From Where Do We Come?

[suchandra]

Nice gesture of Michael Cremo, to give credit to Hare Krishna, "Later while attending a Grateful Dead concert, some Hare Krishnas presented him a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. He read it carefully, and immersed himself in yoga before joining the staff of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. At about this time he began a career in writing."

 

From where do we come?

17:00 Fri 07 Dec 2007 - Bennett Tohara

SOFIAECHO

 

 

Archaeologist and author Michael Cremo encourages audiences to not always accept scientific ‘fact’

 

PHOTOS: BENNETT TOHARA

 

Three-o-five pm, and still no entourage. “That was Stella Hristova, the co-ordinator of this speaking event,” announced a college administrator as she folded her cell phone.

“She said they’ll be an hour late.” The audience began fidgeting and sighing. A few exited the lecture hall. Finally at 3.30pm, a grey-haired man surrounded by local journalists made his entry, and proceeded to set up a laptop-aided presentation.

Michael Cremo apologised to the gathering, explaining how he and his two assistants had just arrived from Rousse, where he had delivered a lecture. Opting to take a shortcut to Dobrich via a rural highway, they ended up getting lost.

A controversial archaeologist and best-selling writer, Cremo opened his talk by posing the age-old question of how long humans have inhabited the earth. According to the most widely accepted theory, anatomically modern humans appeared about 150 000 years ago, and as first put forward in 1859 by the biologist Charles Darwin, share a common ancestor with other primates – or in more colloquial parlance, evolved from monkeys.

The long heritage of humanity

Cremo, as many have done since, challenges this supposition. “Over the years, I’ve gathered many studies that point to humanity’s presence on earth going back far longer than what is conventionally believed,” he said. At the same time, he has discovered that evidence or ideas that undermine the prevailing Darwinian school of thought get expediently locked away and censored.

For the next hour, he presented numerous “suppressed” findings to back his claims. Among them was a site in Hueyatlaco, Mexico where rather advanced stone tools have been unearthed. American geologist Virginia Steel-McIntyre, using four different methods, including uranium-based measurements, dated the volcanic ash strata encapsulating them as having formed about 250 000 years ago (where as most scholars date the appearance of humans in the Western Hemisphere to between 15 000 to 35 000 years before the present era).

Her detractors pointed out that she had been only a graduate student when she conducted the analyses, which themselves were questionable. Despite warnings not to publish her findings, Steel-McIntyre eventually did so in 1981. “Following a barrage of criticism, she lost her university position,” Cremo said.

He also produced an old copy of a newspaper article from 1891, reporting how a woman in Illinois had found a gold chain embedded in a chunk of coal she had broken open, purportedly 300 million years old. And perhaps most bizarre were metallic spheres with parallel grooves around its circumference found deep in mines in South Africa. Its bed layer was said to date back more than two billion years.

“I could go on till Christmas citing case after case, which clearly shows that humans had walked on Earth millions and billions of years ago,” Cremo said. He maintained, however, that his motive was not overthrowing current, accepted views, but to have dissenting hypotheses and facts taken seriously, and examined in an open and objective matter – and if called for, to supersede reigning theories.

He also emphasised these alternative ideas were neither his, nor “New Age”. “The ancient Sanskrit writings of India, the Bible, the Koran… all religions have said that people and all organisms appeared on Earth at the beginning of life itself.”

The levels of personal inspiration

According to his website (www.mcremo.com), the inspiration for his quest came during his early travels through Europe when he met some Scandinavian backpackers who fascinated him with their tales of India. Cremo then journeyed through the Middle East, but had to turn back before reaching the subcontinent.

Later while attending a Grateful Dead concert, some Hare Krishnas presented him a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. He read it carefully, and immersed himself in yoga before joining the staff of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. At about this time he began a career in writing.

A member of the History of Science Society, the World Archaeological Congress, the Philosophy of Science Association, the European Association of Archaeologists and an associate member of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, Cremo currently does research and writes on the history and philosophy of science. He has presented his findings and postulations at numerous institutions including the Royal Society of London, the Russian Academy of Science in St Petersburg and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Of his numerous books, two – Forbidden Archaeology and The Hidden History of the Human Race, along with several others by various authors – served as the basis for the NBC documentary The Mysterious Origin of Man. As well as serving as a consultant, Cremo was featured in several interviews. “NBC had been pressured not to air the programme, but went ahead in February 1996,” he said.

The result was a firestorm. Letters, phone calls and e-mails poured in. Many leading academics were incensed, accusing NBC and show producer Bill Cote of misleading children and duping gullible segments of the public with the pseudo-science of charlatans. Geologist Paul Heinrich disputed many of the claims made on the programme, providing what he called logical explanations. Others commended the network for their courage in disseminating startling revelations in the face of fierce opposition.

The feedback of Bulgaria

Having finished his presentation to our Dobrich group, Cremo then fielded questions from the audience. One listener, Todor Radev, brought up the findings of genetic research, specifically mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomal studies that have traced human origins back to east Africa – 150 000 years ago. Cremo explained that certain gaps existed in the genealogical tree, for example, when an individual, a tribe or nation early in human history may not have left any surviving offspring or died off, and thus terminating their lineage.

Another attendee, local archaeologist Todor Dimov, asked about the reactions Cremo tended to receive from the scientific community. He answered that they fell into three categories. Those in the first group label him a quack and reject his ideas outright. “But these scientists are in the minority. They haven’t really delved into the facts, and are driven less by science, and more by ideology (academic politics) because it threatens to collapse their entire belief system,” he said. And with it their entire careers, reputations and self-identities.

In this regard, he accused the Darwinist establishment of hypocritically succeeding those who persecuted Charles Darwin himself when he first came out with his theories. And on the opposite spectrum are those wholeheartedly inspired by Cremo and delightfully invite him to give talks.

The majority of scholars, however, fall in the middle. They are open and receptive to new evidence and radical concepts, but still to the conventional Darwinian framework, as under current circumstances, it provides the best working model.

The devolution of evolution

Moving away from hard sciences, Roumen Todorov raised questions concerning the progression of civilisation and what the future holds for humanity.

Here, Cremo highlighted a fundamental difference in the notion of time between the Darwinian mode, conceived paradoxically in the Judeo-Christian backdrop, and that of the pre-Christian, Indo-European cosmic view, held by Hindus, ancient Greeks and Celts. The former sees time as a single, linear progression; the latter, cyclical in nature. “Life, human existence and civilisations, according to (what is now regarded as) Eastern cosmology, all undergo a continuous series of beginnings and endings,” he explained.

On a more terrestrial level, another distinction, as Cremo elaborated in his book Human Devolution: A Vedic alternative to Darwin’s theory, is that evolution has humans and complex organisms “ascending” from simpler, more “primitive” forms, and ultimately from chemical concoctions. “Humans, according to ancient Sanskrit literature, emanated from Pure Consciousness, then ‘devolved’ to the framework that Darwin had come to observe and formulate: the survival of the fittest, natural selection, and competition for food, possessions and mates,” Cremo said.

The broader implications of this, he extrapolated, was the ongoing competition for wealth, resources, territory, control and power that has underlined all crime, corruption and conflicts between individuals, institutions, socio-economic classes, nations, political blocks and religions. It also drives people to exploit and destroy the environment in their quest of satisfying their insatiable wants.

As Cremo sees it, the solution to these worldly ills, begins with the young. “We should not limit what is taught in schools, instead presenting different ideas and concepts, then let students decide for themselves.”

Ideally he would like to see a shift in people’s values and attitudes away from the Darwinian approach that has gripped most of humanity for most of its history, and towards “a new consciousness and paradigm”.

After autographing his book, a Bulgarian translation of The Hidden History of the Human Race, and speaking some more with others, he spirited off to his next speaking engagement in Shoumen.

During his stay in Bulgaria, from October 11 to November 11, his third since 2003, Cremo gave talks throughout the country, meeting academics the general public, and toured numerous archaeological, cultural and nature sites. During a previous visit to Rila Monastery, he said of its frescoes, “They perfectly reflect my idea of the cosmic hierarchy, and have much common with my theory of human devolution.”