By Lloyd Pye
In the “Your Shout” of Phenomena’s first issue, Mike Brass offered what I feel was a predictably unbalanced screed against Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson’s Forbidden Archeology. Before I go further, let me state that Michael Cremo is a friend whose theories about human origins differ from mine in several significant ways. And I don’t know Mike Brass from Adam’s goat. However, friendship doesn’t figure into this.
Mr. Brass raised my ire with his transparent use of the most common defensive tactic employed by the scientific mainstream when confronted with ideas or datum they can’t deal with objectively. That tactic is to locate and isolate some aspect of error, then focus on it to obscure the overall validity of the ideas or datum being presented. Because this is a tried and true technique, it tends to be used with care by most seasoned shills for the mainstream position. Perhaps the exuberance of Brass’ youth caused him to go for the jugular in so flagrant a manner. Perhaps I just don’t like his style.
In any case, Brass has written an entire book, The Antiquity Of Man, to discredit the worldwide success of Forbidden Archeology because he feels Cremo and Thompson arrived at their conclusions from a “creationist” viewpoint. Let’s be clear that no term or label is as reviled by staunch Darwinists/evolutionists as “creationism.” Let’s be equally clear that I grant it no credibility either. However, while Darwinists see Creationists as their scholarly antithesis, I consider both Darwinists and Creationists to be not merely wrong in their fundamental beliefs, but laughably wrong. I’m an Interventionist.
Mainstream science employs two tactics when dealing with information it can’t handle: (1) point out at least one supposedly “serious” mistake, then use it to discount a mountain of otherwise compelling evidence; and (2) label the offending researcher(s) as “creationist(s),” thereby tarring them with the brush of intellectual intolerance so rightly used to portray the Creationist agenda. Intelligent Designers have learned from their less-well-educated predecessors that intellectual rigor does not equate with rigid, stiff-necked intolerance. Intelligent Designers are intelligent. That’s a crucial difference.
Whether diehard Creationists or their cleverer offshoot, Intelligent Designers, purveyors of religious dogma represent a challenge to scientific dogma that must be met and obliterated by the likes of Mike Brass. There is no middle ground in this war because the great bulk of evidence—hard, cold, true evidence—is not on the scientists’ side. This is a bitter pill for them to swallow. Yet rather than addressing the countless shortcomings in their own evolutionary agenda, they spend their time trying to discredit the arguments of legitimate, highly skilled researchers like Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson.
Here we must acknowledge that for the most part Darwinist tactics are working. Why? Because they have power and authority on their side. Not correctness, authority. If they were indisputably correct, Brass wouldn’t be criticizing Forbidden Archeology, and I wouldn’t be criticizing him. There would be no argument. The sun is the center of the solar system. The sky is blue. Those are things we know. Everything else is a matter of conjecture. That is the great secret being obscured by mainstream scientists as they use smoke screens to divert our attention onto perceived flaws in the works of their critics.
What Brass doesn’t say in his essay, nor in his book, is that Cremo and Thompson pile up a mountain of evidence against the standard evolutionary dogma about the origin of human beings. Yes, it’s true they were funded by a Hindu-based group that supported their efforts in the hope they would produce evidence to support the Hindu world view. At that, they succeeded admirably. Their book is loaded with relics, artifacts, and solid facts—not specious speculations, as Brass implies—that mainstream science can’t begin to explain in a Darwinist/evolutionist context. Such things should not exist, but they do.
To say the Hindu world view has a strong whiff of creationism about it is not to imply everything in Forbidden Archeology is without merit. Yet that is what Brass and establishment shills like him would have us all believe. They feel that if a religion—any religion, Hindu or otherwise—sponsors a book, it is ipso facto tainted to the point where nothing in it can conceivably be of value. If you don’t buy that, they continue, look at the errors of fact on pages 216 and 634, and accept that those mean nothing in it is reliable.
If only it were that simple for the Brasses of the world. In his “Shout” he goes to great lengths to show the earliest known group of upright walkers, the Australopithecines, are linked with the genus Homo (pre-human/human) by a series of obscure characteristics he lists, i.e. canine positioning and tooth enamel thickness. However, a first grader could be presented with a dozen skulls jumbled on a table, six Australopithecines and six early Homos, and with no coaching at all the first grader could correctly divide them into their proper categories. Those skulls are as morphologically linked as dogs and cats.
The vast majority of Brass’ “Shout” is, in fact, dedicated to establishing that the Australos are solidly linked to the Homos, which he does with a mind-numbing litany of arcane data. For example, he points out that humans and chimps “(share a) transversely broad thoracic cage, a vertebral column inside the rib cage, a dorsally-placed scapula, and laterally-facing shoulder joints.” This, of course, means that if chimps and humans are so structurally alike, then logic implies that the far more human-like (i.e. upright walking) Australopithecines must be only inches away from full “pre” humanity. Poppycock!
Australopithecines were nothing more than upright walking chimps and upright walking gorillas. They were not emerging from quadrupedal locomotion to bipedal. No Darwinist/evolutionist can demonstrate how such a transition is possible in the real world of physical morphology. Too many things have to change in a body to go from down-on-all-fours to up-on-only-twos. We’re not talking about the modification of finch beaks that Darwin observed on the Galapagos. We’re talking about changes so profound in the form and structure of a body (quadruped to biped) as to be literally impossible. Fagettaboutit!
Unabashed Darwinists like Mike Brass can’t afford to acknowledge that there is a far more compelling explanation for the relatively sudden appearance of upright walking hominids (the Australopithecines) at around 4.0 million years ago. They have to support the conceit that—as with all biological processes—bipedality is the result of evolution upward by quadrupeds. But what if, instead, bipeds simply walked out of the Miocene Era, whole and complete, after appearing out of nowhere around 25 million years ago?
The Miocene Era of 25 million to 5 million years ago featured two-dozen (count ‘em!) species of tailless primates that outnumbered monkeys in total numbers. Of those two-dozen species, several have provided enough fossil bones to firmly establish that their arms were the same size as their legs. Is this ever emphasized or brought to public attention? No! Why? It would be utterly self-defeating for the Darwinist/evolutionist “team” in the war against their Creationist/Intelligent Designer opponents.
The “short arm” problem is this: arms the length of legs mean that some Miocene Apes weren’t moving on all fours—period. To be a ground-based quadruped, you require arms substantially longer than your legs to move efficiently and comfortably. Yes, there were apes in the Miocene with arms longer than their legs, but there were just as many, if not more, with arms roughly the length of their legs. Those were bipeds, not quadrupeds, and they simply walked out of the Miocene and left their remains as Australopithecines.
Mainstream shills like Mike Brass have no choice but to use imposing words in a supercilious tone to criticize the “unqualified” likes of Cremo and Thompson when they dare to point out holes in the tottering theory of evolution. That is because mainstream science understands better than anyone else what I asserted earlier: Darwin was wrong. Apologists like Brass are compelled to try to bumfuzzle those “who possess neither the background knowledge nor training . . . (or who) do not have the time to conduct further research.” Brass offers himself as a reliable antidote to the “scientistic” [a term he defines as “works (that) utilize scientific terminology in order to appear scientific”] ramblings of Cremo and Thompson. This is equivalent to accusing them of using the old shyster tactic, “If you can’t win ‘em over with facts, blind ‘em with bulls**t.”
Truth is the coin of every realm of endeavor. Everyone claims to honestly seek and support it. What would be the point of saying otherwise? Unfortunately, most people feel their perception of truth is the version everyone else should accept. The problem is that everyone asserting their fealty to truth has an agenda—everyone!—including me. The trick for you, the seeker of truth, is to figure out whom to believe, whom to trust.
In this case, trust Cremo and Thompson over Mike Brass. It’s a solid bet.
All Original Material Copyright 2007
© Lloyd Pye