Forbidden Archeology

TRANSCRIPT:  Forbidden Archeology. c. 1994 / (531)

Whitney, who maybe you know about Mount Whitney, was named after… he was the chief geologist [break in recording]... of the lava than the area where the valleys used to be. So they cut down and created new valleys for the rivers where the old mountaintops used to be. And gradually the valleys became deeper and deeper until the lava was left where the old valleys were in the form of flat topped mountains which are typically called table mountain. There are quite a number of table mountains there in California. So you can imagine that this took a long time. Just imagine the rains coming down periodically, wearing away the rock grain by grain, until finally you have valleys where the mountains used to be and mountains where the valleys used to be. 

So then along come the gold miners and they began to drill tunnels horizontally into the sides of these table mountains to get at the river gravels which were underneath the basalt lava caps. This is where they found the gold.

But they also found human bones and stone tools, including mortars and pestles and stone plates and all kinds of different artifacts of that nature in the gravel. And there are many well attested accounts of this. So this J.D. Whitney, who was the state geologist of California at that time, wrote up an account of these discoveries and made a number of investigations of them. They weren't isolated discoveries. These things were coming up all the time as the gold mining went on. There was a famous skull that was found at that time which was probably the result of a hoax. This is the famous Calaveras skull. By the way, Mark Twain wrote about the ”Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” It was a place, a sort of real wild west area with towns with names like Angel's Camp. They had genuine saloons with false fronts and duels with six guns and the whole thing. 

So at one point somebody apparently took a skull, it would appear, from an old Indian burial ground. The place was called Calaveras County because of the skulls that were found there. Calavera means skull. So there were Indian burial grounds there. So somebody apparently took a skull from one of those and hid it in one of the gold mines and then that was dug up by the miner and it became a whole celebrated story. But there were many other finds which apparently were quite legitimate and there are many descriptions of them. So that's one example. 

So according to modern dating, the older gravels from these rivers would go back 55 million years and the younger ones would go back at least 9 million years. So if you consider the accepted viewpoint in modern science, human beings of modern form wouldn't go back more than 100,000 years. And as a matter of fact, in the New World, humans are not supposed to have arrived until about 12,000 years ago, according to conservative opinion. There are a few radicals who would push that as far as maybe 30,000 years ago, but that's as far as they would go. So that's one example of these discoveries. 

Many interesting discoveries were made in Argentina, interestingly enough… the story of one of these, because it shows how people react to evidence that goes against their views. So many discoveries of human artifacts were found in what were at that time called Miocene deposits. That would be 5 to 25 million years ago in Argentina. In more recent times, geologists have reclassified these mainly as Pliocene, which would make them 2 to 5 million years ago, according to present dating. So all kinds of human artifacts were found, including skulls, one neck vertebra of a human and various arrowheads and so on. 

[5:00]

One example that is quite interesting is that a Toxodon skeleton was found. A Toxodon is a kind of extinct South American animal. It's like a big rodent. Imagine a rat that would stand about 3 feet tall. That's what a Toxodon was, basically. So this Toxodon skeleton was articulated. What that means is that all the bones were connected together in their property position, as you would find them in life. That means that the bones had not been washed through streams and deposited somewhere, but the animal died in that spot and decayed and the bones remained in place. Interestingly enough, an arrowhead was found embedded in the thigh bone of the Toxodon. So someone had shot it with an arrow back in the days when the bone was still fresh. Presumably that may be what killed the Toxodon, but they didn't recover the body. In any case. This would date back to the Pliocene period. So there were many discoveries of this nature. 

Now, these discoveries tended to arouse intense controversy, and it's interesting that the controversy became especially intense after the discovery of the famous Java man. see, there was a period after the development of Darwin's theory of evolution. Darwin's big book on the Origin of Species came out in 1859. So until about the late 1890s, say about 1896, it was possible for scientists who believed in evolution to think that humans may have evolved as far back as, say, the Miocene or even the Oligocene period, which dates you back many millions of years – this was possible. Because if evolution is true, you still don't… that doesn't say anything about the timetable of evolution. You could have a long timetable or a short timetable. That's something that would have to be determined by empirical observation. 

So in about 1896 though, a fellow named Dubois, a Dutch physician, one way to pronounce his name is dubious. So anyway, this Dutch physician was very fired up about the theory of evolution. His mentor was a fellow named Haeckel. Haeckel was the German messiah of Darwinism. Haeckel was an amazing fellow. He would make up evolutionary trees completely out of his imagination and label them with so and so many millions of years and so forth. So he was very enthusiastic about promoting evolution. He was finally tried for fraud at the court of the University of Jena in Germany.

This was for doctoring embryological drawings. He had the theory that the development of the embryo parallels the process of the evolution of the species. So according to that, a human embryo will go through a fish stage with gill slits and then it will develop into an amphibian stage and reptile stage and so on. Modern day evolutionists have repudiated this theory, but it was popular for a long time. It's still in some textbooks.

Haeckel was promoting the theory by doctoring embryological drawings so as to make the gill slits more gill-like and the fish-like embryo looked a little bit more fish-like, just so as to in the cause of science so that people would understand the theory more readily. He was just helping things along. So he was tried for fraud. Anyway, one of his inventions was a being called pithecanthropus alalus. This literally means the speechless ape man.

And he even commissioned a painting of pithecanthropus alalus and Mrs. pithecanthropus alalus. They look sort of like, sort of like German bourgeois people who had had, well, a little bit too much to drink at the local beer garden; or they looked like modern American couch potatoes who have been watching television for too long. In any case… well, we shouldn't criticize by comparing them with modern people… but anyway, Haeckel made this up and Dubois was inspired with the idea that he would discover the remains of this creature. So he went to Java and sure enough he did discover the remains of this creature.

[10:06]

He discovered a skull cap which he took to be the skull of pithecanthropus alalus. And about 50 feet away he discovered a thigh bone which he took to be the thigh of the same creature. And to this day this is still accepted in mainstream science as being correct, correct understanding. Not too long ago in New York City they had something called the ancestors exhibit in which all the important fossils showing human evolution were gathered together in one big museum exhibit. And I went to that, and they had the pithecanthropus skull and thigh bone there.

And it was presented as it always has been, namely, this is the skull of this creature and this is the thigh bone. So I'll just mention briefly that later findings, which we also describe in this book, completely repudiated this idea, because more recent studies made in Africa by Richard Leakey and so on and so forth have indicated that the thigh bone of pithecanthropus erectus is distinctly different from that of modern human beings. However, the pithecanthropus thigh bone found in Java cannot be distinguished from that of modern human beings. So it would appear that that was a modern human thigh bone, and certainly not a pithecanthropus thigh bone. Now, it's very interesting to see what would happen if that came to be accepted.

It has been written up in professional journal articles. But what would happen, I can predict, if it came to be accepted, is that people would decide that, well, after all, that thigh bone was found in a river deposit next to a river in Java. Java is a tropical country. There is flooding, it's also volcanic, and there are a lot of seismic disturbances and volcanic mudslides. So the stratigraphic sequence in a place like that cannot be trusted.

And in fact, most likely the strata were disturbed and a recent modern human thigh bone got mixed in with older strata. And that would be the explanation. However, as long as that is taken as the thigh bone of pithecanthropus erectus, of course it is understood that it belongs to a being that really did live at the time period of the strata in question. So there's great leeway for interpretation. Anyway, to get back to the story, when the announcement of the discovery of the pithecanthropus was made, immediately all finds of human remains coming from strata older than the strata of the pithecanthropus were rejected by the mainstream scientists, because if pithecanthropus was a human ancestor and was very ape like, then you certainly couldn't have modern humans that were older than pithecanthropus.

So therefore, these discoveries were eliminated. In fact, One critic of J.D. Whitney said that if he had been aware of the full implications of the pithecanthropus discovery, he would not have written his famous articles about the anomalous human remains found in the gold deposits in California. So what you begin to find at the end of the 19th century is a process of revision in which these discoveries are gradually eliminated from the mainstream of science.

But back in the 19th century, many discoveries of this kind were being made. In Europe, there were many different examples; quite a number of different scientists devoted their entire careers to discovering human artifacts dating back to the Pliocene or Miocene or earlier periods. And in fact, there were scientific congresses that were held. For example, there was one scientist named Reid Moore, who lived in England and who was making all kinds of discoveries of this kind. A scientific conference was convened to discuss his findings. All kinds of papers were submitted, studies were made, and so on and so forth. And it was decided that his findings were quite valid. So all of this material was there. 

[15:00] 

So I wanted to tell one story about the… that occurred in Argentina. So all these human remains were being found in the Pliocene strata in Argentina. And there was a lot of skepticism being voiced by various people. So at one point, a man named Pierotti, who was a collector for the National Museum at Buenos Aires, discovered a bola stone partially protruding from a sea cliff along the sea coast there. And the strata for that sea cliff would be what we would now call Pliocene, although they classed as Miocene back in those days. So he thought, “Well, I shouldn't dig this out of the cliff and then present it to people. Let me bring the experts and let them see it in situ in the cliff, and then we'll dig it out in front of them.” So he did that. 

Various expert geologists assembled, including one man named Beaumont, who had been a great critic of these discoveries. So in front of the… well, first of all, the assembled geologists very carefully examined the strata, and they looked for signs of faulting and slipping down of one rock layer in front of another and so on. That is, various things that could have mixed up the strata so that something recent could be mixed in with something old. And they concluded that these strata were very clear cut. They really did belong to what they called the Miocene period. So then they all watched as Pierotti chipped this stone out of its matrix of surrounding rock in the cliff, freed it up, and then they could see this was definitely a human artifact. It was an oval stone with a groove that had been chipped around it. These stones are used for bolas.

The groove is used for tying a leather thong to the stone. They whirl the stones overhead and throw them into the legs of an animal, and it tangles up the animal, and this way the hunters can catch it. Interestingly enough, the bola is a traditional thing used by South American cowboys for catching cows. So they probably learned about it from the local Indian tribes, because it didn't come from Europe, certainly. So where did the local Indian tribes get it?

Apparently, bolas were being used in Argentina back in the Pliocene period, which would suggest that there were some pretty long traditions there. But anyway, so Beaumont was watching as this thing was chipped out. So he said, “Well, just for the sake of argument, why don't we dig further into the face of the cliff and see if anything more shows up?” So Pierotti began to dig further, and they found some spear points further into the face of the cliff, which hadn't even been exposed before. So what do you suppose the outcome of this was?

Did scientists conclude that we now have good evidence for the existence of man in South America in the Pliocene period? Well, no, they didn't conclude that. Beaumont said that, “Well, you know, what Pierotti could have done was dig a hole into the cliff and save all the rock chips, grind up the rock chips and mix them with a cement to produce a cement of the same color as the stone of the cliff. Then he could have cemented these things into the cliff and very carefully treated the outside so it would be indistinguishable from the rest of the rock, and then brought us here and pulled off this hoax. That was Beaumont's conclusion. And as for other scientists in Europe and so on, they never commented. The matter never went any further. So this is just a story, one among many to indicate what happens with evidence. Yeah.

Question:  Why did they do that? 

Answer:  Why did who do that? 

Q:  Why does the science… Why are they so afraid of it? Why did they do that?

A:  Well, you see, the way it works: Fear is a social phenomenon. What are scientists afraid of? Well, they're only afraid of their peers. You see, science is very much a social phenomenon. So scientists exist in an organized framework. They have posts, let's say, in universities or research institutes and so on. They depend on their good reputation in order to function as scientists. If a scientist becomes labeled as a kook or a crackpot, he's finished. He will find that access to funding is cut off. He can make his grant proposals for funding, but somehow he doesn't get his grants.

[20:08] 

He finds suddenly that the articles he submits to different journals are not accepted for publication. He sends in his book manuscript to the publisher, and he gets back a curt little rejection slip, and he doesn't get tenure. And in fact, he gets passed over for promotion. And finally, he finds that it's rather difficult to function at his university when he realizes that his colleagues are saying rather contemptuous things behind his back. So it becomes a bit difficult.

So in the world of science, it's very important to keep a good reputation. That means in practice you really can only talk about things that are considered to be respectable among scientists at the given time. You can be a little bit radical, you can deviate slightly from accepted views, but if you start defending or promulgating ideas that go completely against the accepted views, then that is not at all acceptable and you will ruin your reputation. So this is all documented in this book. We have some case histories of what happened to some people when they did in fact, try to defend unpopular claims.

One interesting case involves some geologists. There's a place called Hueyatlaco, or some such pronunciation, down in Mexico. An archaeologist from the University of New Mexico named Cynthia Irwin Williams was doing excavations there and she discovered some spear points in certain strata. The spear points were of a very advanced type, similar to the Cro-Magnon stone tools of Europe, very finely chipped and so forth. So she wanted the site to be dated.

So a US Geological Survey team was called in to do the dating, and they used several different dating methods to date the strata where the spear points were found. And of course, they did very careful stratigraphic studies to make sure everything was in situ and things hadn't faulted and shifted and so on and so forth. So they came up with a date of roughly 250,000 years for the age of those spear points. Now, the finds I've been talking about thus far go back over 2 million years. So here we're only talking about 250,000 years. However, that is still completely unacceptable. It's about 10 times too old for man in North America, according to accepted scientific views. If you said 25,000 years, that would be radical, but you could hope to make a case for it. But if you say 250,000, it's absurd. So they proceeded to publish their date of 250,000 years.

Perhaps the reason was that these were geologists and they didn't really know what they were getting into because they thought, oh, 250,000 years, that's interesting. So they published that, and there was a great hue and cry. And we have, let's see… there's a lady named, one of the geologists was a lady named Virginia Steen McIntyre, and we've corresponded with her. She gave us a blow by blow account of what happened, and basically her whole academic career was dismantled before her very eyes. In fact, she sent us copies of her correspondence, and it was interesting to see how that developed. So she left a scientific life altogether. 

In due course of time. We had some interaction ourselves with Cynthia Irwin Williams. When we were doing the Origins magazine, we briefly had a little section on this Hueyatlaco case, and we wanted to publish photographs of the spear points. So the copyright for the photographs was held by Cynthia Irwin Williams. So we called her up to ask for permission to print the photographs in the magazine. She said that, “Well, that all depends on what you say in your article. If in your article you give a reasonable date of no more than 25,000 years for those spear points, then I give you permission to print the photographs. But if you mention that lunatic fringe date of 250,000 years, then I deny permission to print the photographs.”

[25:12]

So the result was that we got an artist to make slightly modified pictures of the spear point so as to get around the copyright problem. So I would say that that's an example of suppression of information. 

Now, I'd like to say another thing about a general theme of this book. This has to do with quality of evidence. Because you might say, “Well, how good was the evidence here anyway? This evidence was probably flaky, especially since it was dealing with flint tools. So, you know, this evidence was probably rightly rejected because it was a very dubious quality involving many speculative steps and unsupportable claims, and so forth. On the other hand, there's overwhelming evidence which has been collected by reputable scientists in favor of the accepted scenario of human origins. So you're contrasting this flaky evidence that you're dragging in with this very solid, massively documented evidence for the accepted views. So then why should what you're saying be accepted as being anything serious?”

So we have addressed that problem in the book. In fact, that was one of the major things that we tried to do. This book is quite thick, but it divides into two parts. The first part deals with the anomalous evidence that I've been talking about. And the second part deals with a careful analysis of the accepted evidence.

It turns out that the accepted evidence also is not so strong. One important thing to realize about empirical evidence is that in one sense, it's all flaky. Now, that's part of the philosophy of Kṛṣṇa consciousness. There are four defects of the senses. So these four defects, we may tend to think that we admit that the defects are there, but they're not really that serious.

Of course, occasionally we make mistakes, but most of us are pretty good. You know, we make a small mistake from time to time. And as far as illusions? I mean, what was the last date anyone here experienced an illusion? Has anyone been deluded lately? You know, delusions? I mean. What do you mean? I don't experience delusions. This is for people who, you know, have mental problems and, you know, defective senses.

Well, it's true that, you know, my eyesight isn't quite what it used to be, but after all, we have microscopes and telescopes and so forth. We can extend the power of our senses. And as far as cheating is concerned, well, cheating is not really a problem in science because in other fields cheating can be a problem. But in science there's a self-correcting mechanism of research. You know, someone may cheat, but pretty soon the other zealous researchers will uncover the fraud and immediately they will pounce on this guy and kick him out.

So cheating isn't really a severe problem. So therefore scientific findings are really pretty good. It's true that from time to time, you know, scientists, they're human like anybody else, they make mistakes, but then they correct them and they admit their mistakes. So it's actually not exactly like that. The actual situation is that there's a tremendous amount of cheating and delusion going on.

I'll give you a case example in which I tried out a little test on people's perceptual systems. There are many illustrations in this book of stone tools, at least they're said to be stone tools, which were found by scientists back in the 19th century in say, Miocene deposits or even Oligocene or even Eocene deposits. So these are the really old things. Now, according to modern science, these couldn't really be stone tools because there were no people to make them back then.

So they must be what are called nature facts instead of artifacts. That is, they must be pieces of rock that just got chipped at random in nature, and they just sort of look like stone tools. And then we also have pictures of accepted stone tools from Neanderthal sites and so forth in Europe, or Cro-Magnon sites and so on and so forth. So these are regarded as things that were definitely made by human beings.

[30:14]

So I was talking with a certain expert in stone tool technology up in San Bernardino, and I was showing her some pictures and I just sort of mixed up the pictures and said, well, you know, here's something from the Miocene and I'd show a Neanderthal tool and here's something from this is found in a Neanderthal site. And I put in a couple of the Eocene things and mixed them up. And I was asking her questions and I found she couldn't tell the difference. She was not able to make a distinction between these different tools. And these were well drawn 19th century engraving type lithographs of the tools. So she couldn't tell the difference. She became a little bit suspicious at a certain point. She began saying everything must be dubious and that included the ones that were supposedly man made. 

So the senses are indeed imperfect. That's a fact. And thus people speculate. So what we really have in this whole field of study is imperfect evidence for the modern scientific view on the one hand, and equally imperfect evidence for these very ancient things which contradict the modern scientific view. Our thesis is that the evidence is about equally imperfect on either side. And we can point to many different examples of this. We go through many different cases in detail.

One interesting illustration of this would be the stone tools found in the Olduvai Gorge in Africa by the Leakeys. These date back to the early part of the Pleistocene period and they're associated with the Australopithecus and the Homo habilis ape man. So these are very crude stone tools. In fact, if you look at them, they look for all the world like a rock that has some chips knocked out of it. So how do you know that that's not just a rock that happened to have some chips knocked out of it?

Well, you will read in the books that experts in lithic technology have ascertained that these stone tools were made by intelligent beings for specific tasks. And you can find wear marks and all kinds of very subtle signs indicating that these are not just products of nature, they're actually man made tools. But there are many examples from these early periods going back to over 5 million years, let's say from the Miocene and earlier, which are actually much better cases of stone tools. If you look at them, the chipping is better. You'll see a whole row of chips along one edge that gives you a sharp cutting edge. And the other side will be rounded so you can hold it nicely. It would make a really great little knife. Things like that which are rejected, but which look to be better examples of human work than the accepted Olduvai Gorge tools. 

But no one has ever challenged the accepted Olduvai Gorge tools.We checked through the literature and you just don't find people saying, well, maybe these are just products of nature. Now why is that? Well, they play a role in an important theory. So that's one example of the misuse of evidence.

Q:  If you look at the evidence and then suppose that there were human beings in these previous ages, then one question might be that if they were in any way advanced, then why are they only using stone tools? Why is that the only kind of tools that have been found?

A:  Well, I have a suggested answer to that question. Most of the finds that we have are on the level of Paleolithic up to Neolithic stone tools. Of course you would only expect to find imperishable materials, but why not statues and walls of buildings?

Q:  Arrowheads?

Yeah, maybe a nice golden arrowhead would be good. I don't know if they made arrowheads of gold, but gold is pretty soft. Golden jewelry in the form of bas-relief images, things like that. Why don't they report things like that? Well, that's an interesting question.

[35:08]

The finds that we're talking about mainly in this book were all discovered by mainstream scientists of that particular period, late 19th century and early 20th century. These people were almost all evolutionists, they were Darwinists. The only exception I think is this fellow Quatrefages in France who didn't accept evolution. So they were all looking for primitive man. They all had an image in mind that as you go back in time, people must become more and more primitive until they fade off into apes.

They were not expecting to find anything advanced, so they found primitive stone tools and so forth, or even things up to the Neolithic level in strata which are not regarded as being within the period of human existence according to modern theories. But for them this was acceptable because the modern theories hadn't developed yet. However, artifacts indicating high civilization from ancient strata would not have been acceptable to them because not only is this idea rejected by the Darwinian theory, but this idea is also rejected by the dominant Judeo-Christian chronology, which came before Darwin's theory. Because according to that dating scheme, the world was created in 4004 BC. The way people were in the years just before Darwin, and for many people in the years after Darwin, the way most people in the scientific world accommodated the Judeo-Christian chronology into their developing ideas of geology was to say that there was an antediluvian period of great length in which there were pre-human forms of life.

And some of them also postulated what they called pre-Adamites, that there were very primitive forms of man before the creation of Adam. And they even argued that these primitive forms of man were not eligible for salvation because they didn't have a soul and so on, and that when God created Adam, he created the first human beings with souls and so on and so forth. So there were theories like that, but no one was expecting the to find advanced civilization in very ancient strata. Yeah?

Q:  So are you saying then that had such artifacts actually been uncovered, there was already a knowledge filter in operation even at that time?

A:  Yes, yes, I would argue there was a knowledge filter. This idea of the knowledge filter is very interesting. It's amazing how powerful the effect of people's biases really is in filtering the knowledge that emerges as socially acceptable knowledge within human society. Knowledge has to pass through a series of stages in order to become socially acceptable. If a person makes a discovery, let say, let's say of an artifact somewhere in the earth, the first phase of the filtration process is that that person may choose not to report his discovery.

The second stage is that when he reports his discovery to others, they may immediately say, well that's ridiculous and the thing doesn't go any further. Then he may go so far as to try to publish an account of his discovery in an accepted form like a scientific journal, but he may find that he can't get it published because it won't pass the review procedures for the journal. And he may find that if he tries to report it at a scientific meeting that people don't want to hear about it. But even if he publishes it, he may find that nobody ever refers to it. One can have the experience of publishing a scientific journal article and then nobody will cite it for the next 50 years. In effect, it may as well not exist. It just sits there in a volume gathering dust on the shelves and nobody knows about it. Yeah?

Q:  Now this knowledge filtering system maintains the predominant status quo theory. And you responded to Maharaja's question, original question, by explaining that anything that goes against this theory, that one way or another, those who propagate it, propagate. Counter theories or deviant theories are dealt with. But at some point a theory that was counter to the prevailing theory became prominent. So how did that happen and why can't it happen again?

[40:12]

A:  These things do happen from time to time, and it's a very interesting process if you examine how it happens. It's a bit difficult really to understand in many cases why things happen when they happen. For example, take the theory of evolution. Darwin came out with his book on the Origin of Species in 1859. He had been worried about being attacked for holding this evolutionary viewpoint for about 20 years and he was afraid to publish.

He finally published because a fellow named Alfred Russel Wallace beat him to the punch by publishing an article, actually sending it in to Darwin himself for criticism, which basically summed up Darwin's theory. So then Darwin had to rush into print in order to preserve his priority. But he had been afraid of publishing for 20 years,m but he came out with it. It would seem that at that point conditions were ripe for a change in views within society. What you find is the gradual development, gradual changes in the prevailing consciousness or mindset of people, both the lay public and in the scientific community, which makes it possible at a certain point for a new view to come into prominence.

Just to give another example, I was just reading that in the 17th century, let's say in 1660, most educated people in Europe believed in the reality of witchcraft. That is, they believed you could make a pact with the devil and acquire powers and curse people and make them sick and all kinds of things like that. So they believed in these things. By 1680, most educated people in Europe didn't believe in witchcraft. They thought it was simply non-existent. So a great social revolution occurred during that period. 

So it seems that very complex factors are involved in this, but ultimately it depends on what people believe. The essence of the knowledge filter is that if people hear something that they can believe, then they're willing to give credence to it. They're willing to consider that this might be true. So if somebody then tries to make a reasonably good case for it, then they accept that it is true. If they hear about many such facts, then they regard this as really convincing, and they proceed to accept it as being definitely true. On the other hand, if they hear something that goes against their beliefs, each individual will tend to suppress that information. So it doesn't tend to propagate through society. The result is that people don't hear about it. 

Another example of this, interestingly enough, is the story of meteorites. If you go back to the 1700s, scientists in those days did not believe that stones can fall from the sky. In fact, they thought that that was patently absurd. You know, you mean to tell me that stones fall from the sky? Well, obviously there are no stones in the sky. It's ridiculous.

So to make it worse, country folk, peasants, farmers, people like that, would periodically report that stones fell from the sky. A farmer would come in and he'd say, “Well, yeah, it fell in my field and it dug a big hole when it landed. And it was hot. When I picked it up, it was really hot.” And to make things worse than that, the peasants had traditions about the stones that fall from the sky. 

And not only that, the traditions were mixed up with things that were really ridiculous, namely that some of these stones were the tips of thunderbolts. You know, this word thunderbolt is interesting. A Bolt? What is a bolt? A bolt is an arrow. That's what it means. Like a crossbow bolt, it's the thing you shoot. So thunderbolt. The real meaning of that word is that at the tip of the lightning, there's an arrowhead. So when these meteors would come down, sometimes they came down during thunderstorms and the peasants would pick them up and say, well, these must be the thunder bolts.

And so the scientists thought, well, this is really ridiculous. Then to make it worse still, peasants would sometimes find stone arrowheads in their fields and they'd say, these are thunderbolts, because they look like… well, what is it? It's an arrowhead, but not from an arrow of people that we know of. So it must be from a thunderbolt.

So the scientists just scorned all of this. This is absurd. But at a certain point, they switched over to belief that stones do fall from the sky. And they gave these stones a very respectable name, namely meteorites. This occurred in the early 19th century. And the final trigger that really convinced the scientists, the triggering event, was that a lot of meteorites landed in some place where some scientists were staying, and they just couldn't deny that these events were real. But that still was just like a catalyst. Apparently, things had been shifting to the point that that became acceptable. 

[45:19]

However, I should say that there's more to the story of the meteorites. And it seems that there are two basic kinds of meteorites. That is, stones that fall from the sky. There are the iron type, they're like chunks of iron, practically, and the chondrites, they're called, which have a funny sort of structure. But there are also reports of sedimentary rocks that fall from the sky. Now, this is a bit of a problem. Sedimentary rocks are rocks our geologists could tell us: these are rocks that are supposedly laid down in water, in streams or oceans or lakes and so on. So obviously, sedimentary rocks can't fall from the sky because there are no oceans and streams up there. And even if there were, those would be on planets and the rocks would remain on the planets. They wouldn't come and fall on the earth. So clearly, sedimentary rocks cannot fall from the sky.

Well, they're…. [end side A]]

…found within the strata of the earth. Now these were basically not reported by scientists. The unacceptable anomalies involve things that would require high civilization, and they are found in strata which are, you know, it's totally ridiculous to say that any human remains would be found in these particular strata. One example would be the Carboniferous strata. The Carboniferous age is said to date to be about 250 million years ago. It's a 50 million year period, more or less, and it's roughly 250 million years ago. This is the period in which many coal deposits supposedly formed. At that time it would appear there were vast swamps with very luxuriant growth of vegetation and this got matted down and eventually it formed layers of coal. 

So human artifacts have been reportedly found in the coal deposits. Some of them have been reported by miners, in fact. These include such things as gold chains, iron pots, things that look like manufactured items which would require advanced civilization. These, however, have not been reported by scientists, although David Brewster in the 19th century, who was a well known scientist at that time, did report finding a gold thread embedded in a piece of rock. I forget the strata for that, but it was back in the vicinity of the Carboniferous period. But basically these things are not reported by scientists and they are considered to be completely disreputable. 

But then this brings one to the basic question of, well, how do you evaluate evidence? Because, and the thing that you find is that people evaluate evidence based essentially on what they believe, what they find credible. And this has a very great impact on the kind of evidence that can be considered. So, Yeah?

Q:  I mean, 5,000 years ago, just not that long ago since the Battle of Kurukṣetra, and why do we say so many million people died. Couldn't somebody just go and find a lot of evidence of that? 

A:  So the question is, well, to make it more general, what about evidence from India indicating what may have existed say 5,000 years ago? So it could be that… there you could discover all kinds of interesting things, if you investigated in India. It would be interesting to find out what you might discover there. In India it's a fact that the established archaeological views are very much based on the views of the British. As I was saying, Hastinapur is dated to 800 BC. Ayodhya is dated to about 300 BC. But what would you discover if you really began to investigate? It would be interesting to find out. By the way, there's a notable absence of finds from India. Most of our materials are things discovered in Europe or America, but very few things from India that are of interest. Yeah?

Q:  There was an archaeological survey operating in India before Darwin's theory became generally accepted. So surely at the same time that those discoveries were made in the West and people were able, you know, to report them because there was not, there was no dating established. Surely there was, you know, counterparts also found in India.

A:  Well, we were speaking here of artifacts relating to civilization. Some stone... Yeah, we report some in the book. There were some discoveries from India but not many. And also some discoveries from Burma which are reported. I'm sure that there was not as much archaeological activity in India as there was in Europe. For one thing, if you have more people looking, you're going to have more discoveries. But we do have some stone tools from ancient strata in India that would antedate the period in which man is supposed to have existed. But as far as artifacts involving civilization, one has to consider that before Darwin's time the British in India had very much a Christian orientation, and they definitely did not want to find anything which would indicate a civilization dating back before the period of the biblical chronology. 

[51:26]

In fact you can look at the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and there are very interesting articles there dating back to the early 1800s, in fact late 1700s and you can see their bias. They are totally opposed to anything indicating great antiquity for India. And they openly say this would show the Mosaic record to be a fantasy and a fable. Yeah? 

Q:  What about the existence of scientists in previous ages? Didn't, like, Krishna and Balarama learn some sciences? That's one question. Also I wanted to ask that, like, we know that the age of Kali, that people aren't actually learning new things, are actually forgetting more and more as the age gets people becoming more degraded. So do we have any evidence of first-rate scientists who would have appeared at the beginning of the age of Kali?

A:  Well if you go into the question of the Vedic scientific knowledge, see, that's another whole topic. Indeed you could say there were scientists back in those days. What does scientist mean? It means a person who has knowledge. Scire is the Latin root meaning knowledge.

So veda means knowledge. And scientific knowledge is simply correct knowledge. That's hopefully what it is. So yes, there were certainly scientists back in those days, that is people who knew something. Now the modern view would be that back in those days you would have poets who were very imaginative and eloquent in writing Sanskrit poetry, but they were completely unrealistic in their view of the world, and they were burdened with all kinds of gross superstitions. They believed in gods and demons and ghosts and all kinds of weird things. So they were completely unrealistic. That would be the modern view, however, not necessarily so. 

So just to sum things up, I guess, as far as the UFO discussion is concerned, that will mainly be tomorrow. So I guess the meeting won't be limited to the young people. Everyone can come. I'll just say a few words about that briefly, though, to introduce the topic. So this Forbidden Archaeology book is intended to discuss the question of the evidence for human evolution. And basically we show that there are very serious problems with the existing theory, and that there's been a tremendous amount of suppression of evidence.

And furthermore, that this evidence is suppressed by a natural process of human social interaction. It's not that you have some evil conspirator somewhere who's planning things out and saying, now suppress this and now lie about that, and so on, but simply, given the way human nature works in the scientific community, this process of information suppression or information filtering takes place. And really, we only begin to appreciate how extensive this process is because we only see what comes through the filter. It's very hard to find what gets filtered out. To find the things that are filtered out, you really have to dig.

So you can say, then this is a critique of the theory that man evolved from the ape. Now the question is, if man did not evolve from the ape, where did human beings come from? What is the origin of the human race? So if we're going to raise these issues, we're obliged to say something about that, because people will want to know. We can't just criticize their theory.

We cannot criticize their theory and put forward a vague idea of creation and say, “Well, God did it. God created human beings.” Because that is not really an answer or a response to the case that they are making. The scientists are putting forward a very concrete and detailed story of the origin of the human race. So the proper response to that would be to give a concrete and detailed story of the actual origin of the human race.

[56:02]

So what would that story be? Well, actually, we don't lack for information on that. We in fact have the information in Vedic literature. But the story is a little bit difficult for modern scientists to accommodate. The story, basically is that human beings descended from demigods, who in turn descended from higher demigods, who descended from Lord Brahma, who was generated from Garbhodakaśāyī Viṣṇu, and so on.

But the part of the story that immediately involves humans is that humans as we know them are descended from superhuman beings or humans of superhuman power that used to live on the earth long ago. And they in turn are descended from demigods who came down from the heavens. One example would be the story of Vaivasvata Manu. Vaivasvata Manu is the son of Vivasvān, who is the sun-god living in the sun. One of the sons of Vaivasvata Manu is Ikṣvāku, who was a king living on the earth, except that he wasn't an ordinary human as we know him. He lived for many thousands of years and so on and so forth. From Ikṣvāku there were various lines of kings coming down. One of them in particular was Yayāti. From Yayāti the Yavanas are descended, and most of us are in the category of the Yavanas. So we can say then that according to Vedic literature we can count among our ancestors the sun-god.

Of course there are other cultures on this planet that do that. The Japanese royal family will say they come from the sun-god. The Peruvian Indians, the Incas, used to say that they descended from the sun-god. So we could also say that being Yavanas. But that's the basic story: in general, humans descended from the gods. So that is related to the topic that I'll talk about tomorrow. So that's just an introductory statement; and for those of you who want to purchase this book, it tells about these things and relates it to modern empirical evidence. So okay, yeah?

Q:  When you were explaining the complexity and the necessary requirements in the mindset of predominant society to get a scientific theory to change, what immediately I was struck with was your description this morning in Bhāgavatam class about how Kali can just influence in certain ways and create a particular degradation in society. It seems to fit right in there that there are, there are personalities whose service it is to degrade our way of thinking and support all sorts of atheistic and such degrading philosophies. Even Lord Śiva appeared to promulgate impersonalism for degrading purposes. On the other hand, it would be a source of encouragement that if somehow or other people were purified enough, then their ability to accept the truth would be enhanced and other scientific theories might be able to become prevailing. Therefore harināma and prasādam distribution and book distribution would actually help change the scientific view of the world.

A: Well, yes, we're planting seeds and eventually you may find a tree growing. Yes, indeed. So how long should we go? It's now nearly 8:30. Pardon me? 

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Well, yes, that's true. Yeah?

Q:  The idea of evolution has any part in your view? 

A:  The idea of evolution, is there any credibility? You mean bodily transformation from one bodily form to another? 

Q:  I guess so. I mean, kind of a mutative adaptation to changing.

A:  It doesn't play any prominent view in Vedic literature. You don't find any mention of that concept. You do find that bodily forms can change, that's for sure, but they change according to intelligent control, and they change very quickly. So that's part of the whole account. Yeah.

[1:00:52]

The whole idea of natural selection is that you have an accidental change that may improve the ability of an organism to cope with its environment. Like a classical example is the peppered moth in England. I'll just give that example. So once upon a time in England, there were some moths that lived there that were predominantly black. No, excuse me, that's not right – they were predominantly gray. Okay. Now, they would land on the trees. In those days, this was before the Industrial Revolution, the trees tended to be covered with lichen, which is gray. So the moths blended right in with the trees.

Now, there was a certain mutant type of moth in this species which was black. So naturally, when a black moth landed on the gray tree, it would stand out and birds could easily see it. So the idea is that the black moths were not able to reproduce very successfully because they were always being eaten up by the birds at a rate much faster than the rate at which the grey moths were being eaten. So when the Industrial Revolution came, due to pollution, the lichens died and the tree trunks became much darker. So now the black moths blended right in and the gray moths stood out. And it was discovered that after a certain number of years, the population of moths was predominantly black moths. So you could say, well, this is natural selection in action. So that means then that natural selection does happen. In fact, I have heard that when pollution controls were applied, the population began to shift back as the trees again developed gray coverings on their bark. So now you have more gray moths again.

But the question is, how do you, let's say, get moths in the first place? Or suppose you have, for example, insects which don't fly. Let's say, hypothetically, you have some flightless insects. How do you get insects that can fly? How do insects get their compound eyes and so many different complex organs that they have in general? No one has ever really been able to account for this in terms of natural selection. As far as Vedic literature is concerned, it doesn't say that these things occur by natural selection. It does say that they occur by intelligent control of the bodily forms. And furthermore, the subtle control occurs on the level of the subtle body.

The demigods, in fact, can change form; they can assume animal forms or human forms and so forth. Just to give the example, I'll mention the Vedic account of the origin of at least some birds, which sounds a bit fantastic, but this is the way it goes. One of the daughters of Dakṣa was named Vinatā. She was the wife of Kaśyapa Muni. So she gave birth to two birds. Now she had human form and she gave birth to beings in bird form. One of them was Garuḍa and the other was Anūru. So from Anūru two offspring were produced. One of them was Sampati and the other one was Jaṭāyu. Jaṭāyu appears in the story of the Rāmāyaṇa.

So both of them, of course, were birds. Interesting thing though, about the story of Jaṭāyu and Sampati in the Rāmāyaṇa is that they could take human form. Of course, they could talk. They were intelligent. Lord Rāmacandra had a conversation with Jaṭāyu and so forth, and he fought with Rāvaṇa and so on. But periodically they would take human form and go and talk with certain sages. That was part of the story. So also they lived for many, many thousands of years. Who knows how long they lived? So they were birds, but not exactly birds of the kind we see in nature around us.

And in the Matsya Purāṇa there's further detail as to descendants of Jaṭāyu and Sampati. Different types of birds descended from them along different lines of descent. So in one sense you can call it evolution because from Sampati and Jaṭāyu, gradually you would find birds that are more birdlike, with less intelligence, less mystic power, until finally you just have regular birds. Of course, even regular birds may have a bit more in the way of mystic power than you might think because we don't tend to see in our culture the levels of consciousness that animals may actually have. We're cut off from the animals.

[1:06:05]

Kṛṣṇa could speak in the language of the different animals, for example, it’s stated,. We think that they have no language at all in which to speak. So that's part of the story. So in one sense it's evolution, it's change in form, but it's not the kind of evolution that the scientists are thinking of. Especially if you say the ancestor so and so many generations back is a bird who can take a human form and he's very intelligent and he lives for thousands of years and so on. And his great, great grandfather was someone like Garuḍa who can fly to Vaikuṇṭha and so on. Yeah? 

Q:  You want to say something about the scientists putting forth the idea that species become extinct. And what our understanding… the dodo bird – people reported it and we don't see it.

A:  Well, the question is extinction. This brings us to an interesting topic. Back in 1976 in Washington, when Śrīla Prabhupāda visited there, he came in time for the 4th of July and went downtown and saw the fireworks, which he thought were completely worthless. But anyway, we had conversations with him at that time about various scientific issues. Hari Sari was also there. And one issue that came up was the question of extinction. And Śrīla Prabhupāda said, “There's no extinction. No animals or plants have ever become extinct. There is no question of extinction.” And this was a bit of a shock because it's one thing to say that things haven't evolved, but, you know, surely all kinds of life forms are extinct.

In fact, if you want to talk about the modern ecology movement and so forth, one of the main themes is that many different life forms are becoming extinct right now due to the destruction of the rainforests and so on. So Śrīla Prabhupāda completely rejected this idea. So you can ask, “Well, what about the dodo bird? What about the passenger pigeon? What about the dinosaurs?”

So, well, you can get an idea as to what might be involved here, if you consider wolves. Now, in North America, you don't have wolves these days, except maybe in northern Michigan during the winter, they come down from Canada, so I'm told. But basically you don't have wolves.

Q:  But… [unclear]

A:  Wolves, you're sure? What color wolves? Sure they weren't foxes?

Q:  No, they're studying them. Not necessarily.

A:  Well, I'm talking about real wolves. You know, the big gray, the big gray guys.

Q:  The ones they have here are the Eastern woodland red wolves.

A:  Okay, well, there are different species. But anyway, the point is, such animals used to be all over the United States, 48 contiguous states. Now you don't find them, certainly not so much. So their habitat has been restricted due to human encroachment, let's say. Well, it could be a similar thing with other life forms. In any case, if all the different forms of life on the earth that ever existed are still existing and are not extinct, then they must be living somewhere. So there must be some place for them to live. Where could that be? Śrīla Prabhupāda was asked several times, “Well, are they living on other planets?” He said, “Other planets? This planet? What do you know about this planet?” So he made that point. So he made the point, we don't know everything about this planet.

So this gets us into areas that are even, let's say, more on scientifically dangerous ground than anything we've discussed thus far. Because it's one thing to say about… say so many things about what may have happened in the past, but if you say that we don't know about the earth planet today, then that's a little bit hard to accept. Śrīla Prabhupāda made some very strong statements about that. There were some interesting conversations that took place, for example, in Vrindavan in 1977, I think mainly, in which the Fifth Canto was being discussed with the aim of designing the Vedic Planetarium in Mayapur.

[1:11:02]

And so devotees including, well, mainly Tamāl Kṛṣṇa Mahārāja was there and one Bhakti Prem Swami, who was with the movement at that time, and so on. So they were talking about the structure of the earth, Jambūdvīpa and so on, and arguing that, well, it's really hard to understand the way the Himalayan Mountains are described in the Fifth Canto of the Bhāgavatam, because, after all, it said that they’re 10,000 yojanas tall, and if there are eight miles to the yojana roughly, then that means they're 80,000 miles tall. The earth planet as we know it today is about 8,000 miles in diameter. So you've got mountains on the earth that are 10 times as high as the diameter of the earth. So how do you make sense out of that?

So Śrīla Prabhupāda was saying that you don't even begin to know what is the earth. And he said you're restricted to a small region on the earth. He made a comparison with an oxen which is trampling on grain to thresh it. So the oxen is hooked up so that he walks in a circle, and he's blindfolded.

I don't know, maybe they get dizzy or something walking in the circle, if they're not blindfolded. So the point is, the ox can't see where he's going, and he may think that this is the whole world and he's just walking on and on and on, but actually he's going in a circle, and he's completely unaware of the vast world around him. So Śrīla Prabhupāda used that comparison to describe the relation between the earth as we think we know it and the earth as it actually is. So one corollary of that is that if that's true, then that would provide plenty of room for these other species to be living. They could be living somewhere where we're not there to destroy them.

But that brings you to the whole question of the Fifth Canto and cosmology and so forth. And that's also related to what we talked about… talk about in this book, which we'll go into tomorrow. Yeah? 

Q: Is it possible that when the question was asked about extinction, Prabhupāda was referring to… that there's no extinction of the soul?

A:  No, he was talking about the bodily forms. That's what we were discussing. And specifically we asked him about the dinosaurs. And basically what he said about the dinosaurs, if I can sum it up, is that because we pointed out they found all these bones and so forth and so on. And he said well, that a lot of what they say is imagination, but if there was some big animal like that, that's perfectly possible, but it's still existing.

He said there are many animals that we don't know about in the ocean. He made that point that many of these dinosaurs are evidently not aquatic because they have feet that you don't find in aquatic animals. The kind of feet with big claws and so on that you would find on land animals. So… but he said whatever they are, a big animal could be there, but it's still existing. That was the point he made specifically in reference to the dinosaurs. Yeah?

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Yeah, he wasn't worried about destroying the planet. It's a completely different perspective on the universe because the Vedic picture is that everything is under control. The demigods are there. Ultimately Kṛṣṇa is there, should the demigods run into anything they can't handle. So everything is completely under control. And these various manifestations of the age of Kali that we are seeing are also occurring under higher control. So Kṛṣṇa is fully aware of everything that's going on. Yeah?

Q:  I remember a quote from Prabhupāda saying that about the dinosaurs, what they were digging up was previous Kali-yuga.

A:  Well, you know, I looked into that. I'd like to see a quote in which Śrīla Prabhupāda said that because I definitely have quotes in which devotees raised that issue with him. And he specifically denied it and said I never said that. He said they say I say so many things. So yeah, that I've definitely run across.

[1:15:51]

Q:  When Prabhupāda mentioned in the very literature we find that there is 8,400,000 species of life. That means in this planet or in the material, in all the universes that…there are in the universe? 

A:  The 8,400,000 species of life are in this universe. However, the universe is… you see, the concept of the universe in Vedic literature is somewhat different from the concept that we have based on modern scientific ideas. According to the modern scientific idea, this earth is like a little speck floating in outer space. And even the sun is another little speck. And if you go across a vast territory of practically empty space, you'll come to another sun which is like a little speck floating out there. So basically their picture is you have these tiny little specks floating in this vast void of empty space. On some of these specks they say there may be life, although they don't know about life on any other planet, nor do they even know of the existence of other planets. So that's their picture of the universe. 

The Vedic picture is that the universe in one sense is co-extensive with the greater earth. The total earth system of Bhū-maṇḍala has the same diameter as the universe, and there are additional planetary systems above and below Bhū-maṇḍala. Basically the whole thing is inhabited. And there is the possibility of travel from any part of the universe to any other part of the universe within a very short period of time for the demigods who are capable of doing this. So the picture you have of the universe is quite different from what we have in modern science. So in any case… Well, do you have a question?

Q:  [unclear]

A:  So one more question. Yeah?

Q:  Before the so-called age of enlightenment iIn Europe, there was also the concept of the universe shell.

A:  Yeah, right.

Q:  Certain scientists suggested a universe without a shell or a heliocentric universe. That idea was thrown out and the whole concept of people that there's a God outside this universe. It just ushered in a whole new atheistic paradigm. The universe is unlimited and there's nothing in control of natural law. So the idea of having a shell in the universe is a significant part of the Vedic universe.

A:  Yeah, that's true. It gives you a place for the kingdom of God. Yeah, that's a whole discussion also. But let's see, maybe we can, I guess, end the meeting here tomorrow. I'll talk about this UFO topic. And all glories to Śrīla Prabhupāda!