In 1966 respected archeologist Virginia Steen-McIntyre and her associates on a U.S. Geological Survey team working under a grant from the National Science Foundation were called upon to date a pair of remarkable archeological sites in Mexico. Sophisticated stone tools rivaling the best work of Cro-magnon man in Europe had been discovered at Hueyatlaco, while somewhat cruder implements had been turned up at nearby El Horno. The sites, it was conjectured, were very ancient, perhaps as old as 20,000 years, which, according to prevailing theories, would place them very close to the dawn of human habitation in the Americas.

Steen-McIntyre, knowing that if such antiquity could indeed be authenticated, her career would be made, set about an exhaustive series of tests. Using four different, but well accepted, dating methods, including uranium series and fission track, she determined to get it right. Nevertheless, when the results came in, the original estimates proved to be way off. Way under as it turned out. The actual age was conclusively demonstrated to be more like a quarter of a million years.

As we might expect, some controversy ensued.

Steen-McIntyre's date challenged not only accepted chronologies for human presence in the region, but contradicted established notions of how long modern humans could have been anywhere on Earth. Nevertheless, the massive reexamination of orthodox theory and the wholesale rewriting of textbooks which one might logically have expected did not ensue. What did follow was the public ridicule of Steen-McIntyre's work and the vilification of her character. She has not been able to find work in her field since.

More than a century earlier, following the discovery of gold in California's Table Mountain and the subsequent digging of thousands of feet of mining shafts, miners began to bring up hundreds of stone artifacts and even human fossils. Despite their origin in geological strata documented at 9 to 55 million years in age, California state geologist J. D. Whitney was able subsequently to authenticate many of the finds and to produce an extensive and authoritative report. The implications of Whitney's evidence have never been properly answered or explained by the establishment, yet the entire episode has been virtually ignored and references to it have vanished from the textbooks.

For decades miners in South Africa have been turning up from strata nearly three billion years in age hundreds of small metallic spheres with encircling parallel grooves. Thus far, the scientific community has failed to take note.

Among scores of such cases cited in the recently published Forbidden Archeology (and in the condensed version The Hidden History of the Human Race) it is clear that these three are by no means uncommon. Suggesting nothing less than a massive cover-up, co-authors Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson believe that when it comes to explaining the origins of the human race on earth, academic science has cooked the books.

While the public may believe that all the real evidence supports the mainstream theory of evolution with its familiar timetable for human development (i.e., Homo Sapiens of the modern type going back to only about 100,000 years) Cremo and Thompson demonstrate that, to the contrary, a virtual mountain of evidence produced by reputable scientists applying standards just as exacting, if not more so, than the establishment has been not only ignored but, in many cases, actually suppressed. In every area of research, from paleontology to anthropology and archeology, that which is presented to the public as established and irrefutable fact is indeed nothing more, says Cremo, than a consensus arrived at by powerful groups of people.

Is that consensus justified by the evidence? Cremo and Thompson say no.

Carefully citing all available documentation, the authors produce case after case of contradictory research conducted in the last two centuries. Included are detailed descriptions of the controversy and ultimate suppression following each discovery. Typical is the case of George Carter who claimed to have found, at an excavation in San Diego, hearths and crude stone tools at levels corresponding to the last interglacial period, some 80,000-90,000 years ago. Even though Carter's work was endorsed by some experts such as lithic scholar John Witthoft, the establishment scoffed. San Diego State University refused to even look at the evidence in its own back yard and Harvard University publicly defamed him in a course on Fantastic Archeology.

What emerges is a picture of an arrogant and bigoted academic elite interested more in the preservation of its own prerogatives and authority than the truth.

Needless to say, the weighty (952 page) volume has caused more than a little stir. The establishment, as one might expect, is outraged, albeit having a difficult time ignoring the book. Anthropologist Richard Leakey wrote, Your book is pure humbug and does not deserve to be taken seriously by anyone but a fool. Nevertheless, many prestigious scientific publications including The American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Geo Archeology, and the British Journal for the History of Science have deigned to review the book, and while generally critical of its arguments, have conceded, though grudgingly, that Forbidden Archeology is well written and well researched. Some indeed recognize a significant challenge to the prevailing theories. As William Howells wrote in Physical Anthropologist, To have modern human beings...appearing a great deal earlier, in fact at a time when even simple primates did not exist as possible ancestors, would be devastating not only to the accepted pattern, it would be devastating to the whole theory of evolution, which has been pretty robust up until now.

Yet despite its considerable challenge to the evolutionary edifice, Forbidden Archeology chooses not to align itself with the familiar creationist point of view nor to attempt an alternative theory of its own. The task of presenting his own complex theory which seeks, he says, to avoid the false choice, usually presented in the media between evolution and creationism Cremo has reserved as the subject of a forthcoming book Human Evolution. On the question of human origins, he insists, we really do have to go back to the drawing board.

As the author told Atlantis Rising recently, Forbidden Archaeology suggests the real need for an alternative explanation, a new synthesis. I'm going to get into that in detail. And it's going to have elements of the Darwinian idea, and elements of the ancient astronaut theory, and elements of the creationist nature, but it's going to be much more complex. I think we've become accustomed to overly simplistic pictures of human origins, whereas the reality is a little more complicated than any advocates of the current ideas are prepared to admit.

Both Cremo and Thompson are members of the Bhaktivedanta Institute the Science Studies Branch of the International Society for Krishna consciousness. Cremo and Thompson started their project with the goal of finding evidence to corroborate the ancient Sanskrit writings of India which relate episodes of human history going back millions of years.

So we thought, says Cremo, if there's any truth to those ancient writings, there should be some physical evidence to back it up but we really didn't find it in the current textbooks. They didn't stop there though. Over the next eight years Cremo and Thompson investigated the entire history of archeology and anthropology, delving into everything that has been discovered, not just what has been reported in text books. What they found was a revelation. I thought there might be a few little things that have been swept under the rug, said Cremo, but what I found was truly amazing. There's actually a massive amount of evidence that's been suppressed.

Cremo and Thompson determined to produce a book of irrefutable archeological facts. The standard used, says Cremo, (meant) the site had to be identifiable, there had to be good geological evidence on the age of the site and there had to be some reporting about it, in most cases in the scientific literature. The quality and quantity of the evidence they hoped would compel serious examination by professionals in the field, as well as by students, and the general public.

Few would deny that they have succeeded in spectacular fashion. Much in demand in alternative science circles, the authors have also found a sympathetic audience among the self-termed sociologists of scientific knowledge, who are very aware of the failure of modern scientific method to present a truly objective picture of reality. An upcoming NBC special, The Mysterious Origins of Man draws heavily upon Cremo and Thompson's suggestion that there is a knowledge filter among the scientific elite which has given us a picture of prehistory which is largely incorrect.

The problem, Cremo believes, is both misfeasance and malfeasance. You can find many cases where it's just an automatic process. It's just human nature that a person will tend to reject things that don't fit in with his particular world view. He cites the example of a young paleontologist and expert on ancient whale bones at the Museum of Natural History in San Diego. When asked if he ever saw signs of human marks on any of the bones, the scientist remarked, I tend to stay away from anything that has to do with humans because it's just too controversial. Cremo sees the response as an innocent one from someone interested in protecting his career. In other areas, though, he perceives something much more vicious, as in the case of Virginia Steen-McIntyre. What she found was that she wasn't able to get her report published. She lost the teaching position at the university. She was labeled a publicity seeker and a maverick in her profession. And she really hasn't been able to work as a professional geologist since then.

In other examples, Cremo finds even broader signs of deliberate malfeasance. He mentions the activities of the Rockefeller foundation, which funded Davidson Black's research at Zhoukoudian (in China). Correspondence between Black and his superiors with the Foundation shows that research and archeology was part of a far larger biological research project, (from the correspondence) thus we may gain information about our behavior of the sort that can lead to wide and beneficial control. In other words, this research was being funded with the specific goal of control. Control by whom? Cremo wants to know.

The motive to manipulate is not so hard to understand. There's a lot of social power connected with explaining who we are and what we are, he says. Somebody once said knowledge is power. You could also say power is knowledge. Some people have particular power and prestige that enables them to dictate the agenda of our society. I think it's not surprising that they are resistant to any change.

Cremo agrees that scientists today have become a virtual priest class, exercising many of the rights and prerogatives which their forebears in the industrial scientific revolution sought to wrest from an entrenched religious establishment. They set the tone and the direction for our civilization on a worldwide basis, he says. If you want to know something today you usually don't go to a priest or a spiritually inclined person, you go to one of these people because they've convinced us that our world is a very mechanistic place, and everything can be explained mechanically by the laws of physics and chemistry which are currently accepted by the establishment.

To Cremo it seems the scientists have usurped the keys of the kingdom, and then failed to live up to their promises. In many ways the environmental crisis and the political crisis and the crisis in values is their doing. And I think many people are becoming aware that (the scientists) really haven't been able to deliver the kingdom to which they claimed to have the keys. I think many people are starting to see that the world view they are presenting, just doesn't account for everything in human experience.

For Cremo we are all part of a cosmic hierarchy of beings, a view for which he finds corroboration in world mythologies. If you look at all of those traditions, when they talk about origins they don't talk about it as something that just occurs on this planet. There are extraterrestrial contacts with gods, demigods, goddesses, angels. And he feels there may be parallels in the modern UFO phenomenon.

The failure of modern science to satisfactorily deal with UFOs, extra-sensory perception or the paranormal provides one of the principle charges against it. I would have to say that the evidence of such today is very strong, he argues. It's very difficult to ignore. It's not something that you can just sweep away. If you were to just reject all of the evidence for UFOs, abductions and other kinds of contacts coming from so many reputable sources, it seems we have to give up accepting any kind of human testimony whatsoever.

One area where orthodoxy has been frequently challenged is in the notion of sudden change brought about by enormous cataclysm, versus the gradualism usually conceived of by evolutionists. Even though it has become fashionable to talk of such events, they have been relegated to the very distant past supposedly before the appearance of man. Yet some like Immanual Velikovsky and others have argued that many such events have occurred in our past and induced a kind of planetary amnesia from which we still suffer today.

That such catastrophic episodes have occurred and that humanity has suffered from some great forgettings, Cremo agrees. I think there is a kind of amnesia which when we encounter the actual records of catastrophes, it makes us think, oh well, this is just mythology. In other words, I think some knowledge of these catastrophes does survive in ancient writings and cultures and through oral traditions. But because of what you might call some social amnesia, as we encounter those things we are not able to accept them as truth. I also think there's a deliberate attempt on the part of those who are now in control of the world's intellectual life to make us disbelieve and forget the paranormal and related phenomena. I think there's a definite attempt to keep us in a state of forgetfulness about these things.

It's all part of the politics of ideas. Says Cremo, It's been a struggle that's been going on thousands and thousands of years and it's still going on.

Forbidden Archeology is available from Torchlight Publishing. For more information write to: Torchlight Publishing, P.O. Box 177, Badger, CA 93603, or phone: 1-800-443-3361.