Read Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization for Free Online

controversy ensued. Steen-McIntyre’s date not only challenged accepted chronologies for human presence in the region, but also 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 that 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 origins in geological strata documented at nine to fifty-five million years in age, California state geologist J. D. Whitney was able subsequently to authenticate many of the finds and to produce an extensive report. The implications of Whitney’s evidence have never been properly answered or explained by the scientific 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 Richard Thompson and Michael Cremo’s
Forbidden Archeology
(and in its condensed version,
Hidden History of the Human Race
), it is clear that these three examples are by no means uncommon. Suggesting nothing less than a “massive cover-up,” Cremo and Thompson believe that when it comes to explaining the origins of the human race on Earth, academic science has cooked the books.
     
    Though 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 go back 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 those of 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 that has been conducted in the last two centuries. The authors describe astonishing discoveries made, and then go on to discuss the controversies that ensued from those discoveries and the suppression of evidence that invariably followed.
     
    Typical is the case of George Carter, who claimed to have found, at an excavation in San Diego, California, 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 the lithic scholar John Witthoft, the establishment scoffed. San Diego State University refused to even look at the evidence in its own backyard and Harvard University publicly defamed Carter in a course entitled “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,
Forbidden Archeology,
has caused more than a little stir. The establishment, as one might expect, is outraged, but it is having a difficult time ignoring the