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REFLECTIONS ON WORLDS BEFORE OuR OWN WorLDS REFLECTIONS OUR OwN BEFORE Anomalous evidence, from human artifacts found in ancient strata to sand and stone structures vitrified by intense heat, suggestive of prehistoric nuclear war, cannot be explained by established interpretations of human origins. find myself now, in the seventh decade of life, still asking two questions that in one way or another the great majority of my 165 published books have sought to answer: (1) who are we as a species? and (2) what is our destiny? The basic reason why I wrote Worlds Before Our Own (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1978; Anomalist Books, 2007) is that I have always found it incredible that such sophisticated people, as we judge ourselves to be, do not really know who we are. Archaeologists, anthropologists and various academicians who play the "origins of man" game reluctantly and only occasionally acknowledge instances where unique skeletal and cultural evidence from the prehistoric record suddenly appears long before it should—and in places where it should not. These irritating artifacts destroy the orderly evolutionary line that academia for so long has presented to the public. Consequently, such data have been largely left buried in site reports, forgotten storage rooms and dusty archives where one suspects that there is a great deal of suppressed, ignored and misplaced prehistoric cultural evidence that would alter the established interpretations of human origins and provide us with a much clearer definition of what it means to be human. There is now a basic academic consensus that the "Homo" lineage goes back at least three million years, and that an ancestor of modern man evolved about one million years ago. Homo sapiens, the "thinking man" (our own species), became the dominant planetary life-form on a worldwide basis about 40,000 years ago. It is difficult enough to explain the sudden appearance of Homo sapiens at that time, but it is an even more complex question to ponder why Neanderthal man and Cro-Magnon man correspondingly disappeared. Academic warfare rages unceasingly over whether or not Neanderthal man and our ancestors were two separate species or whether they interbred. And just as scientists are adding to a growing body of evidence that humankind developed in Africa, a Hungarian excavation surrendered a Homo sapiens skull fragment in a context more than 600,000 years out of alignment with the accepted calendar of man's migrations across the planet. Hominid fossils unearthed in Dmanisi, Georgia, are dated at 1.77 million years old; and a hominid tooth found in Niocene deposits near the Maritsa River in Bulgaria is dated at seven million years old. What happens to Darwinian evolution when there are such sites as the one in Australia which yielded Homo sapiens (modern man), Homo erectus (our million-year-old ancestor) and Neanderthal man (our Stone Age cousin) in what appears to be a contemporaneous environment? Then there is the Tabun site in today's Israel where Homo sapiens fragments were found in strata below (which means older than) classic Neanderthal bones. In August 2007, scientists dating fossils found in Kenya challenged the conventional view that Homo habilis (1.44 million years) and Homo erectus (1.55 million years) evolved one after the other. Dating of new fossil evidence reveals that the two species lived side by side in Africa for almost half a million years. Somewhere, in what would appear to be a biological and cultural free-for-all, there must lie the answer to that most important question: who are we? But just as we are trying our best to fit skeletal fragments together in a manner that will be found acceptable to what we believe we know about our origins, footprints have been found in stone which, if they are what they appear to be, will make a total shambles of our by Brad Steiger © 2007 Website: http://www.bradandsherry.com First published in The Canadian 23 and 31 December 2007 Website: http://www.bradandsherry.com First published in The Canadian 23 and 31 December 2007 NEXUS +59 GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE FOR MANKIND'S EXTREME ANTIQUITY by Brad Steiger © 2007 FEBRUARY — MARCH 2008 www.nexusmagazine.com