn back: I had to write about man, the hybrid. This then is his checkered history.
This book is not concerned with biological evolution, only the ascent of man, who is, of course, a zoological entity (corporeal) but at the same time something more than an animal (something incorporeal), in a class by himself: a separate kingdom.
The origin of our genus . . . continues to inspire fiery debate.
DONALD JOHANSON AND ENRICO FERORELLI, “FACE TO FACE WITH LUCY’S FAMILY,” NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
I start this book on the premise that people (the races of man) don’t, didn’t, can’t, and couldn’t change or evolve (physically) to become something else. Notwithstanding hypothetical family trees and even more fanciful common ancestors, the question of origins today remains completely unsettled and open to interpretation. What evolutionists call change is, in my book, simply the result of commingling, different races mixing genes. Evolution’s transmutation of species reminds me of nothing so much as the medieval transmutation of lead into gold, an alchemy fed by legend, ambition, and illusion.
It is man’s ideas that have evolved.
LOREN EISELEY, THE IMMENSE JOURNEY
I don’t believe in physical evolution; our real evolution is in mettle, ethos, character. George Morley of the Kosmon Church in England put it this way: “There have been times when Man was more advanced than today. . . . In the civilisations of the ancient Egyptians and Persians, and earlier still on the grand continent which sank beneath the Pacific (Pan), we see great knowledge and wisdom, when men had understanding of the gods. . . . Then what is it that has advanced? It is the conditions of life . . . the ordinary comforts. . . . But it must ultimately come about that there will be a spiritual apotheosis to which Man will attain.”14
Human history, wrote author John W. White, my friend and publishing mentor, is a “process of ascent to godhood. . . . Cro-Magnon are distinguished from Neanderthal not so much by physical body design as by their greater intelligence which resulted in world’s first art, statuary, engravings, music, personal ornamentation, star charts . . . [and] more highly developed social systems. Altogether they showed a superior degree of consciousness.”15
THE NOOKIE FACTOR
Yes, many have already rebutted Darwinian evolution, but “so far, they have failed to find . . . a better theory to put in its place.”16 The disproving of evolution has already been done many times and done well by biologists, mathematicians, lawyers, Christians, prehistorians, science writers, and even paleontologists. But a real meaty alternative remains to be offered. If anything, Darwinism has succeeded by default. An alternative comes to life in these chapters, which present our two common ancestors, Asu and Ihin, whose races mingled to produce a third, the Druks (H. erectus). (See “Cast of Characters” below.)
We have a lot of ground to cover and missteps to unravel: To begin with, it took many decades for scholars to finally admit that supposed ancestors were actually contemporaries (chapter 3 is devoted to this). Then, more decades elapsed before it was conceded that those contemporaries (living side by side) actually interbred (the subject of chapter 5), producing the entire pantheon of hybrids known to us as the fossil record.
Read any scientific book about the races in today’s world and hardly a page goes by without mention of admixtures, crossings, half-breeds, and so on. It was the same in the ages of the past. Hiding in plain sight is the all-too-human factor of these mergers, what archaeologist Christopher Hardaker whimsically calls the nookie factor. So let’s cut to the chase:
We could have babies together.
CHRISTOPHER HARDAKER
The nookie factor actually stands Darwinism on its head. Whereas evolution has species lines branching out and separating (splitting) at some time in the distant past, crossbreeding entails quite the opposite: the different stocks came together, cohabited, to form new races. And we are all hybrids. Here’s the nub of this book: Fossils taken as representing stages of evolution or changes (by mutations) are herein shown to represent nothing more than the unstoppable intermixing of the Paleolithic races. Man the mixer is our constant theme. The peopling of the world, as drawn in these chapters, is about the mingling and merging of disparate types. No evolution there, just the continual confection of half-breeds and quarter-breeds, an exchange of genes since day one.
THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW
The present is not the key to the past.
MARVIN L. LUBENOW, BONES OF CONTENTION: A CREATIONIST ASSESSMENT OF HUMAN FOSSILS
Early man lived “amidst physical conditions far different from those which prevailed during Neolithic times,” observed paleogeologist George Frederick Wright. As we will again have occasion to note, past processes cannot be judged wholly by present ones. We find, however, that cannibalism in the protohistorical world, as an example, has been judged by modern standards, sanitized and interpreted as “the result of mortuary practices. . . . In view of the extreme scarcity of cannibalism in historic times, its very existence in prehistory is becoming hard to swallow.”17 We will, however, see this is quite wrong (chapter 1).
The uniformitarian fallacy: Should we assume the past is comparable to the present? Immanuel Velikovsky, for one, protested this notion, “the shortsighted belief that no forces could have shaped the world in the past that are not at work also at the present time, a belief that is the very foundation of modern geology and of the theory of evolution.”18 Neither can such specious comparisons reveal the lost continent of Pan, which calamity changed the history of the planet (see prologue). Earth was different in earlier times with forces no longer operative after the Semuan age (discussed in chapters 6, 7, and 10).
The terrestrial atmosphere was not the same in the remote past as it is now.
FRED HOYLE, EVOLUTION FROM SPACE
Today, no fossiliferous rocks are forming anywhere; nowhere are bones and shells lithified; (fossilization requires rapid burial in sediments). The scale of mountain building, volcanic activity, and even nonterrestrial bombardments was much greater in early periods of Earth history (see chapter 6). The thickness of limestone sediments point to precipitation on a gigantic scale, though this is not taking place anymore. Today, no sea or lake is forming evaporate beds comparable to ancient deposits of immense thickness.
Darwin’s theory of sexual selection in the distant past was based on the behavior of living creatures, working backward. Thus do his followers today make statements like: “Systematists can write a history of life on earth looking only at living species.”19 Paleontologists freely extrapolate from the present back to the past, called “back-reckoning”—a top-down approach.
Some have worked out Homo erectus demographics, assuming that their population dynamics were much like those of hunter-gatherer people today. They use population trends from historical time (along with other assumptions) to judge the extent of prehistorical populations (I challenge this in chapter 6).
In addition, our genetic history is supposedly revealed by a DNA tree that uses chromosomes from present-day humans. “One starts from . . . the present structure . . . and then looks at the fossil record . . . to derive filiation of these forms.”20 For example the out-of-Africa theory (explored in chapter 11) works back from present populations, using these mtDNA trees. The well-known 1987 study, based on 136 women from different parts of the world, purportedly leads us back to mitochondrial Eve, our presumed African ancestress. Yet it is pure assumption that “evolutionary” history can be read off our genes. And the idea of “colonizing” the world out of Africa is more congruent with today’s polieconomic Zeitgeist than with anything that happened in the Paleolithic. Imposing a Western expansionist framework on early man is just the sort of Eurocentrism that anthropology supposedly beats out of its acolytes. Variation (heterogeneity, diversity), we will see, was once much greater in the human family. This former diversity, as these chapters unfold, is actually the key that unlocks the door to the past.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
The unfamiliar names of the five races of men used in this book have been borrowed from the historical portions of Oahspe: A New Bible in the Words of Jehovih and His Angel Embassadors, the dazzling, encyclopedic, lost records that open up many obscure aspects of Paleolithic culture to our understanding.*3
First race of man, Asu: bedrock mortal, the first “adam,” though insapient; a close precursor of Australopithecus, represented best by Africa’s Ardipithecus, dwelling on land and in trees and without speech and meager in consciousness. Since su means “spirit,” Asu means “man without spirit,” which is to say, before upgraded to true human status.
Second race of man, Ihin: the sacred little people (only three feet tall), the gracile AMHs (anatomically modern humans) of the very early record, with Europoid features—the root stock of Homo sapiens pygmaeus; like biblical Abel, in the sense of being able to think, understand, and commune spiritually. Appeared on Earth only six thousand years after the first generation of Asu. (An extensive history of the Ihins can be found in my prequel The Lost History of the Little People.)
Third race of man, Druk: a cross (though forbidden) between Asu man and Ihin; equivalent in many cases to H. erectus and also to the biblical Cain; also known as the ground people (pit dwellers); omnivorous, long-armed, curved back, often quite large (“giants”). They were the third race, just as H. erectus has been called “the third identifiable hominid.”21 Known also as the barbarian hordes. In this book I often use the name Druk interchangeably with H. erectus.
Fourth race of man, Ihuan: has mostly AMH features. Three times produced (72, 39, and 20 kya) by crossing Ihin and Druk. Best known as the Aurignacian and Solutrean Cro-Magnon in Europe: tall, strong, and copper-colored “mighty men”; the last Ihuans to survive into the modern era were the American Paleo-Indians.
Fifth race of man, Ghan: a cross between Ihin and Ihuan; fully modern in type, Homo sapiens sapiens, beginning around the time of Apollo, eighteen thousand years ago in both the Old and New Worlds (see appendix B). Stately but willful souls with all the arts and sciences of man. Kings and born conquerors. Masters of the sun kingdoms in the Mesolithic. They tamed the Earth.