Dr. Jochmans cites numerous accounts of human artifacts being found in earth strata, which according to the standard evolutionary time scale, predate human evolution. These accounts show human existence far far back into earth history, and prove evolution theory false.
Although Dr. Jochmans writes "as though" human
remains and artifacts are hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, is it
is clear from his conclusion that he considers this world to be young, in
accordance with a normal, straight, reading of the Bible and its
genealogies.
I do not have any background on, nor contact with Dr. Jockman. I cannot contact
the "Forgotten Ages Research Society" of Lincoln, Nebraska, USA,
which, I understand, originally published the booklet. This booklet was
available throught the Bible-Science Association some time back.
In most of the academic and scientific world today, the
interpretation of the history of the earth, of life, of man, and of human
culture, is defined within the narrow boundaries of specific, prevailing theories.
The geology of the earth, for example, is viewed almost exclusively in terms of
uniformitarianism. This means that the present-existing processes of erosion
and volcanism are thought to have been the only forces at work in the past.
Because of the slowness of these processes of change, and the tremendous
transformations observed in the earth's depths, the age of the earth is thus
counted in billions of years - today, it is put between 4 1/2 and 5 billion
years.
Likewise, the history of life on this planet is seen as a lengthy development
by evolution, or, the progression from simple to increasingly more complex
forms. Since the simplest - and supposedly earliest - life forms appear in
Cambrian rock, and Cambrian rock is dated geologically at 600 million years,
this is deemed the age of life on earth. Only in the final stage of evolution
did man appear on the scene, the ultimate end-product: According to the most
recent anthropological finds, the earliest man-like creatures roamed the earth
just 4 million years ago. Finally, the very nature of evolutionary theory
dictates that man's cultural development must have been linear - a slow,
gradual, but constant, upward climb from primitive beginnings, spanning the
last 10,000 years, with the advent of modern technological civilization and its
products the recent culmination of that climb.
These theories, which together form the uniformitarian-evolution-linear model,
have predominated modern science for the past century, to the extent that all
finds made - every rock sample, every fossil, every human remains and every
artifact - have been carefully interpreted and categorized so as to fit this
model's framework, at the exclusion of all other. But it is becoming
increasingly apparent that not all facts from the past find their
"proper" place. Other discoveries have been made that contradict the
accepted model. Yet these discoveries are largely ignored, since it is far
easier for the majority of scientists and historians to uphold what is "established,"
than to try to build a new model based on the "exceptions."
One of the greatest pitfalls of the uniformitarian-evolution-linear model is
that it must accept the premise that man, as an intelligent being, was a very
recent arrival in the history of the earth. With the geologic record counted in
billions of years, the fossil record in hundreds of millions of years, the
record of human fossils in the millions of years, and human civilization only
in the thousands of years, there would be no way to explain the presence of
human bones, or sophisticated artifacts derived from the hand of man, in deep
rock strata. In fact, the finding of even a single such item would be totally
devastating to the model, for it would negate the entire concept of uniformity,
and the evolution of man and human culture in the past.
The point that will be brought out in this book is that there is evidence for
man, and the products of human civilization, in the deep recesses of the earth.
Herein are presented the case histories.
Walk into any natural museum today, or read any textbook on
anthropology, and one invariably finds a large chart exhibited, tracing the
ancestry of man back through more primitive forebears, until the line is lost
somewhere amid the apes. Recently, paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey,
excavating in Ethiopia, announced the discovery of what are supposed to be the
oldest accepted fossil remains of man - about 4 million years old. What has
been disturbing about the new finds is that they are, in part, too human: Their
great age, yet partly "modern" appearance, has forced evolutionists
to push back the departure of man from the ape stock farther into the past, so
that now it is beginning to infringe upon the time period necessary for the
development of the apes themselves.
But while the African finds are revolutionary, there have been other
discoveries of human fossils greatly more important, but these have been
deliberately neglected or denounced, because they are far older than man is
"supposed" to be.
Over a hundred years ago, in the 1850's, gold miners began digging tunnels into
the sides and top of Table Mountain, northwest of Needles, California. Gold was
discovered, but along with it were bones of extinct mastodons, mammoths, bison,
tapirs, horses, rhinos, hippos and camels - all dating from the Pliocene. In
1863, a physician from nearby Sonora, Dr. R. Snell, began to collect specimens
from the excavations. In that year, with his bare hands, he loosened from among
the fossils a stone disc that appeared to have been used for grinding. But Dr.
Snell was not the first, or last, to unearth mysterious objects from the
mountain gravel: In 1853, Oliver W. Stevens made affidavit that he removed a
large stone bowl from the lowest level tunnel; in 1857, the Honorable Paul
Hubbs, of Vallejo, dug up part of a human crania from inside the Valentine
shaft; and in 1862, Mr. Llewellyn Pierce also signed affidavit that he had
found a stone mortar 200 feet in from the mouth of the same shaft. The most dramatic
find, however, was reserved for a Mr. Mattison, one of the owners of the mines.
In February of 1866, Mattison unearthed from beneath a layer of basalt an
object which - because of the encrustation's - he first thought was the
petrified root of a tree, but on closer examination discovered was a complete
human skull. The miner sent the skull to the office of the State Survey in June
of the same year. Eventually, the skull came into the possession of Dr. L.
Wyman, of Harvard College, who removed the encasing material around the
cranium. Dr. Wyman, and an associate named Professor Whitney, identified the
skull as very modern in type, but also noted that, "the fragments of bones
and gravel and shells were so wedged into the cavities of the skull that there
could be no mistake as to the character of the situation in which it is
found." The stickler was, however, that this meant the skull, along with
all the artifacts found, were 12 million years old.
In 1958, Dr. Johannes Huerzeler, of the Museum of Natural History in Basel,
Switzerland, unearthed a human jawbone at a depth of 600 feet, in a coal mine
in Tuscany, Italy. The bone had belonged to a child, between the ages of five
and seven. Though flattened like a sheet of iron, the jaw was declared by
several experts to be not only human, but modern-looking at that. But what
mystified them was that it had been encased in a Miocene stratum - geologically
dated at 20 million years. Dr. Huerzeler declared it to be the world's oldest
man" - but his fellow anthropologists did not dare give it the same
distinction. Here were human remains more modern in appearance than all the
"ape-men" forms ever found - yet they were five times as old as any
of them. In fact, the jaw bone is as old, if not older, than many ancestors of
the apes. The bone raised more problems than answers - so the find was quickly
"shelved," and no further work was ever done to give it due
recognition.
Early in November of 1926, archaeologist J.C.F. Siegfriedt made a discovery in
another mine, this one the Number Three shaft of the Mutual Coal Mine of Bear
Creek, 55 miles southwest of Billings, Montana. What Siegfriedt found was a
human tooth, in which the enamel had been replaced by carbon and the roots by
iron, by seepage petrification. In an account published in the Carbon County
News and dated November 11, 1926, Siegfriedt reported that he had meticulously
preserved the mineral matrix that had been deposited around the tooth, and
several dentists identified the mold created as being a human second lower
molar. The tooth, however, came from the lower level of the mine - from an
Eocene deposit dated at 30 million years old. Siegfriedt could generate no
interest in his find among other specialists, and as far as is known, no one
has done any further study of the mystery.
One of the more controversial of the "out-of-place" bones from
extreme antiquity is today part of the collection of the Freiberg Mining
Academy in West Germany. It is a poorly preserved human skull, found in brown
coal in 1842, from an undisclosed locality. Early European authorities
dismissed the skull as a fake, but more recent research and analysis has
questioned this hasty pronouncement, putting it back into the realm of the
authentic. The reason for its initial denunciation is understandable: The coal
it was embedded in, a portion of which still clings to the skull, is estimated
to be as much as 50 million years old.
It seems that even when authentication is overwhelming, the response by the
scientific community is, inversely, underwhelming. In 1973, a rock collector
named Lin Ottinger was searching over a rock plateau that had just been
bulldozed over, in preparation for the beginning of mining operations by the
nearby Big Indian Copper Mine. The mine is situated 35 miles southwest of Moab,
Utah. During his pickings in the exposed rock, Ottinger suddenly found pieces
of bone and teeth, and traced these to a patch of sand with a brown stain - the
tell-tale sign of decayed organic matter. Carefully removing the sand, Ottinger
discovered the top portion of a large intact bone. The rockhound, realizing the
importance of his find, decided to have a credited expert look at it, and let
him do the digging, so that everything would be "scientifically
acceptable."
A week later, Ottinger returned to the plateau with Dr. J.P. Marwitt, professor
of anthropology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, several
photographers, a news reporter, and a number of observers. With cameras
recording the event, Dr. Marwitt carefully removed the lower halves of two
human skeletons. The bones were articulated - that is, laid out naturally -
showing the bodies had not fallen or been washed into the stratum in which they
were situated. These and other factors revealed the bones to be as old as the
layer in which they were found. The one problem was, the layer is Lower Dakota
and Upper Morrison formations -over 100 million years of age, according to
uniformitarian geologists. Yet, as Marwitt noted, the bones were not simian or
even half-ape: They were fully human and modern-looking.
The skeletons were taken by Marwitt back with him to the University of Utah, to
run laboratory datings on them. But whether the tests were ever run, there was
no official confirmation. One gets the impression they were, and that the
findings were too disturbing for conservative thinking. Marwitt suddenly became
"disinterested" in the project, and left Utah to take up a teaching
position elsewhere. After a year waiting for results, Ottinger recovered the
bones - and that ended the scientific inquiry.
More finds, made in the last century, were similarly reported, and promptly
forgotten. The Saturday Herald of Iowa City carried an article that on April
10, 1867, human remains and artifacts were brought to light at the Rocky Point
Mine, in Gilman, Colorado. At a depth of 400 feet below the surface, excavators
found human bones embedded in a silver vein. Along with the bones was found a
well-tempered copper arrowhead. As best as can be calculated, the vein in which
the items were situated was 135 million years old, by present geological
standards. ((SR. #2))
At times, the discoveries made revealed "mysteries upon mysteries."
In July, 1877, four prospectors were looking for gold and silver outcroppings
in a desolate, hilly area near the head of Spring Valley, not far from Eureka,
Nevada. Scanning the rocks, one of the men spotted something peculiar
projecting from a high ledge. Climbing up to get a better look, the prospector
was surprised to find a human legbone and knee cap sticking out of solid rock.
He called to his companions, and together they dislodged the oddity with picks.
Realizing they had a most unusual find, the men brought it into Eureka, where
it was placed on display.
The stone in which the bones were embedded was a hard, dark red quartzite, and
the bones themselves were almost black with carbonization - indicative of great
age. When the surrounding stone was carefully chipped away, the specimen was
found to be composed of a leg bone broken off four inches above the knee, the
knee cap and joint, the lower leg bones, and the complete bones of the foot.
Several medical doctors examined the remains, and were convinced that
anatomically they had indeed once belonged to a human being, and a very
modern-looking one. But an intriguing aspect of the bones was their size: from
knee to heel they measured 39 inches. Their owner in life had thus stood over
12 feet tall. Compounding the mystery further was the fact that the rock in
which the bones were found was dated geologically to he era of the dinosaurs,
the Jurassic - over 185 million years old. The local papers ran several stories
on the marvelous find, and two museums sent investigators to see if any more of
the skeleton could be located. Unfortunately, nothing else but the leg and foot
existed in the rock.
The next and last skeletal find takes us another quantum leap in geologic time,
and plunges us even deeper into the earth's strata. A Scientific American
article published in 1880 reprinted the particulars of a discovery made in the
spring of that year, reported in the St. Louis Republican. Dr.
R.W. Booth, who operated an iron mine about 3 miles from Dry Branch, in
Franklin County, Missouri, unearthed from a depth of 18 feet a human skull, portions
of ribs, vertebrae and a collar bone. With them were two barbed arrowheads of
flint, and pieces of charcoal. Dr. Booth realized the significance of all this,
but was frustrated when at just a touch the skull crumbled to dust, and the
other bones likewise broke into pieces. But these pieces nevertheless told
their story: Later analysis showed they were definitely human. Two and a half
weeks later, Dr. Booth reached a level of 24 feet, and found more of the same
skeleton - a thigh bone, vertebrae, and more charred wood. What is more, the
remains were found resting on a layer of iron ore, which bore the impressions
of coarse matting. One could still see the marks of criss-crossing fibers. What
astounded Booth was that the layer in which both portions were dug up was the
second or saccharoidal sandstone of the Lower Silurian - dated an incredible
425 million years old.
Let me repeat that: 425 million years. We have gone far beyond the purported
age of human culture, of man himself, the apes, all mammals, even the age of
the dinosaurs. According to evolutionary theory, the Silurian age saw the
advent of life on land and was in fact more than two-thirds of the way back to
the supposed advent of life itself. But what are the remains of man and his
products doing at this level? Something, certainly, is very wrong.
Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington once wrote: "We have found
a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound
theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last we have
succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! it is
our own." There is more truth in this statement than first meets the eye,
for there are many instances where not only did man leave his remains in the
rock strata, but also his imprint.
In 1884, Earl Flint, a geologist representing the Peabody Museum and Harvard
University, discovered in a rock quarry near Managua, Nicaragua, on the shores
of Lake Gilva, a layer containing fossilized human tracks, 16 to 24 feet below
the surface. Flint described the tracks in these words, written in 1884:
"The footprints are from one-half to three inches in depth and none
exceeded eighteen inches. Some of the impressions are nearly closed, the soft
surface falling back into the impression, and a crevice about two inches in
width is all one sees, and my first glance at some parallel to one less deep,
gave me an idea that the owner of the latter was using a stave to assist him in
walking. In some the substance flowed outward, leaving a ridge around it - seen
in one secured for the museum; the stride is variable, owing to the size of the
person, and the changing nature of the surface passed over. The longest one
uncovered was seventeen inches, length of foot ten inches, and width four
inches, feet arched, steps in a right line, measured from center of heel to
center of great toe over three steps. The people making them were going both
ways in a direction consonant to that of the present lake shore east and west,
more or less."
Among these, and others in nearby sites, Flint found examples of both barefoot
and well-defined sandaled-foot impressions. All were geologically dated as
being over 200,000 years of age. Now supposedly at this remote time, man was
nothing more than a naked, hairy creature, capable of chipping a few flints and
just beginning to overcome his fear of fire. In sharp contrast, the Nicaragua
finds reveal the intelligent use of a walking stick, and the wearing of sandals
that appear to have been best designed for both comfort and protection. We are
confronted here with not just the footprint of a half-beast, but rather the
footprint of a civilized being.
Two years earlier, in the summer of 1882, inmates working in the quarry at the
State Prison near Carson City, Nevada, brought to light a layer of sandstone
covered with fossilized animal tracks, among them a number having belonged to
the extinct mammoth. What caused considerable scientific consternation,
however, was the fact that several human tracks were also found. The tracks
were in six series, each with alternate right and left tracks. The stride was
from two and a half to over three feet, and the individual prints were from 18
to 20 inches in length - that of a giant. The straddle - the distance between
the lines of left and right prints - was 18 to 19 inches. Geologist Joseph Le
Conte read a paper on the investigation done on the Carson City tracks to the
California Academy of Science on August 27,1882, and attempted to explain them
as the marks left by an extinct giant sloth that lived during the late Pliocene
- over 2 million years ago. But sloths, in order to walk upright on only two
feet, as the fossil tracks indicate, would have had to have used their tails as
a balance, and there were no tail grooves in the sandstone. Not only this, but
a comparison between the Carson City tracks and known sloth impressions showed
several dissimilarities. The sloth's prints have marked toe protuberances as
well as definite claw marks; the Carson City tracks have neither. The Carson
City tracks, in fact, showed signs that their maker had worn some type of
sandal or foot protection - very definitely not the habit of an animal.
The May 25, 1969 issue of the Tulsa Sunday World carried the story of a
curious fossil find made on a hilltop overlooking the eastern part of Tulsa,
Oklahoma. The find was made by Troy Johnson, a field geologist of thirteen
years' experience, and though he showed plaster-casts of his discovery to
several experts, each and every one refused to accept it or its implications.
Johnson had unearthed a sandstone strata filled with fossil tracks - many
five-toed and distinctly human. The fact that a number of examples of these
were overlaid by the tracks of now extinct creatures demonstrated that the
mantracks could not have been of recent origin, but dated back between 3 and 5
million years.
One remarkable mantrack find was reported in the Soviet journal (no. 8, 1961).
In 1959, a joint Russian-Chinese paleontological expedition under the direction
of Dr. Chou Ming Chen, discovered in the Gobi Desert of central Asia the
fossilized print of a shoe with a ribbed sole. The find appears in sandstone
dated at 15 million years. Members of the expedition who carefully examined the
shoe-print were quick to recognize that it was not the footmark of any animal,
for the ribbing was too straight and regular to be of natural origin.
Even more recent examples of foot and shoe prints were brought to light in the
1970's, in the Carrizo Valley in northwest Oklahoma. The prints occur in both
the Morrison formation and Dakota sandstone - over 100 million years old. The
bare foot marks are somewhat eroded, but show evidence of definite pressure
ridges. Several are in very close proximity to dinosaur tracks. The shoe prints
are more clearly defined, and reveal their wearers to have been above normal
size, with the imprints averaging 20 inches long and 8 inches across the ball
of the foot.
Probably the most publicized mantracks are those found along the Paluxy river,
near Glen Rose, Texas. They were first observed in 1908, after a flood washed
away a portion of shore ledging, exposing geologic levels of the Glen Rose
Formation, the Paluxy Formation, and the Twin Mountain Formation of the Trinity
Group - all dated to the early Cretaceous, between 120 and 130 million years.
Interestingly, these same rock types occur at Bandera, not far from San
Antonio, and there, too, human prints have been uncovered and documented. On
the Paluxy, serious research into the mystery of the fossil prints did not
begin until 1938, when Roland T. Bird, of the Department of Vertebrate
Paleontology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City,
removed a trail of brontosaurus tracks that were alongside a series of what his
eyes beheld with the "official" position, but admitted in the May,
1939 issue of Natural History: "No man ever existed in the age of reptiles
although the tracks are perfect in every detail." Bird could only conclude
that the prints he saw were those of some "extinct ape" - but this
explanation was most unsatisfactory, since according to evolutionary theory,
apes were not to appear for another 100 million years after the epoch of the
brontosaurus.
The Paluxy site became a tourist attraction, and during the Depression, locals
began excavating both dinosaur and man prints, and selling them for souvenirs.
Some of the specimens sold were really hand-carved by the more unscrupulous
opportunists, and unfortunately in later years, conservative scholars were
quick to point to these few examples of fakery as the answer to all the tracks
discovered. But on-the-spot diggings by geologists and paleontologists have
uncovered many new prints found in situ that could not have been hoaxes, for
they were discovered deep within the rock layers, and at times several feet
back into the Paluxy banks, where no fabrication could possibly be made.
The sum total of finds along the Paluxy reveal quite a mixture of man and
animal types having lived all at the same time. There are heavy brontosaur
tracks, the talon marks of the feared Tyrannosaurus Rex, three-toed spoors of
other dinosaurs - and the imprint of a saber-tooth tiger, which was supposed to
have lived only a few million years ago, not in the era of the giant lizards.
As for the human prints, many are found in series, popping out of the Paluxy
banks in a very natural stride, then wading into the river bed. A good number
of the prints are bare, with the large toe in particular clearly
distinguishable; others show signs of the maker's feet having worn some form of
foot covering, like a moccasin or thin sandal. in one instance, in fact, the
fossil print is so well preserved that the impression of the lacing on the
moccasin is still visible. Some human tracks are of men of modern stature, with
shoe sizes from 7 to 13; others are of children, whose prints are both
proportionally smaller and shallower. Several more, however, are 1 6-inches,
with not a few of men with 21 and 1/2-inch feet and a 7-foot stride - giants in
the true sense of the word.
The most remarkable fact of all, however, is that these prints are in the same
layer as dinosaur tracks, and in a few instances, the human and dinosaur prints
cross each other, showing that the two had been contemporary when the rock had
been mud. The significance of these examples was noted by Dr. A.E. Wilder Smith
of the University of Illinois: "One authentic man-track found in the same
stratum as one authentic brontosaurus track throws out one hundred years of
evolutionary teachings. It is sufficient to bring the whole Darwinistic theory
down and revolutionize all biology today."
But the out-of-place footprints go back even further in geologic time. The
American Anthropologist, volume IX (1896), page 66, describes the finding of a
perfect human imprint in stone about 4 miles north of Parkersburg, on the West
Virginia side of the Ohio river. The track was 14 1/2 inches long, and was
found embedded in a large stone. Though few specifics were given, one expert
has calculated from the type of rock depicted, and its position on the river's
edge, that the track must be at least 150 million years old, according to
modern geologic dating.
In the late 1970's, Dr. Rex Gilroy, director of the Mount York Natural History
Museum of Australia, discovered a giant impress on Mount Victoria. One
tentative estimate puts the track at 200 million years of age.
One of the most remarkable tracks was found in Fisher Canyon, Pershing County,
Nevada. On January 25, 1927, an amateur geologist named Albert E. Knapp was
descending a small hill in the canyon, when he spotted the fossil laying
topside up among a pile of loose rocks. He picked up the find, and took it home
with him. Upon closer examination, Knapp was astounded to discover, "it is
a layer from the heel of a shoe which had been pulled up from the balance of
the heel by suction, the rock being in a plastic state at the time." The
shoe print was in a marvelous state of preservation - the edges of the heel
were smooth and rounded off as if cut, and its right side appeared more worn
than the left - suggesting it had been worn on the right foot. But what Knapp
found really amazing was that the rock in which the heel mark was made, was
Triassic limestone - 225 million years old - which runs in a belt through the
canyon hills he had been exploring. The rock was later examined by an expert
geologist at the Rockefeller Foundation, who confirmed Knapp's analysis. The
presence of minute crystals of sulphide of mercury throughout spaces in the
fossil also testified to it being of great antiquity.
The real surprise about the age-old heel imprint, however, did not come until
micro-photographs revealed that the leather had been stitched by a double row
of stitches, the twists of the threads is very discernable. One line followed
along the heel's outer edge, and the second line paralleled the first
precisely, inwards by one-third of an inch. What baffled investigators was the
fact that this double-stitching had been done with thread much smaller, and
more refined in workmanship, than that used by shoe-makers in 1927, when the
fossil print was discovered. As Mr. Samuel Hubbard, Honorary Curator of
Archaeology of the Oakland Museum in California, commented: "There are
whole races of primitive men on earth today, utterly incapable of sewing that
moccasin. What becomes of the Darwinian theory in the face of this evidence
that there were intelligent men on earth millions of years before apes were
supposed to have evolved?"
In 1885, Professor J.F. Brown of Berea College, Kentucky was called upon to
examine a puzzling find, made 16 miles east of the town of Berea, on Big Hill
in Rock Castle County, one of the spurs of the Cumberland Plateau. Near the
summit, an old wagon trail cut through a stratum of carboniferous limestone,
and removal of earth to widen the trail into a road had exposed a new section
of this stratum. As E.A. Allen reported in the American Antiquarian, volume 7,
page 39, preserved in the layer were the fossilized impressions of several
creatures. What mystified those who witnessed the remains was that among these
tracks were two well-preserved prints of a human being. They were described as
"good-sized, toes well spread, and very distinctly marked."
It was not until 1930 that further and more detailed investigations were
performed, this time by Dr. Wilbur Greely Burroughs, head of the geology
department at Berea College. Dr. Burroughs discovered a total of twelve 9
1/2-inch mantracks and portions of others, and confirmed that they had indeed
been impressed upon gray Pottsville sandstone dating from the Upper
Pennsylvanian period -well over 300 million years old.
Several geologists and paleontologists of the conservative school, in search of
a face-saving explanation, declared the tracks not to be of human origin, but
the marks of some as yet unknown species of amphibian. Dr. Burroughs' research,
however, proved otherwise. He described the configuration of the tracks this
way, as quoted in the Louisville Courier-Journal, May 24,1953:
"Of these, two pairs show the left foot advanced relative to the right.
The position of the feet is the same as that of a person. The distance from
heel to heel is 18 inches. One pair shows the feet parallel to each other, the
distance between the feet being the same as that of a normal human being.
Dr. Burroughs concluded that the prints were made by a creature that was
exclusively bipedal. Most amphibians and reptiles are quadruped - there were no
foreleg prints. And those that have been known to walk upright on their hindlegs,
always do so with the tail acting as a tripod or "third leg," to give
balance. As Dr. Burroughs carefully noted, nowhere were there signs of belly or
tail marks in the examined stratum. Furthermore, Dr. Burroughs and several of
his colleagues performed a microscopic analysis of the mantracks, and based
upon the grain count, established that, "the sand grains within each track
are closer together than the grains immediately outside the tracks and
elsewhere on the rock for the same kind and same combination of grains, due to
the pressure of the creature's foot." The "creature," they
found, had exerted a weight pressure a little above that of a modern man. As
the Science Newsletter of October 29, 1938 commented, no amphibian or reptile
that size has been discovered in the fossil record that walked upright in the
Pennsylvanian era.
Finally, the clear impressions showing five toes, ball and heel are totally
unrelated to an amphibian's or reptile's physical makeup - only man has a foot
like that. Albert G. Ingalls, writing in Scientific American, January, 1940,
declared, "If man existed as far back as in the Carboniferous Period in
any shape, then the whole science of geology is so completely wrong that all
geologists should resign their jobs and take up truck driving."
On an outcrop of greyish-blue crinoidal limestone about 200 feet wide and
extending along the west bank of the Mississippi for 3 miles just south of St.
Louis, are a number of mantrack impressions which a century ago could be
observed during low-water stages. The early French explorers along the river
were the first to note their existence, and ever since they have created a
heated controversy. The first scientific observation of the prints was reported
by Henry Schooleraft in The American Journal of Science (volume V), for 1822,
and he described them as, "strikingly natural, exhibiting every muscular
impression, and the swell of the heel and toes, with a precision and
faithfulness to nature I have not been able to copy." His colleagues
dismissed the tracks as Indian petroglyphs, but Schooleraft was convinced of
their natural origin: They had been impressed, he carefully noted, not carved
into the limestone. Whoever had made them, Schooleraft also commented, had been
of average size: The foot lengths were 10 1/2 inches; width across the
outspread toes were 4 inches; and the heels were 2 1/2 inches wide.
The American Antiquarian, volume 7, pages 364-367 (1885) gave the account of
another find associated with the St. Louis footprints that is perhaps even more
disturbing. Quoting from Priest's "American Antiquities," a
particular set of tracks was described in detail. Then, "directly before
the prints of these feet, within a few inches, is a well-impressed and deep
mark, having some resemblance to a scroll, or roll of parchment, two feet long
by a foot in width." The squared impression was not a natural shape;
neither were there scratch marks that would have indicated the patch had been
carved. Rather, the evidence points to the parchment impression having been
made when the rock was still in a plastic state - made at the same time as the
footprints. What such a find suggests is that the prints' owners were not only
men, but were men with the intelligence to produce some form of paper sheet -
and perhaps write upon it. But as if this were not enough of a mystery, the
limestone in which prints and paper appear, is dated to the Mississippian age -
345 million years ago.
Still more finds of prints plunge mankind "feet first" even farther
down into the geologic column. In 1948, a shoe impress was discovered near Lake
Windermere, England. As reported in the natural history journal The Field
for that year, the impress had been made in Ordovician limestone - an
unbelievable 500 million years old. Remarkable too is the finding that the
print bears signs of craft and artistry: Around the edge of both the heel and
the foreshoe are circular impressions which resemble tacking; while in the
center of the sole and heel are faint decorations of linear and flower-like
designs. Though the impression is somewhat distorted in shape due to fractures
and crevices in the rock surface, a measurement reveals an extended length of
the shoe of about 8 inches and a width of 31/2 inches.
On June 1, 1968, an amateur rock hunter, William J. Meister, of Kearns, Utah
was visiting nearby Antelope Springs with his family. The area, which includes
the Swasey Mountains and the Cambrian Wheeler shale formation, is famous for
its many fossils, and on this particular day Meister was on the lookout for
fossilized trilobites and brachiopods - according to evolutionary theory, once
among the oldest known living creatures. Meister broke off a rock slab, and,
tapping its edge with a hammer, it fell open in two pieces, like the leaves of
a book. To his great surprise, inside was a human sandal print, pointed in the
toes, rounded in the heel, and with a squashed trilobite in the center of the
sole. The sandal print measured 10 1/4 inches long, 31/2 inches wide at the
ball and 3 inches at the heel. The sandal appears to have been well-worn on the
right side - indicating it had been worn on the right foot - and the heel
impression is deeper by one-eighth of an inch, characteristic of the weight
distribution of humans on the foot. This particular find was later examined by
Dr. Hellmut H. Doelling, of the Utah Geological Survey, and he found no
irregularities or evidence of fakery - the print was genuine.
On July 20th, Meister returned to Antelope Springs with professional geologist
Dr. Clifford Burdick. Digging in the same locality, Burdick discovered another
imprint in the Cambrian shale, this time of a child The print was 6 inches
long, and the five toes were barely distinguishable, as if the child was
wearing moccasins. Yet Burdick detected that the toes were spread out,
indicating the child had only begun to wear shoes, which tend to compress the
toes with age. The heel and arch were again well depressed, showing weight
distribution, and a segment of a fossil was crushed in its middle. Burdick managed
to find a larger fossil imprint, like Meister's original, though the impression
was shallower, and also unearthed a second child's track, smaller than the
first, with the toes broken off, but perfect in its other aspects. Later, a
detailed examination revealed that the rock in which the prints were found was
made of tiny layers, and where the foot-marks occur, the layers were bowed
downward from the horizontal - demonstrating that weight had indeed, been
pressed into the once prehistoric mud.
But that "prehistoric mud" with its tell-tale prints, is now Cambrian
shale - an astounding 600 million years old. And the fossils in the prints are
trilobites - supposed to be among the earliest forms of life on earth. This
time, we have literally hit "rock bottom" in the fossil record - and
yet here we find the presence of man, and an intelligent, shoe-wearing man at
that. How could he have "evolved" from simple life, when the Cambrian
prints testify that he is as old as life itself?
It is one thing to find evidence of human skeletal remains
and footprints in the incredible past, but it is something else again to
discover artifacts that prove the existence of advanced cultures in the strata
as well. One of the characteristics of any high civilization is its ability to
work metals. Conservative historians and archaeologists, who hold to the
concept of linear cultural development, point to the ancient Middle East as the
home of the very first metal production. Here, they claim, man began to melt
and shape copper, iron, gold, and silver only 8,000 years ago. But unusual
relics brought up from the depths of the rocky earth tell a different story.
In 1826, a well dug near the Ohio river in north Cincinnati failed to produce
water, but did produce the unexpected. From a level 94 feet down, a buried tree
stump was brought to the surface which showed the marks of an ax. The marks
were deep and well-cut, indicating the use of a sharp and durable blade. The
suspicion that the ax had been made of metal was confirmed when, embedded in
the top of the stump, an advanced oxidized wedge of iron was found. The layer
from which the stump came was estimated to be between 50,000 and 75,000 years
old - nearly 10 times the accepted age of the supposed first metal usage.
A letter kept in the Archives of Madrid and dated 1572, records the account of
the Spanish Viceroy in Peru and a strange artifact which came into his
possession. In the year the letter was written, Indian miners removed from a
subsurface layer of gravel a large conglomerate boulder, and broke it into
pieces for easier disposal. As the mass shattered to the hammer blow, out of
the center of it fell a perfect six-inch nail. The nail was later given to the
Viceroy as a souvenir, who had it thoroughly examined, and verified its
finding. The first mystery is that iron was unknown to the Peruvian Indians, so
the nail did not originate with them. And the second mystery is that the rock
from which the nail was freed was in the neighborhood of 75,000 to 100,000
years in age.
In the June, 1851 issue of Scientific American (volume 7, pages
298-299), a report was reprinted from the Boston Transcript about two
parts of a metallic vase dynamited out of solid rock on Meeting House Hill,
Dorchester, Massachusetts. When the two parts were put together, they formed a
bell-shaped vase, 4 1/2 inches high, 6 1/2 inches at the base, 2 1/2 inches at
the top and an eighth of an inch thick. The metal of the vase was composed of
an alloy of zinc and a considerable portion of silver. On the sides were six
figures of a flower in bouquet arrangements, inlaid with pure silver, and
around the lower part a vine, or wreath, also inlaid with silver. The chasing,
carving, and inlaying are exquisitely done by the art of some unknown craftsman
- yet this curiosity was blown out of solid pudding stone from 15 feet below
the surface. Estimated age - 100,000 years. Unfortunately, the vase was
circulated from museum to museum, and then disappeared. It is probably
gathering dust in some curator's basement, its identity or source long
forgotten.
At Lawn Ridge, 20 miles north of Peoria, Illinois, in August of 1870, three men
were drilling an artesian well, when - from a depth of over a hundred feet -
the pump brought up a small metal medallion to the surface. One of the workmen,
Jacob W. Moffit, from Chillicothe, was the first to discover it in the drill
residue. A noted scholar of the time, Professor Alexander Winchell, reported in
his book Sparks From a Geologist's Hammer, that he received from another
eye-witness, W.H. Wilmot, a detailed statement, dated December 4, 1871, of the
deposits and depths of materials made during the boring, and the position where
the metal "coin" was uncovered. The stratification took this form:
Soil - 3 feet; yellow clay - 17 feet; blue clay - 44 feet; dark vegetable
matter - 4 feet; hard purplish clay - 18 feet; bright green clay - 8 feet;
mottled clay - 18 feet; paleosol (ancient soils) - 2 feet; coin location;
yellowish clay - 1 foot; sand, clay and water - 11 feet. The strange
"coin-medallion" was composed of an unidentified copper alloy, about
the size and thickness of a U.S. quarter of that period. It was remarkably
uniform in thickness, round, and the edges appeared to have been cut. Researcher
William E. Dubois, who presented his investigation of the medallion to the
American Philosophical Society, was convinced that the object had in fact
passed through a rolling mill, the edges showed "further evidence of the
machine shop." Despite its "modern characteristics", however,
Dubois plainly saw that, upon the object, "the tooth of time is plainly
visible."
Both sides of the medallion were marked with artwork and hieroglyphs, but these
had not been metal-engraved or stamped. Rather, the figures had somehow been
etched in acid, to a remarkable degree of intricacy. One side showed the figure
of a woman wearing a crown or headdress; her left arm is raised as if in
benediction, and her right arm holds a small child, also crowned. The woman
appears to be speaking. On the opposite side is another central figure, that
looks like a crouching animal: it has long, pointed ears, large eyes and mouth,
claw-like arms, and a long tail frayed at the very end. Below and to the left
of it is another animal, which bears a strong resemblance to a horse. Around
the outer edges of both sides of the coin are undecipherable glyphs - they are
of very definite character, and show all the signs of a form of alphabetic
writing.
In 1876, the medallion was presented by Professor Winchell to a meeting of the
Geological Section of the American Association in Buffalo. There was much
speculation, but few answers. One participant, a conservative historian,
Professor J.R. Lesley, tried to explain the object as a "practical
joke" dropped into a hole by a passing French or Spanish explorer. The
professor even claimed to see the coin's figures as the astrological signs of
Pisces and Leo, and read into the glyphs the date 1572. However, Winchell
countered with these arguments against such an interpretation: 1. By no stretch
of the imagination were the figures and glyphs decipherable in terms of any
known symbology or script. 2. Who, as a practical joke, would have dropped a
metal object into a hole and known that someone several hundred years later would
happen to drill at that precise spot (within a 4-inch tolerance) and find it?
The odds would be phenomenal. And 3. There is the very real problem of
explaining the accumulation of 114 feet of deposit over the buried coin. Having
examined all the evidence, Winchell was convinced the coin had indeed come from
this depth. It had not fallen into a hole in the past - the sediments drilled
through were uniform and undisturbed. And the amount of sedimentation was not
what would have settled in only a few centuries. In fact, recent calculations
based on uniform rates of alluvium deposition and radioisotope dates for this
region estimate an age for materials from just below a depth of 100 feet to be
between 100,000 and 150,000 years.
What conclusions can we draw about the mystery coin? A lost civilization once
existed on the North American continent which worked in copper and other
metals; possessed art and writing; attired themselves with crowns and other
clothing; knew of and perhaps domesticated several animals including the horse;
utilized acids for etching in a manner that is still not understood today; and
perhaps the most disturbing, possessed forms of machinery for the cutting,
rolling and processing of metal pieces.
As a sidelight, the enigmatic coin was not the only item that came from deep
levels in Illinois. In 1851, in Whiteside County, another well-drilling bit
brought up from a sand stratum 120 feet deep two copper artifacts: What appears
to be a hook, and a ring. Their age is thought to be the same as that of the
coin - about 150,000 years old.
On February 13,1961, three rock hunters - Mike Mikesell, Wallace Lane and
Virginia Maxey - were collecting geodes about 12 miles east-southeast of
Olancha, California. Geodes are spherical stones with hollow interiors lined
with crystals. On this particular day, while searching in the Coso Mountains,
they found one stone located near the top of a peak approximately 4,300 feet in
elevation and about 340 feet above the dry bed of Owens Lake.
The rockhounds took it to be a geode, but later found it was not, because it
bore traces of fossil shells. The next day when Mikesell cut the stone in half,
he nearly ruined a ten-inch diamond saw in the process, for it did not contain
crystals, but rather something totally unexpected. Inside were the remains of
some form of mechanical device: Beneath the outer layer of hardened clay,
pebbles and fossil inclusions is a hexagonal shaped layer of a substance
resembling wood, softer than agate or jasper. This layer forms a casing around
a three-quarter inch wide cylinder made of solid white porcelain or ceramic,
and in the center of the cylinder is a two millimeter shaft of bright, brassy
metal. This shaft, the rock hunters discovered, is magnetic, and after several
years of exposure never showed traces of oxidation. Also, surrounding the
ceramic cylinder are rings of copper, much of them now corroded. Embedded too
in the rock, though separate from the cylinder, are two more man-made items -
what look like a nail and a washer.
EDITOR’S COMMENT:
Several readers have stated that this artifact is indeed a spark plug
from the 1920’s.
The puzzled rock hunters sent their find to the Charles Fort Society, who
specialize in investigating things out of the ordinary. The Society made an
X-ray examination of the cylinder object enclosed in the fossil-encrusted rock,
and found further evidence that it was indeed some form of mechanical
apparatus. The X-rays revealed that the metallic shaft was corroded at one end,
but on the other end terminated in what appeared to be a spring or helix of
metal. As a whole, the "Coso artifact" is now believed to be
something more than a piece of machinery: The carefully shaped ceramic,
metallic shaft and copper components hint at some form of electrical
instrument. The closest modern apparatus that researchers have been able to
equate it with is a spark plug. However, there are certain features -
particularly the spring or helix terminal - that does not correspond to any
known spark plug today. The rock in which the electrical instrument was found
was dated by a competent geologist at 500,000 years old.
The rock strata appear to be full of metal "surprises." The Illinois
Springfield Republican reported in 1851 that a businessman named Hiram de Witt
had brought back with him from a trip to California a piece of auriferous
quartz rock about the size of a man's fist, and that while showing the rock to
a friend, it slipped from his hand and split open upon hitting the floor.
There, in the center of the quartz, they discovered a cut-iron nail, six-penny
size, slightly corroded but entirely straight, with a perfect head. the quartz
was given an age of over one million years.
In 1865, a two-inch metal screw was discovered in a piece of feldspar unearthed
from the Abbey Mine in Treasure City, Nevada. The screw had long ago oxidized,
but its form - particularly the shape of its threads - could be clearly seen in
the feldspar. The stone was calculated to be 21 million years in age.
Twenty years earlier, in 1844, Sir David Brewster made a report to the British
Association for the Advancement of Science which created quite a stir. A nail
of obvious human manufacture had been found half-embedded in a sandstone block
excavated from the Kindgoodie Quarry near Inchyra, in northern Britain. It was
badly corroded, but identifiable nonetheless. The sandstone was determined to
be at least 40 million years old.
In the fall of 1885, at an iron foundry owned by the sons of Herr Isidor Braun
located in Schondorf near Bocklabruck, Upper Austria, a workman named Riedl was
breaking up a block of Tertiary brown coal that had been mined from the pits at
Wolfsegg, near Schwannstadt, and was about to be used to heat the foundry's
giant smelters. As the block disintegrated into several pieces, out dropped a
strange cube-like object. In 1886, mining engineer Dr. Adolf Gurlt made a
report to the Natural History Society at Bonn, Germany and noted that the
object, coated with a thin layer of rust, is made of iron, measures 2.64 by
2.64 by 1.85 inches, weighs 1.73 Ibs., and has a specific gravity measurement
of 7.75. Four of the iron "cube's" sides are roughly flat, while the
two remaining sides - opposite each other - are convex. A fairly deep groove
was incised all the way around the object, about mid-way up its height. Other
early studies on the iron artifact were in scientific journals of the day as
Nature (London; November 11, 1886, page 36) and L'Astronomie (Paris; 1886, page
463). A plaster cast was also made before the turn of the century -important
because the original object subsequently suffered from handling, and from being
disfigured by samples having been cut from it by investigators for research.
The cast is kept in the Oberosterreichisehes Landesmuseum in Linz, Austria,
where the original object was also exhibited from 1950 to 1958. The iron cube
is presently in the custody of Herrn O.R. Bernhardt of the Heimathaus Museum in
Vocklabruck.
In 1966-67, the iron "cube" was carefully analyzed by experts at the
Vienna Naturhistorisehes Museum, using electron-beam microanalysis. They found
no traces of nickel, chromium or cobalt in the iron - which means the object
was not of meteoric origin. No sulfur was detected either, ruling out the
chance of it being a pyrite, a natural mineral that sometimes forms geometric
shapes. Because of a low magnesium content, Dr. Kurat of the Museum, and Dr. R.
Gill of the Geologisehe Bundesanstalt of Vienna, are of the opinion that the
object was made of cast-iron. In 1973, Hubert Mattlianer concluded from yet
another detailed investigation that the object had been made from a
hand-sculptured lump of wax or clay pressed into a sand base, this forming the
mold into which the iron had been poured.
The final conclusion, then, is that the strange object is definitely man-made.
What is not explained is what it was doing encased in coal dating to the
Tertiary - 60 million years old.
In 1968, French speleologists Y. Druet and H. Salfati reported finding unusual
metal nodules entombed in an Aptian chalk bed in a quarry at Saint-Jean de
Livet. The nodules are reddish brown, wafer-shaped and hollowed at the ends,
measuring from 3 to 9 centimeters long and 1 to four centimeters wide. The two
investigators at first thought the nodules were fossils until they discovered
their metallic nature. Next, they theorized they were residue from a meteor -
but careful study showed the nodules were too uniformly shaped to be of natural
origin. Chemical analysis showed a carbon content consistent with modern
forging and casting techniques. But what had these man-made objects been doing
in chalk beds dating toward the end of the Cretaceous - over 120 million years?
As Druet and Salfati concluded, "These objects, then, prove the presence
of intelligent life on earth long before the limits given today by prehistoric
archaeology."
On June 9, 1891, Mrs. S.W. Culp of Morrisonville, Illinois was shoveling coal
into her kitchen stove when a large lump broke in two and out from the center
of it fell a gold chain. The chain was about 10 inches long, made of eight
carat gold, weighed 8 pennyweight, and was described as being "of antique
and quaint workmanship." The Morrisonville Times of June 11 reported that
investigators were convinced the chain had not simply been accidentally dropped
in with the coal: One portion of the coal lump still clung to the chain, while
the part that had separated from it still bore the impression of where the
chain had been encased. The Times could only comment, "Here is one for the
student of archaeology who loves to puzzle his brain over the geological
construction of the Earth from whose ancient depth the curious are always
dropping out." In this case, the "curious" "dropped
out" of a piece of coal from the Pennsylvanian era - over 300 million
years old.
Similar events produced another metal object of even greater age. In 1912, two
employees of the Municipal Electric Plant of Thomas, Oklahoma, were shoveling
coal into the plant furnaces, using fuel which had been mined near neighboring
Wilberton. One chunk of coal was too large to handle, so the workmen took a
sledge hammer to it. Once it broke open, however, the workmen found that the
chunk contained an iron pot, and upon its removal, the two coal halves bore the
"mold" of the pot in its interiors. Both employees signed affidavits
testifying to the authenticity of the discovery, and the iron pot was
subsequently examined by several experts - every one of which was most
reluctant to comment on the pot, and the circumstances surrounding its
discovery. This was most understandable, since the object came from coal dated
from 300 to 325 million
years.
One more find that must be mentioned in the out-of-place metal category takes
us - once again - to the deepest level of fossil life. On June 13, 1880, a
reporter for the Inverness Courier named Walter Carruthers was vacationing near
Loch Maree and Victoria Falls, in Scotland, and - being an amateur rock hunter
- decided to explore the geology of the area. Between 300 and 400 yards above
Victoria Falls, and immediately beside the last of the three lesser falls on
the west side of the stream, Carruthers noticed peculiar impressions in the
rock. The rock was a l6 x 16-foot exposed surface of Torridon Red Sandstone,
placed in the Cambrian age. The impressions consisted of two continuous flat
bands side by side, between 1 1/4 and 1 1/2 inches wide and about 1/4 inch
deep, running unnaturally straight through the flat layers of sandstone in
situ, and perfectly distinct for 16 feet, disappearing on the west side under
the superimposed rock, and broken only where portions of the sandstone had been
weathered out. A few weeks later the curious "bands" were also
observed by a colleague of Carruthers, Mr. William Jolly, Her Majesty's
Inspector of Schools for the region. Carruthers had thought the impressions to
have been the creation of some highly unusual living creature, but Jolly
recorded that "the continuous even breadth and square section of the bands
would seem to render this impossible." Jolly further noted, "The
double band resembles nothing more nearly than the hollow impression that would
be left by double bars of iron placed closely together." Jolly's
observation was corroborated years later when micro-specks of iron oxide were
taken from the impression cavities. The superintendent thought, however, that
perhaps the iron bands had at one time been inserted into the rock, "to
clasp some structure to it" - but other findings discount this. First, the
bands occur high above the Falls in an almost totally inaccessible place, where
a "structure" would serve little purpose. Second, the bands are only
one-quarter of an inch deep, so that anything "clasped" to them would
not hold for long. Third, parallel on either side of each band are tin)? ripple
marks in the sandstone, indicating the presence of the original iron bands had
caused turbulence patterns in the sand during the time the sand had been laid
down by water, and before it had turned to stone. Fourth, the sandstone in the
impressions show tiny striations which are really the preserved grain marks of
the iron - again, indicating the metal had been impressed in the primordial
sand, before solidification took place. And finally, fifth, one portion of one
of the bands bends back into the subsurface, and careful excavation revealed
the presence of iron oxide totally encased by the surrounding sandstone.
Jolly also found other band impressions in the same locality: There is a third
band that runs alongside the other two, but is much less distinct and is not
continuous. Two more lines, about 2 feet lower down on the rock surface, are
only 7 feet long, and two more are higher up, running 3 feet long. Jolly also
saw still more bands on an outcropping of the same sandstone on the other side
of the stream, again parallel to one another - one 3 feet, another 6 feet, and
smaller portions of several others.
What purpose these iron bands served, we can only guess. What we do know,
however, is that all the bands were very uniform in width and thickness, with
squared edges, and the grain marks they left indicate they were rolled and cut
- all of which points to precision manufacturing by machine production.
But this is totally impossible, if we are to believe the geologists, for the
sandstone in which the bands occur is Cambrian - 600 million years old, by
their own measurements. Who, pray tell, was running an iron mill at a time when
there was supposedly only tiny invertebrate creatures ruling the world?
Metal-working is by no means the only sign of advanced
culture: Other characteristics include such developments as art, architecture
and writing. Since we have already observed several examples of metal
production encased in geologic rock, it should be no surprise to find examples
of other cultural elements also entombed deep within the earth.
In 1921, an Arkansan named Rowlands was digging in one of the many gravel pits
on a line of small hillocks known as Crowley's Ridge, located two miles north
of Finch. At a depth of 10 feet, Rowlands' shovel suddenly struck something
large and solid. The object appeared at first to be a boulder, but excavating
around it, Rowlands soon discovered that it was a large rock-sculptured head of
a man. It stood about 4 feet high, and the figure had a squared, protruding
chin, small, tight-lipped mouth, a short nose, and a furrowed brow and stare
accented by two flat "buttons" of inlaid gold for eyes. Two more gold
discs ornamented the figure's ears, and a heart-shaped plug of copper was
embedded in the chest. The top of the head was covered by a carved hood that
draped down the nape, and attached to a piece around the neck. Near the head,
and in the same layer, Rowlands dug up a number of smaller objects: a gold
ring, a small coffer made of volcanic pumice (which does not exist in this
region), and tiny carvings of men, animals, moons and stars.
The head and artifacts soon became a local attraction, and the newspapers
dubbed the glowering figure "King Crowley." Several investigators
authenticated the find, though they could not explain its presence in the
ten-foot layer of gravel - geologically dated at 175,000 years. The head and
objects were sent to the Arkansas Natural History Museum in Little Rock. The
museum curators, who also examined the artifacts and had double-checked and
documented their discovery, were confident in the findings' authenticity to
place them on public display. At the same time, however, some of the small
carving samples were mailed to the Smithsonian in Washington. The Smithsonian -
being a far more conservative institution -described the carvings as truly
"unexplained items," but could not reconcile the antiquity of the
strata in which they had been brought to light. Finally, after fifteen years of
vacillating on the subject, orthodoxy triumphed: The Smithsonian concluded that
the Crowley Ridge artifacts could not be 175,000 years old as this contradicted
established theory on the age of human civilization, and therefore declared the
artifacts fakes. Conforming to this prestigious conservative pronouncement, the
Little Rock museum promptly took the stone head and other objects off display,
and eventually sold them to unnamed private collectors. The "King
Crowley" had was shipped off to California, and the rest of the collection
was similarly scattered to the four winds. Today, the location of even a single
object is unknown.
One wonders how many other valuable out-of-place items, because they do not
conform to "acceptable" schemes of history and geology, have been
likewise thrown out or lost by Establishment institutions.
On June 27,1969, workmen cutting into a rock shelf situated on the Broadway
Extension of 122nd Street, between Edmond and Oklahoma City, came upon a find
that was to create much controversy among the experts. The find was an inlaid
tile floor, found 3 feet below the surface, and covering several thousand
square feet. Durwood Pate, an Oklahoma City geologist, commented on the floor
in the Edmond Booster of July 3, 1969:
"I am sure this was man-made because the stones are placed in perfect sets
of parallel lines which intersect to form a diamond shape, all pointing to the
east. We found post holes which measure a perfect two rods from the other two.
The top of the stone is very smooth, and if you lift one of them, you will find
it is very jagged, which indicates wear on the surface. Everything is too well
placed to be a natural formation."
Pate also discovered a form of mortar between the tiles. He believes now that
the tile surface served as a common floor for several human shelters over a
wide area. Delbert Smith, a geologist and president of the Oklahoma Seismograph
Company, summed up the mystery concerning the tile floor in the Tulsa World of
June 29, 1969: "There is no question about it. It had been laid there, but
I have no idea by whom." Yet another facet of the mystery involved the
question of age. There are some differing opinions as to the geology involved,
but the best estimate places the tiles at 200,000 years old.
On August 1, 1889, a professional well-driller, M.A. Kurtz, was working near
his home in Nampa, Idaho, along with two other crewmen, when their steam pump
suddenly spat out a piece of brownish clay 11/2 inches long that was clearly
humanoid in appearance. The discovery was also eye-witnessed by several prominent
citizens of Nampa. What amazed these men was that the little clay
"doll" had come from below a 15-foot layer of lava rock, 100 feet of
sand, 6 inches of clay, 40 feet of more sand, then 165 feet composed of clay,
sand, clay nodules mixed with sand, and coarse sand layers - a total of 320
feet.
The small "doll" is composed of half clay and half quartz, and
according to at least one expert, Professor Albert A. Wright of Oberlin
College, it was not the product of a small child or amateur, but was made by a
true artist. Though badly battered by time, the doll's appearance is still
distinct: it has a bulbous head, with barely discernible mouth and eyes; broad
shoulders; short, thick arms; and long legs, the right leg broken off. There
are also faint geometric markings on the figure, which represent either
clothing patterns or jewelry -they are found mostly on the chest around the
neck, and on the arms and writs. The doll is the image of a person of a high
civilization, artistically attired.
The Nampa doll came to the attention of Dr. G.F. Wright of the Boston Society
of Natural History, who sought to verify the depth at which it was found - and
thus also establish its great antiquity. In an on-location examination of
Kurtz's equipment, the hole drilled, and interviews with the witnesses, Dr.
Wright became convinced the find was genuine. Kurtz demonstrated that the well
had been tubed with heavy iron tubing 6 inches in diameter, so that there was
no mistake about the occurrence of the artifact at the stated depth.
Furthermore, the pump worked in only one direction - had the object fallen into
the hole from above, it would have been destroyed by the pump. Wright concluded
in a report to the Boston Society that, "There is no ground to question
the fact that this image came up in the sand pump from the depth
reported." In another study, fellow Bostonian Professor F.W. Putnam found
through microscopic analysis that quartz grains under the doll's right arm had
been cemented by iron molecules. This too - independent of the fact of the
depth of the discovery - is indicative of a great age.
How old is the Nampa object? The lava rock layer through which Kurtz's drill
penetrated is part of the prehistoric lava flows of the Columbia Plateau which
occurred before the advance of the last Ice Age. And below this layer, the
image was discovered another 300 feet down. The best modern geologic estimate
puts the date for the layer in which the doll was found at over 300,000 years.
Today, the Nampa doll is on exhibit at the Idaho State Historical Society in
Boise.
Curiously enough, a second doll-like figure was discovered sometime before 1880
near Marlboro in Stark County, Ohio, by workmen drilling a well. The image -
made of black variegated marble and standing 6 inches tall - was unearthed from
a depth of only 120 feet, but was embedded in sand and gravel of a similar type
and age as that of the Nampa doll. There were two things remarkable about the
Ohio figure: First, the marble it is made of is not indigenous to Ohio; and
second, it bears an astonishing resemblance to the image found at Nampa. One
can see in it the same bulbous head, simple facial features, stocky frame and
long arms and legs. Did the two, the Ohio and Idaho "dolls," come
from the same enigmatic lost civilization? The evidence answers yes.
One of the most convincing signs of a high civilization is the written word. In
the early spring of 1891, a farmer named J.H. Hooper was examining a wooded
ridge on his property, located in Bradley County, 13 miles from Cleveland,
Tennessee. A peculiar stone caught his attention, which he first took to be a
grave marker. But digging around it, he soon discovered that the stone was only
a surface projection of a subterranean structure that extended into the depths
below. Hopper spent the next several weeks in an attempt to uncover his unusual
find: A length of wall, traced for a thousand feet, on the average 2 feet thick
and 8 feet high, with numerous projections - like the first one - spaced along
the top every 25 to 30 feet. The wall ran roughly at an angle of 15 to 20
degrees east. The structure continues on beyond the section exposed, in both
directions, following the crest of a ridge that extends from the Hiawassee
river north of Chattanooga southward, where it dips beneath the Tennessee
river. Its position dates it geologically to near the beginning of the
Quaternary - well over a million years old.
The wall is composed of red sandstone blocks constructed in three courses,
cemented together with a dark red clay mixed with salt, and in numerous places
is plastered over with red, slate and yellow clays. Along one stretch of wall,
near the northern end a distance of 16 feet, Hooper made without a doubt the
most important discovery: Hidden beneath the outer clay plasterings, a number
of the sandstone block surfaces were covered with the hieroglyphs of a lost
language. The letters were arranged in wavy, parallel and diagonal lines,
interspersed with small pictures of strange animals, many unidentifiable. there
were other symbols too, of the sun and crescent moon, which appear to have some
astronomical significance. All together, 872 individual characters were made
out, many repeated - suggesting the script is a form of pictographic writing,
like Chinese.
Despite the implications of the wall, and the challenge of the discovery of an
unknown writing, the find was met by the scientific community with overwhelming
apathy. A short notice on the Tennessee mystery wall appeared in the
Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences (11:26-29), written by A.L.
Rawson, who examined the structure and script first-hand, as well as published
copies he had made of some of the glyphs and pictures. But that was all; no
further study was ever made.
In 1936, Tom Kenny, a resident of Plateau Valley, a town located on the western
slope of the Rockies in Colorado, was excavating for a winter cellar to store
vegetables, when at a depth of 10 feet his spade hit a barrier. Clearing the
covering material away, he unearthed a pavement made of tiles, each man-made
and five inches square. The tiles were laid in mortar, the chemical composition
of which later analysis showed was different from all materials found in the
valley. The perplexing problem is that the strange pavement was found in the same
layer containing the three-toed Miocene horse - upwards of 30 million years
old.
In November, 1829, a block of marble measuring over 30 cubic feet was excavated
from a depth of between 60 to 70 feet, from the Henderson quarry, located 12
miles northwest of Philadelphia. The block was sent to the Savage marble saw
mill in nearby Norristown for cutting into slabs for construction. After taking
off one slab about 3 feet wide and 6 feet long, workmen noticed something
strange: They had exposed an unnaturally straight-edged, rectangular
indentation. Several respectable townsmen were called to the scene, and in
their presence the rest of the block surface was carefully removed. Revealed
were two sharply defined engraved letters, resembling an "I," and a
"U" with a squared base. The indentations were 11/2 inches long and
five-eighths of an inch in width. There was no way the letters could have been
of recent origin - they were deeply embedded in the marble. More mysterious,
the marble had come from a very old lime rock. Estimated age: About 65 million
years.
The Los Angeles News of December 17, 1869 printed an account supplied to the
paper by a correspondent of the Cleveland Herald, writing from Wellsville,
Ohio. The account described how in the autumn of the year, at a coal mine
operated by a Captain Lacey of Hammondville, a miner named James Parsons was
loosening a large mass at a depth of 100 feet, when he suddenly exposed a
smooth slate wall covered with strange alphabetic writing. The letters were
raised and well defined. The coal that had covered the wall bore their distinct
impression - which means the letters date to a time when the coal was in a
vegetable state, and had molded itself against the wall. Each sign was
three-quarters of an inch in size, and arranged in rows precisely spaced 3
inches apart. The first line of letters contained 25. Local teachers and
ministers examined the find, but could offer no explanations. Unfortunately,
just before a number of university professors arrived to verify the discovery,
the slate surface disintegrated from exposure to air, and the script was lost.
Nevertheless, the find was well-documented, and attested to by several reliable
witnesses. But the most disturbing fact about the mysterious slate wall and its
glyphs was their undeniable presence in coal - coal from the Carboniferous era,
well over 200 million years old.
A naturalist named Isaac Lea reported in the American Journal of Science
(volume I, number 1, page 155), in 1822, a find he had made in a stretch of sandstone
located a quarter mile north of Pittsburgh, on the same side of the Monongahela
river. Lea described it as the most singular specimen he had ever seen: An
unusually flat rectangular surface, 3 feet long and varying from 5 to 6 inches
wide. One end was cut off by a break in the rock - so there is no way of
knowing the real length of the original impression. The other end terminated in
the middle of the rock face in a straight, square line -as if a roll of paper
had been torn off clean. On this flat surface were row after row of evenly
spaced, perfect diamond shapes, each with an oblique, raised band across its
center. Lea was mystified as to how to classify the impression, as belonging to
the animal or vegetable kingdom. The answer is neither: The pattern is too
precise to be natural, the diamond shapes too square to be designed by anything
but an intelligent hand. Luckily, Lea had forethought enough to make accurate
measurements and draw sketches of the impression, for when he returned to
remove it for further study, he found that a quarryman had beaten him to it,
and had done his work. The naturalist also took meticulous note of the position
of the rock surface in relation to the geology of the surrounding area. The
hill in which it existed is not high enough to take in the bed of carboniferous
coal found in a horizontal stratum about 250 feet above the locality. In
fragments of the impressed rock, Lea found fossils of primitive jointed plants
- the type which made its appearance in the Devonian era, 400 million years
ago.
What exactly was the mysterious pattern in rock? We do not know, but the fact
remains that it bore the artistic and measuring hand of man. That hand was
contemporary with purportedly the earliest plant life on earth.
How can this evidence of the presence of man from the very
beginning of the fossil record be explained? Certainly, the prevailing
Uniformitarian-evolution-linear model of the past is in no position to do so,
because the mere existence of deeply buried human objects completely destroys
the whole premise of slow, gradual, progressive development of the earth, of
life, of man, and of human culture -the very cornerstone of the model. If man
and his products can be found all the way down to the lowest level of geologic
life, where is the evidence for his continual evolution, or for his long
cultural climb from primitive beginnings? It is clear we must look elsewhere
for the answers.
Today, besides the Uniformitarian-evolution-linear model, there have been three
new and alternative models proposed, and each of these offer their own
interpretations of the past. These are: Extraterrestrialism, Catastrophic
evolution, and Creationism. Let us look at each one separately.
Most people have become aware of the Extraterrestrialist model through the
writings of Erich von Daniken, author of Chariots of the Gods, and other
similar works. What is not often realized, however, is that von Daniken's ideas
not only have had popular appeal to the man on the street, but they are having
a definite impact on the academic and scientific world as well. Von Daniken
offers what appears to be a plausible answer to the riddle of out-of-place
artifacts of an advanced nature which have been unearthed from the
archaeological record -and, as we have seen from the fossil and geological
records as well. According to him, aliens from other worlds have supposedly
been visiting the earth throughout history and prehistory, and the out-of-place
remains we find were the product of contact between the spacemen and early man.
In the case of those objects discovered in those layers believed to pre-date
man's appearance, then the items were left by the extraterrestrials themselves.
By giving the out-of-place artifacts an "other world" source, Von
Daniken has thus neatly explained their presence, while at the same time
preserving accepted" theories of evolution. In effect, he has placed the
artifacts in a realm outside the earthly scheme of things, where they do not
conflict with slow, progressive evolutionary development - only intervening now
and then.
But there are several flaws in the Extraterrestrialist model. In not one
instance has Von Daniken been able to demonstrate the existence of a single
"ancient astronaut." His "evidence," on close inspection,
is largely based on his own personal interpretations of primitive drawings and
ancient records which look and sound (to him) like men wearing spacesuits, or
riding around inside spaceships. In every case, there is another simpler and
literally more "down to earth" interpretation for every
"space" drawing and record he offers as proof.
When we examine closely the out-of-place artifacts themselves, especially those
we have studied embedded in the geologic layers, we find that they do not
appear alien to us, and they certainly do not exhibit a technology exclusively
different from that of, say, our own civilization today - that is, what man
himself has and could have once before produced. What is more, where we have
found the presence of artifacts, we have also found clear evidence of the
presence of man: You will remember that among those discoveries made in the
fossil record, not only did we observe objects of worked metals, stone, etc.,
but there were also human skulls, bones and footprints. Man was there; the
artifacts logically were of his making. There is no need to invoke spacemen, or
look to the stars, for an answer - the answer lies here on earth, or as in the
case of our study here, in the earth.
A second modern model of the past is Catastrophic evolution -and as its name
implies, it is a modification of the old Uniformitarian-evolution model.
Catastrophic evolutionists propose to fully accept the existence of human
remains in the geologic column, while leaving the column and the dating of the
various rock layers intact. What this means is a scenario of human history in
which civilizations have been born, risen to intellectual and technological
heights, and then were destroyed by earth upheavals, again and again over 600
million years. At first glance, this model might seem plausible enough to
explain the facts. But there are problems to consider. As noted earlier,
historians measure the antiquity of our own civilization as being no more than
10,000 years. If we take this as the average "lifespan" for the
development of a technological society, and attempt to apply this to the
multiple civilization scenario, we find that we must presuppose the existence
of an incredible 60,000 civilizations to each down to the Cambrian age. What is
more, there is the major difficulty of how all these societies would have
disappeared -unless one is also to imagine 60,000 separate cataclysms.
Unfortunately, the geologic record does not support that many world changes.
The geologic record also reveals that, if only simple forms of life supposedly
existed in the earliest levels, there was no way such environments could have
supported a human population, let alone active civilizations. Finally, there
still remains the unanswered question of where man originated - and for that,
we have already seen, evolution cannot even attempt a solution.
Our third alternative model to examine is by no means new - in fact it was the
accepted model of the past long before uniformitarianism of geology came to the
forefront. It is called Creationism, or Creation-Flood science, because it is
based on the Biblical account in Genesis of the Divine creation of the world,
life and man, and the world-destroying Deluge. What makes Creationism
distinctive from the other proposed models is it teaches that mankind existed
on the earth before most geologic strata were formed. What is more, he was
created and lived as an intelligent, civilized being from the outset. The
Genesis record describes how after Creation and before the Flood, the descendants
of Adam - the Antediluvians - possessed an advanced culture that included
agriculture, urbanization, the arts, metal-working and sophisticated
engineering abilities. The Flood completely destroyed the Antediluvian
civilization and the entire world, depositing the remains (according to
Creationist-Flood geology) in a short time in the form of all the strata from
Cambrian to early Tertiary. After the Flood, the first descendants of Noah
built another civilization culminating in the technology that constructed the
Tower of Babel. The remains of this post-Flood civilization, after the
destruction of Babel, were swept away by the Ice Age disaster, and were
preserved in the strata of the Tertiary-Pleistocene.
The Creation-Flood model can thus accept the appearance of human remains and
advanced artifacts in the geologic past, as evidence for pre-Flood and
immediate post-Flood civilizations. Because of the cataclysmic nature of the
Flood, and the abruptness with which the Babel-Ice Age disaster occurred, the Creation-Flood
model predicts further that buried artifacts are probably few and far between,
appearing as rare surviving remnants in the rock - which is the case exactly.
Another upset in Creationism's favor is that, by its rejection of
uniformitarian long-age dating of the earth's strata, it is able to explain
remarkable similarities among the out-of-place artifacts, in diverse levels.
For instance, we found several examples of giant human bones and footprints -
in Tertiary, Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, and Pennsylvanian rock. This would
mean, in "accepted" geologic time measurements, the persistence of a
very specialized life form - Homo gargantuan - over a span of 300 million
years. There is no precedent for that kind of survival anywhere in the fossil
record. But by viewing all these layers as having been laid down in a short
time period, and by regarding the remains within as the remnants of one
destroyed world, the various giant finds and their similarities are explained.
In addition, the large bones and prints confirm what was recorded in Genesis
about conditions before the Flood: "There were giants in those days,
mighty men, men of renown."
There is, however, one problem that Creationism must contend with. But that
problem at least may have a satisfactory answer. It involves the presence of
foot and sandal prints - and, for that matter, the prints of extinct animals -
found in the fossil record. Dr. John D. Morris of the Institute for Creation
Research, in San Diego, noted that in the case of the mantracks and dinosaur
tracks found on the Paluxy river, there is a layer of sedimentary rock 8,500
feet in thickness underlying these Cretaceous formations. Now according to the
Creationist model, this must all have been deposited during the Flood. The problem
is, as Morris put it, "How could man and dinosaur witness such massive
deposition at the beginning stages of the Flood and survive long enough to
leave their prints so high up in the geologic column?"
The answer may lie in an uplift of pre-Cambrian rock located just to the
southwest of Glen Rose. The uplift shows only small traces of the deposits
which covered the Paluxy area, which means it could have served as a refuge for
men and animals during the first part of the Flood. The waters appear to have
retreated momentarily, and the men and dinosaurs climbed down from their
summit, to cautiously walk across the mud-filled Paluxy region, probably in
search of food. It is significant that all the Paluxy man prints are clear
impressions of the whole foot, indicating that the stride of their makers had
been slow and deliberate, and not running, as the impressions then would have
been deep prints of the forefoot only. The tracks also go off in different
directions, as if the survivors had split their company to search over more
ground. But just moments after the impressions were made, the Flood waters must
have returned, sweeping men and creatures away, and quickly burying their
tracks by new deposits - deposits which aided in the perfect preservation of the
prints to this day.
This particular scenario of waters retreating and returning may not only have
applied to Paluxy, but to the making of the other fossil foot and shoe prints
as well. Flood geologists note many examples in various sedimentary rocks of
evidence for tidal water action. Some coal seams, for example, contain numerous
layers of limestone alternating with carbonized vegetable matter (coal). These,
the geologists say, were created by the "rocking" motion of a large
body of water, that carried the remains of marine organisms at one end and land
life on the other, and dropped portions of its two different loads with each
surge, as it moved back and forth. Sometimes in these layers, coal appears
directly on coal, or limestone on limestone, without the alternate material
between - indicating a complete retreat of the waters temporarily, and then
their dramatic return and deposition. Noteworthy is the fact that in the book
of Genesis, Noah described the Flood waters as "prevailing upon the earth."
In the Hebrew, the word used for "prevail" has the connotation,
"a movement to and fro."
1. The Uniformitarian-evolution-linear model is totally
inadequate to explain the presence of human remains in the geologic record, as
these remains are in direct contradiction to the model's premise of slow,
progressive development from simple, primitive beginnings.
2. The Extraterrestrialist model is dependent upon the unproven existence of
aliens from outer space, and rests on the false assumption that man himself
could not have produced the out-of-place artifacts - even though they are in
fact accompanied by human skeletal remains and imprints.
3. The Catastrophic evolution model presupposes the existence of a highly
improbable number of destroyed civilizations to explain the buried objects, and
cannot answer the basic question of the origins of man by evolution, since his
remains are found as far back as the earliest fossil layer.
4. The Creation-Flood model offers a workable solution to the mystery of
out-of-place fossil relics, which is also consistent with observable geologic
phenomena based on a catastrophic premise. The model also explains similarities
and parallels between out-of-place finds in diverse layers, which no other
model can do.
Based on these findings, then, we must conclude that the Creationist model is
superior to all other models in supplying answers to the riddle of human
remains and artifacts in the geologic record. These "strange relics from
the depths of the earth," in fact, testify to the validity of the
Creation-Flood model, and tend to prove wrong the major concepts of all other
models so far proposed.
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Creation Outreach page
posted by Ken Clark; updated 10/15/2000