Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin's Theory

546 Pages·2003·2.49 MB·English

by  Michael A. Cremo

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
Ascended Apes or Fallen Angels?
Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the
Human Race
The Extreme Antiquity of Nonhuman Species
Genes, Design, and Designer
Beyond Stones and Bones:
Alfred R. Wallace and the Spirit World
What is a Human Being? Matter, Mind, and
Consciousness
The Cosmic Hierarchy: A Cross-Cultural Study
Apparitions, Angels, and Aliens
Paranormal modification and Production of biological
form
A Universe Designed for Life
Human Devolution: a Vedic Account

HUMAN DEVOLUTION
A VEDIC ALTERNATIVE TO DARWIN’S
THEORY
MICHAEL A. CREMO

Dedicated to
His Divine Grace
A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
om ajnana-timirandhasya jnananjana-shalakaya caksur unmilitam yena
tasmai shri-gurave namah
INTRODUCTION

My book Forbidden archeology, coauthored with Richard L. Thompson,
documents archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity, consistent with
the Puranas, the historical writings of ancient India. This evidence places a
human presence so far back in time as to call into question the Darwinian
account of human origins.
In his review of Forbidden archeology published in Geoarchaeology (1994 v. 9,
pp. 337–340), Kenneth Feder said, “When you attempt to deconstruct a well-
accepted paradigm, it is reasonable to expect that a new paradigm be suggested
in its place. The authors of Forbidden archeology do not do this, and I would
like to suggest a reason for their neglect here. Wishing to appear entirely
scientific, the authors hoped to avoid a detailed discussion of their own beliefs.”
It is not true that my coauthor and I were trying to avoid a detailed discussion of
our own alternative account. Rather we were hoping to ignite just such a
discussion. But some practical considerations compelled us to proceed in stages.
In my introduction to Forbidden archeology, I wrote: “Our research program led
to results we did not anticipate, and hence a book much larger than originally
envisioned.” I was genuinely surprised at the massive number of cases of
archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity that turned up during my
eight years of historical research. Forbidden archeology went to press with over
nine hundred pages. “Because of this,” I wrote in the introduction, “we have not
been able to develop in this volume our ideas about an alternative to current
theories of human origins. We are therefore planning a second volume relating
our extensive research results in this area to our Vedic source material.”
Human Devolution: a vedic alternative to Darwin’s theory is that second
volume. The reasons for its late appearance have more to do with the time it
takes to research and write such a book rather than any desire to avoid a
detailed discussion of a Vedic alternative to Darwinism.
Nevertheless, I am not unhappy that Human Devolution appeared after
Forbidden archeology rather than along with it. Before presenting an alternative
to the Darwinian concept of human origins, it is reasonable to show that one is
really necessary. I have therefore welcomed the chance to introduce to scientists
and other scholars the evidence in Forbidden archeology before moving on to
systematically presenting an alternative. After hearing the Forbidden archeology
presentations, many ask, “If we did not evolve from the apes, then what
alternative explanation do you propose?” To them, I reply, “Do you admit a new
explanation is required? If not, I have more work to do in showing that one is
required. And if you do admit that a new explanation is really required, then it is
not just my responsibility to come up with a new explanation. It is also your
responsibility. We should all be thinking about this. Of course, I have some ideas
about what the explanation should be, but you should also.”
My first scientific presentation of Forbidden archeology’s evidence and Vedic
perspective was in December of 1994 at the World Archaeological Congress in
New Delhi, India. My paper “Puranic Time and the Archeological Record,”
delivered in the section on time and archeology chaired by Tim Murray and D. P.
Agrawal, drew a large, appreciative audience. That paper was later chosen for
publication in the peer reviewed conference proceedings volume time and
archeology, edited by Tim Murray and published by Routledge in its One World
Archaeology series in 1999 (pp. 38–48).
In March 1995, I presented my paper “The Impact of Forbidden archeology” at
the Kentucky State University Institute for Liberal Studies Sixth Annual
Conference on Science and Culture. This paper set forth the Vedic background
for my research. It also reviewed the initial scientific reactions to the publication
of Forbidden archeology.
In July 1996, I was invited by the Institute for the Study of Theoretical
Questions of the Russian Academy of Sciences to lecture on Forbidden
archeology in Moscow. I then spoke about my work at a symposium organized
by the Institute for Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. After
my presentation, Indologist Evgeniya Y. Vanina commented: “I think that the
statement you have made, and your paper, are very important because they touch
upon . . . how to look at the texts of the classical tradition as sources of
information. There is a tendency among scholars to say whatever the vedas—and
the Puranas, the Ramayana, and the mahabharata—are saying, it is all myth and
concoction, and there is no positive information in it. . . . I think that such a
negativist attitude toward the ancient and early medieval Indian texts as sources
of information should definitely be discarded.” While I was in Russia, I was also
invited to give a talk on Forbidden archeology to a large audience of physicists
at Dubna, the science city outside Moscow. In October 1996, I spoke about the
evidence in Forbidden archeology at the International Conference on Revisiting
Indus Sarasvati Age and Ancient India in Atlanta.
In July 1997, in Liège, Belgium, at the XXth International Congress for History
of Science, I presented a detailed study of one of the cases documented in
Forbidden archeology. This paper, “The Later Discoveries of Boucher de
Perthes at Moulin Quignon and Their Impact on the Moulin Quignon Jaw
Controversy,” appeared in Proceedings of the XXth International Congress of
History of Science, vol. X., earth Sciences, Geography, and Cartography, edited
by Goulven Laurent and published by Brepols in 2002 (pp. 39–56). In October
of 1997, I presented lectures on Forbidden archeology to students and faculty of
archeology, anthropology, and biology at the University of Amsterdam, the Free
University of Amsterdam, the University of Leiden, the University of
Groningen, the University of Utrecht, and the University of Nijmegen in the
Netherlands, and at the Catholic University of Louvain and University of Ghent
in Belgium. In November of 1997, I lectured on Forbidden archeology at
universities in Hungary, including the Eötvös Loran Science University in
Budapest, the University of Szeged, and the University of Eger.
In January 1999, I presented a paper titled “Forbidden Archeology of the Middle
and Early Pleistocene” at the fourth World Archaeological Congress in Cape
Town, South Africa. In March and April, I gave lectures on Forbidden
archeology at universities in England, Poland, Hungary, and the United States,
including City University of London, the University of Warsaw, the University
of Delaware, the University of Maryland, and Cornell University. In September
1999, I was invited to speak on Forbidden archeology at the University of
Oklahoma School of Geology and Geophysics, as part of the Shell Oil
Colloquium Series. Also in September I presented a paper titled “Forbidden
Archeology of the Paleolithic” at the European Association of Archaeologists
Fifth Annual Meeting at Bournemouth in the United Kingdom. The paper was
selected for inclusion in a conference proceedings volume edited by Ana C.
Martins for British Archaeological Reports (forthcoming).
In March 2000, I was invited to speak on Forbidden archeology in a lecture
series of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, one of the world’s oldest
scientific societies. The lecture was given in the Royal Institution’s headquarters
in London. Later that year, in September, I presented a paper titled “The
Discoveries of Carlos Ribeiro: A Controversial Episode in Nineteenth-Century
European Archeology” at the European Association of Archaeologists Sixth
Annual Meeting, in Lisbon, Portugal. In November 2000, I lectured on
Forbidden archeology at universities in Hungary.
In June 2001, I lectured on Forbidden archeology at the Simon Fraser University
in Vancouver, Canada. In September 2001, my paper “The Discoveries of
Belgian Geologist Aimé Louis Rutot at Boncelles, Belgium: An Archeological
Controversy from the Early Twentieth Century” was accepted for presentation at
the XXIVth Congress of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric
Sciences, held in September of that year in Liège, Belgium. In October 2001, I
lectured on Forbidden archeology at Pennsylvania State University and Cornell
University. In November 2001, I lectured on Forbidden archeology at the
Charles University in Prague, in the Czech Republic, at the invitation of the
faculty of philosophy.
In January and February 2002, I toured South India, with lectures at universities
and other scientific and cultural institutions, such as the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan
in Mumbai (Bombay) and the Ana University in Chennai (Madras). In April and
May 2002, I toured the Ukraine and Slovenia, speaking at universities and
scientific institutions such as the Kiev Mogilanskaya Academy and the Institute
of Archeology of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. I also spoke to
archeologists in the archeology department of the Dnepropetrovsk Historical
Museum. In November and December I returned to the Ukraine for another
series of such talks at universities and historical museums in Odessa, Kharkov,
and Lvov. As I am writing this introduction in December 2002, I am preparing a
paper on the California gold mine discoveries reported by geologist Josiah D.
Whitney for the fifth World Archaeological Congress, to be held in Washington,
D.C., in June 2003. I am with archeologist Ana Martins of Portugal co-organizer
of a section on history of archeology for the Congress.
In terms of ordinary scholarship, this modest collection of conference
presentations, publications, and university lectures is not overly impressive. But
given the explicit Vedic antievolutionary content of the papers and lectures they
are, I believe, historically significant. They show that scientists and historians of
science, whether or not they agree with the conclusions expressed in the
presentations, now consider such presentations part of the active discourse in
their disciplines. In that sense, they demonstrate that Forbidden archeology
accomplished one of its major purposes—sparking a discussion within the world
of science about anomalous evidence for extreme human antiquity and a Vedic
perspective on human origins. The presentations show that fundamentalist
Darwinists within the world of science have not been as successful as they
would like to be in maintaining a boundary between science and what they call
religiously motivated “pseudoscience,” to use their favored, and charmingly
cranky, terminology. I personally do not accept the increasingly irrelevant
distinctions some try to make between scientific and religious ways of knowing.
I see myself as neither scientist nor religionist, but as a human being prepared to
use various ways of knowing in the pursuit of truth. Forbidden archeology was
widely reviewed in the professional journals of archeology, anthropology, and
history of science. I included the complete texts of these reviews, along with
related correspondence, in my book Forbidden archeology’s Impact, which
attracted its own set of academic reviews. For example, Simon Locke wrote in
Public understanding of Science (1999 v. 8, no. 1, pp. 68–69), “Social
constructivism, reflexivity, and all that is postmodern have inspired a variety of
experiments in new literary forms to enliven the staid old world of the standard
academic study. . . . As attempts to document the social process of knowledge
production and capture some of its reflexivity, they are both consistent and
courageous. So, too, Michael Cremo’s book. The ‘impact’ the book documents is
that of Cremo’s earlier work, Forbidden archeology. In this latest book rather
than construct his own historical narrative, Cremo opts for the far more
interesting strategy of directly reproducing much of the source material from
which any such narrative would be constructed. The result is a multi-faceted
textual kaleidoscope, in which a wide range of the many discourses surrounding
contemporary science reflect and refract each other in fascinating array . . .
Cremo has provided here a resource of considerable richness and value to
analysts of public understanding [of science]. . . . It should also make a useful
teaching resource as one of the best-documented case studies of ‘science wars,’
and raising a wide range of issues covering aspects of ‘knowledge transfer’ in a
manner sure to be provocative in the classroom.”
The positive or negative nature of the Forbidden archeology reviews in
academic journals is not as significant as the very fact that the reviews appeared
at all. They represent another form of acknowledgement that the Vedic critique
of the Darwinian theory of human evolution represented by Forbidden
archeology is a genuine part of contemporary science and scholarship. As
Kenneth Feder said in his Geoarchaeology review (pp. 337–338), “The book
itself represents something perhaps not seen before; we can fairly call it ‘Krishna
creationism’ with no disrespect intended . . . While decidedly antievolutionary in
perspective, this work is not the ordinary variety of antievolutionism in form,
content, or style. In distinction to the usual brand of such writing, the authors use
original sources and the book is well written. Further, the overall tone of the
work is superior to that exhibited in ordinary creationist literature.”
Jo Wodak and David Oldroyd published a lengthy review article about
Forbidden archeology in Social Studies of Science (1996 v. 26, pp.
192–213). In their article, titled “Vedic Creationism: A Further Twist to the
Evolution Debate,” they asked (p. 207),“So has Forbidden archeology made any
contribution at all to the literature on palaeoanthropology?” They concluded,
“Our answer is a guarded ‘yes’, for two reasons.” First, “the historical material .
. . has not been scrutinized in such detail before,” and, second, the book does
“raise a central problematic regarding the lack of certainty in scientific ‘truth’
claims.”They also commented (p. 198), “It must be acknowledged that
Forbidden archeology brings to attention many interesting issues that have not
received much consideration from historians; and the authors’ detailed
examination of the early literature is certainly stimulating and raises questions of
considerable interest, both historically and from the perspective of practitioners
of SSK [sociology of scientific knowledge]. Indeed, they appear to have gone
into some historical matters more deeply than any other writers of whom we
have knowledge.”
In the first few pages of their article (pp. 192–195), Wodak and Oldroyd gave
extensive background information on: The International Society for Krishna
Consciousness, of which the authors of Forbidden archeology are members (“a
modern variant of the Bhakti sects that have dominated Hindu religious life over
the last one and a half millennia”); the teachings of the movement’s founder,
Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (“for Prabhupada, science gives no adequate
account of the origin of the universe or of life”); the Bhaktivedanta Institute
(they comment on “the boldness of its intellectual programme”); and Vedic
chronology (“partial dissolutions, called pralaya, supposedly take place every
4.32 billion years, bringing catastrophes in which whole groups of living forms
can disappear”). Wodak and Oldroyd also make many references to the Rg veda,
vedanta, the Puranas, the atma, yoga, and karma.
In common with other reviewers, Wodak and Oldroyd drew a connection
between Forbidden archeology and the work of Christian creationists. “As is
well known,” they noted (p. 192), “Creationists try to show that humans are of
recent origin, and that empirical investigations accord with human history as
recorded in the Old Testament. Forbidden archeology (Fa) offers a brand of
Creationism based on something quite different, namely ancient Vedic beliefs.
From this starting point, instead of claiming a human history of mere millennia,
Fa argues for the existence of Homo sapiens way back into the Tertiary, perhaps
even earlier.”
In l’anthropologie (1995 v.99, no. 1, p. 159), Marylène Pathou-Mathis wrote:
“M. Cremo and R. Thompson have willfully written a provocative work that
raises the problem of the influence of the dominant ideas of a time period on
scientific research. These ideas can compel the researchers to orient their
analyses according to the conceptions that are permitted by the scientific
community.” She concluded, “The documentary richness of this work, more
historical and sociological than scientific, is not to be ignored.” And in British
Journal for the History of Science (1995 v. 28, pp. 377
–379), Tim Murray noted in his review of Forbidden archeology (p. 379): “I
have no doubt that there will be some who will read this book and profit from it.
Certainly it provides the historian of archaeology with a useful compendium of
case studies in the history and sociology of scientific knowledge, which can be
used to foster debate within archaeology about how to describe the epistemology
of one’s discipline.” He further characterized Forbidden archeology as a book
that “joins others from creation science and New Age philosophy as a body of
works which seek to address members of a public alienated from science, either
because it has become so arcane or because it has ceased to suit some in search
of meaning for their lives.” Murray acknowledged that the Vedic perspective of
Forbidden archeology might have a role to play in the future development of
archeology. He wrote in his review (p. 379) that archeology is now in a state of
flux, with practitioners debating “issues which go to the conceptual core of the
discipline.” Murray then proposed,“Whether the vedas have a role to play in this
is up to the individual scientists concerned.”
This openmindedness is characteristic of the reviews of Forbidden archeology
that appeared in respected academic and scientific journals, the only exception
being a particularly vitriolic attack by Jonathan Marks in american Journal of
Physical anthropology (1994 v. 93, no. 1, pp.
140–141). Other than that, demands to totally exclude the Vedic perspective of
Forbidden archeology from the discourse of science were confined to the
publications of extremist groups, such as skeptics societies (whose skepticism
does not extend to the theory of evolution) and the unremittingly anticreationist
National Center for Science Education in the United States (misleadingly named
so as to imply some governmental connection). Also in this category is an
attempted book-length debunking by Michael Brass (the antiquity of man).
Wiktor Stoczkowski, reviewing Forbidden archeology in l’Homme (1995 v. 35,
pp. 173–174), accurately noted (p. 173), “Historians of science repeat tirelessly
that the Biblical version of origins was replaced in the nineteenth century by the
evolution theory. In our imaginations, we substitute this simple story for the
more complex reality that we are today confronted with a remarkable variety of
origins accounts.” Among those accounts Stoczkowski included those of the
Biblical creationists. “Forbidden archeology,” he added, “gives us one more,
dedicated to ‘His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada’ and
inspired by the Vedic philosophy that disciples study in the United States at the
Bhaktivedanta Institute, a branch of the International Society for Krishna
Consciousness.”