Genesis, the Biblical story of creation, tells us God created the universe in six days. He made Adam, the first man, the Bible tells us, from the dust of the earth, an event many Christians believe took place in the Garden of Eden 6,000 years ago. Scientists and religious scholars call this scenario creationism. In 1859, Charles Darwin came up with another idea. He said man s existence could be explained within the context of material creation alone, through evolution and natural selection, the survival of the fittest. According to Darwin, man evolved from apes, an idea distinctly at odds with the Biblical scenario.

The debate over human origins has raged ever since. It surfaced more recently in Abbotsford, British Columbia, where a school board dominated by Christians requires the teaching of Intelligent Design, a form of creationism, along with the theory of evolution. Reports Maclean s Magazine, The issue they are debating is a large one ... arguably the biggest question of them all: how did life begin ... with a Big Bang or a Big Being?'

Critics of the Abbotsford policy fear the school board would place the Book of Genesis on a par with Darwin s Origin of Species. They accuse the board of imposing their religious beliefs on students, while some Christians believe that teaching Darwinism amounts to the same thing, the imposition of a de facto religious belief-system.

Recent studies show, however, that adherents to either side of this wrangle would do well to rethink their positions. A reexamination of old and new research reveals that the creationism versus Darwinism debate may be missing the mark entirely.

Richard Thompson and Michael Cremo, co-authors of Forbidden Archeology and The Hidden History of the Human Race, have assembled a body of evidence that testifies to the existence of modern man millions of years before his supposed emergence from southern Africa 100,000 years ago. On The Mysterious Origins Of Man, an NBC documentary scheduled to air in February, Thompson and Cremo make their case along with other experts. The evidence they reveal suggests man neither evolved from apes nor rose from the dust of the earth just 4,000 years before the time of Christ. The implications are profound and may force a reevaluation of the entire issue of human origins.

Narrated by Charlton Heston and drawing on evidence largely ignored by the scientific establishment, Mysterious Origins steps outside the usual Bible versus Darwin debate. At issue are human footprints discovered in Texas side by side with dinosaur tracks, stone tools dating back 55 million years, sophisticated maps of unknown antiquity, and evidence of advanced civilization in prehistory.

Based on research assembled as Darwin began to dominate scientific thought at the turn of the century, and upon more recent archaeological discoveries, Mysterious Origins exposes a knowledge filter' within the scientific establishment, a bias that favors accepted dogma while rejecting evidence that does not support conventional theory. As a result, fossil evidence indicating man is far more ancient than conventional theory allows, and that he did not evolve from apes, has gathered dust for over a century, suppressed, in effect, because it conflicts with an entrenched belief-system, the NBC documentary reveals. Scientists, moreover, who challenge accepted dogma, can find themselves, not only on the outside of the debate, but unemployed.

Thompson, science investigator Richard Milton, and other experts, trace the problem to speculative leaps' made by researchers too eager to find the missing link in human evolution, the long-sought-after ancestor of both man and apes. It seems any missing link will do, Milton says, regarding the 120-year effort to prove Darwin s theory.

In the case of so-called Pithecanthropus Ape man (a.k.a. Java Man, homo erectus), anthropologist Eugene Dubois found a human thigh bone and the skull cap of an ape, in Indonesia, separated by a distance of forty feet. The year was 1891. He pieced the two together, creating the famous Java Man. But many experts say the thigh bone and skull cap are unrelated. Shortly before his death, Dubois himself said the skull cap belonged to a large monkey, and the thigh bone to a man. Yet Java Man remains to this day, to many, evidence of man s descent from apes, having been featured in New York s Museum of Natural History until 1984.

In the case of Piltdown Man, another missing link wanna-be found in England in 1910, the find proved to be a sophisticated fraud perpetrated, in all likelihood, by overly zealous Darwinists. And even the crown jewel of alleged human ancestral fossils, the famous Lucy, found in Ethiopia in 1974, is indistinguishable from a monkey or extinct ape, according to many anthropologists.

Physical anthropologist Charles Oxnard, and other scientists, have drawn a picture of human evolution radically at odds with the conventional theory, a fact usually ignored by universities and natural history museums. Oxnard placed the genus Homo, to which man belongs, in a far more ancient time period than standard evolutionary theory allows, bringing into question the underpinnings of Darwin s theory. As reported in Cremo and Thompson s Hidden History, Oxnard states, The conventional notion of human evolution must now be heavily modified or even rejected ... new concepts must be explored.'

What pains other opponents of standard evolutionary theory is its inability to account for how new species and features originate, the supposition that the innumerable aspects of biological life, down to the pores in human skin, a beetle s legs, the protective pads on a camel knees, and on and on, came about accidentally through natural selection. The notion of intent, or inherent purpose, within creation does not fit into the Darwinian version of reality. Life, to a Darwinist, can only exist in the context of absolute materialism, a series of accidental events and chemical reactions responsible for everything in the universe. Even common sense seems to take a back seat to scientific dogma. In the case of the human brain, for instance, its advanced capacities (the ability to perform calculus, play the violin, consciousness itself) cannot be explained by the survival of the fittest doctrine alone.

What about the Bible and Creationism?

The creationist argument derives from orthodox religious doctrine, rejecting allegorical and metaphorical interpretations of the Book of Genesis. It is a belief system many Christians do not accept literally and which the Bible itself may not support. It also lacks scientific support, in that fossil records reveal man has existed on Earth for far longer than 6,000 years. The six days of creation scenario, moreover, taken literally, bears no resemblance to the time it took for the universe to be born. The more common-sense notion of Intelligent Design, however, creationism without the dogma, strikes a more palatable note, even among some scientists, who find it hard to deny that an inherent intelligence exists within the universe. The problem with creationism lies, then, not in the idea of intelligent design, but in dogmatic interpretations of the Bible, the lack of mental flexibility shared by both extremes in the debate over human origins.

New Ground, or Ancient Wisdom?

Evidence for extremely ancient human origins will lead many into foreign territory, terrain some would rather avoid. But to others, the standard creationism versus evolution debate was wanting all along. Once looked upon with raised eyebrows, and still facing dogged opposition, the catastrophist point of view has made headway of late in the scientific community. This theory says that sudden disruptions in the continuity of planetary life have taken place, altering the course of evolution (Gradualism , on the other hand, a Darwinist tenet that assumes all life evolved slowly and without interruption, has fallen out of favor in some circles). Indeed, it has become clear that all sorts of catastrophes have taken place on the globe, and in the universe at large. A well known catastrophist theory proposes that the extinction of the dinosaurs resulted from a huge meteor crashing into the planet with the force of thousands of hydrogen bombs. Other theories have to do with drastic changes in climate, seismic upheavals and fluctuations, even reversals, in the Earth s magnetic field.

The catastophism versus gradualism debate, while revealing how little science knows for certain about prehistory, also exposes a distinct prejudice within the scientific communityÑ an antipathy, dating to the time of Darwin, toward anything remotely resembling Biblical catastrophes, such as the great flood, even if the connection has only to do with sudden, rather than gradual, changes in the course of evolution.

Catastrophism, though, avails another scenario regarding human origins and prehistory. As presented in Graham Hancock s Fingerprints of the Gods and in Rand and Rose Flem-Ath s When the Sky Fell, a sudden, catastrophic shifting of the earth s lithosphere, called crustal displacement, may have occurred at some time in the past. Lent credibility by Albert Einstein, the theory suggests that the earth s outer crust may have suddenly (not gradually, as in Continental Drift) shifted on the surface of the globe, causing continents to slide into radically different positions.

Drawing on the work of Charles Hapgood, who developed the theory with Einstein s assistance, the Flem-Aths explain that this may be the reason carcasses of hundreds of woolly mammoths, rhinos and other ancient mammals were found flash-frozen in a zone of death' across Siberia and northern Canada. Remarkably, the stomachs of these mammals contained warm-weather plants, the implication being that the very ground upon which the animals grazed suddenly shifted from a temperate to an Arctic climate. Hapgood and Einstein theorized that a sudden shifting and freezing of the continent of Antarctica, which may have been situated 2,000 miles farther north than it is now, may have occurred as a result of crustal displacement.

Ancient maps, accurately depicting Antarctica before it was covered in ice, also support the idea that the continent was situated in a temperate climate in recent prehistory. Copied from source maps of unknown antiquity, the Piri Reis, Oronteus Finaeus and Mercator maps derive, Graham Hancock and the Flem-Aths propose, from some prehistoric society with the capacity to accurately calculate longitude and chart coastlines, an accomplishment that did not take place in recorded history until the eighteenth century. As outlined in Flem-Ath and Hancock s books, the maps, along with a body of evidence, testify to the existence of a sophisticated prehistoric civilization. Charlton Heston, on NBC s Mysterious Origins, likens this scenario to Plato s description of the lost continent of Atlantis.

Lost Civilizations, the real missing link?

Examining stone work at ancient cites in Bolivia, Peru, and Egypt, Hancock argues that these megalithic marvels could not have risen from the dust of nomadic hunter-gatherers, which is what conventional science would have us believe. The magnificent city of Tiahuanaco, Bolivia, emerges as a case in point, said by Bolivian scholar, Arthur Poznansky, to date to 15,000 B.C. Precision stone cuttings performed on immense blocks at Tiahuanaco, and at the other cites, to tolerances of one-fiftieth of an inch, and then the transporting of these blocks over long distances, reveal technical capacities that match or surpass those of modern engineers. How supposedly primitive people transported these megaliths, to the summit of Machu Picchu in Peru, for instance, remains a great mystery, feats that conventional scientific theories are at a loss to explain. Hancock asserts that, even if we accept the later dates most archaeologists ascribed to these structures, the knowledge and technical abilities of the builders would had to have been the product of a civilization that evolved over a long period of time, pushing the appearance of civilized man to the predawn of recorded history.

My view,' Hancock says, is that we are looking at a common influence that touched all of these places, long before recorded history, a remote third-party civilization yet to be identified by historians.'

A wide range of natural evidence and recorded human experience points to the existence of such a civilization. Etymology, the study of word origins, postulates that a prehistoric Indo-European language must have existed to account for the deep similarities in the world s languages. Could this have been the language of Hancock s prehistoric civilization?

Santillana s Hamlet s Mill, a study of how ancient myths depict the procession of the equinoxes, weighs in also, testifying to the existence of advanced knowledge proliferated among prehistoric peoples. Discussing myths that originate in the mists of antiquity, and the numerical values and symbology recorded therein, Santillana reveals that the ancients of many cultures shared a sophisticated knowledge of celestial mechanics that has only recently been matched with the help of satellites and computers. The proliferation of closely related biological species on continents separated by vast oceans, a phenomenon that puzzles Darwinists, can also be explained by the existence of an advanced, seafaring civilization in prehistory. An entire body of evidence, in fact, supports man and civilization having existed at a far earlier date than orthodox science or religion concedes. Could the existence, then, of such a civilization, be the real missing link in human history?

Why limit the debate to Western models?

The conventional debate over our origins, as we find it characterized in the major media, ignores concepts of human and cosmic origins shared by a large portion of the world s population, those of the mystic East. Einstein himself entertained such ideas, because they supported his belief in a universal intelligence. More recently, physicist and Nobel Laureate, Brian Josephson, and others, have drawn parallels between Eastern mysticism and modern physics. Fritjof Capra, in The Tao of Physics, harmonizes Vedic, Buddhist and Taoist philosophy with the subtleties of quantum theory. The Vedas, in fact, present a scenario similar to the expanding and contracting universe of modern physics, the Great In breath and Out breath of creation, the projection of omnipresent consciousness, Brahman, the essence of which remains intrinsic to all things as creation evolves. Taoism, on the other hand, offers an understanding of conscious reality that closely resembles Heisenberg s uncertainty principle, where perspective, or consciousness, shapes objective reality.

To Einstein, especially in his later years, the idea of consciousness-based reality became naturally apparent, as it does now to others in the field of physics, philosophy, and religion, the awareness of a universal, conscious presence inseparable from identity and creation. As I grow older,' Einstein said,' the identification with the here and now [his famous space-time] is slowly lost. One feels dissolved, merged into nature.'

The greatest minds, then, of our time and of the greatest antiquity, reject Darwin s often unstated premise, his belief in absolute materialism, which says that all life evolved from primitive matter, accidentally, without purpose or design. At the same time, consciousness-based creation offers an alternative to strict Biblical interpretations and the concept of an anthropomorphic creator separate from man and nature.

Establishment science, though, has had a hands-off approach to consciousness, never daring to explore what by definition cannot be explained by matter-based beliefs about the origin of life. An article in the December issue of Scientific American, by David Chalmers, The Puzzle of Conscious Experience, emphasizes the point.

For many years,' Chalmers says, consciousness was shunned by researchers...The prevailing view was that science, which depends on objectivity, could not accommodate something as subjective as consciousness.' Chalmers goes on to say that neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers are only recently beginning to reject the idea that consciousness cannot be studied. He proposes, while insisting that consciousness is materially based, that [it] might be explained by a new kind of theory ...[that] will probably involve new fundamental laws [with] startling consequences for our view of the universe and of ourselves.'

The eminent physicist Steven Weinberg in his book Dream of a Final Theory puts it another way. He says the goal of physics is to develop a theory of everything' that will tell us all there is to know about the universeÑa law or principle from which the universe derives. So stating, Weinberg exposes the limitation of scientific materialism, while at the same time trying to transcend it, as he butts up against an Absolute, a Logos, if you will, that cannot exist within the context of matter-based creation. The real problem, he admits, is consciousness, because it is beyond what could have derived from material processes alone.

Darwinism, therefore, which depends upon the assumption that all existence is matter-based, cannot account for the most human characteristic of all, consciousness, which cannot derive from the process of natural selection in a random, mechanistic creationÑthe capacity of the human mind being far beyond what is necessary for mere survival. And strict creationism, when pitted against a Darwinism that ignores the origin of consciousness, along with other crucial factors, appears to be merely a foil that Darwinists use to make themselves look good.

To understand human origins, then, and to develop a Theory of Everything, a true scientist must not only evaluate the tangible evidence presented in Forbidden Archaeology, and in Fingerprints of the Gods, he must study consciousness, without which he neglects the most basic capacity of human beingsÑthe ability to think creatively. He would have to experiment in the internal, subjective world, delving into what the scientific establishment considers a forbidden realm. He would have to devote himself, independent of any dogma, to the essence of his own conscious existence, as well as to the study of material creation. Like Einstein, he would see this pursuit as the essential goal of both science and religion, the search for knowledge in its purest sense, or sciere in the Latin, from which the word science derives. By so doing, science might arrive at a theory of everything.