The Lost Knowledge of the Ancients: Were Humans the First?

Archaeologists and historians have produced a number of curious finds which still await a logical explanation. The story of man will appear in a different light if the answers are ever found. If the following facts are well-founded, civilization might have had a much earlier source.

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Foreigners in Ancient China

In excavations at Choukoutien (Zhoukoudian), a cave system near Beijing in China, Dr. F Weidenreich discovered a number of skulls and skeletons in 1933. One skull belonged to an old European, another to a young woman with a narrow head, typically Melanesian in character. A third skull was identified as belonging to a young woman with the distinctive traits of an Inuit. A male European, a girl from the tropics and another from the Arctic Circle uncovered on a Chinese hillside. But how, in the first place, did they get to China some 30,000 years ago? This episode out of prehistory is a mystery.

The cave site of Choukoutien ( public domain )

Straightened Mammoth Tusks

Did man in the last Ice Age possess enough technical facilities to straighten out a giant hooked mammoth tusk? Until the discovery of six-foot-long spear made of mammoth tusk in Sungir, Russia, no scientist suspected that prehistoric man had possessed the ability to transform a hooked tusk into a number of straight bone spears.

Reconstruction of an Ice Age burial in Russia, which included 6-ft-long spears made from straightened out mammoth tusk. Credit: Libor Balák

At the same site, the Russian archaeologists found a bone needle – a replica of our own steel needle. Like the spears, it was 27,000 years old. The making of such artifacts by the Ice Age man was completely unexpected, and it shows that technology in the Glacial Age was far more advanced than previously thought.

The Jericho Skulls

The famous Jericho skulls filled in with clay and shell, depict exquisite Egyptian-like faces. They have been dated to about 6,500 BC, which is roughly some 1,500 years before the beginning of the Egyptian civilization. This discovery poses many questions. Were their mummified faces the outcome of the desire to immortalize man? If so, it provided evidence of the existence of religion in a very early period. But abstract thinking does not come to man overnight – it is a long process. From what source did the Jericho people receive it?

• Face of Man Who Lived 9,500 Years Ago in the Biblical City of Jericho Brought Back to Life
• The plastered skulls of Jericho

One of the plastered skulls of Jericho ( JC Merriman / flickr )

15-million-year-old Shoeprint?

In Fisher Canyon in Nevada the imprint of a shoe sole was discovered un a coal seam.  The shoeprint is clear that traces of a strong thread are visible. The age of the footprint was estimated to be over 15 million years. But man did not appear for another 13 million years. According to popular opinion, primitive man appeared some 1.8 million years ago, but he only began to wear shoes 25,000 years ago! Whose footstep can it be?

Dr. Chow Ming Chen made a similar discovery in the Gobi Desert in 1959. It was a perfect impression of a ribbed sole on sandstone, and was calculated to be millions of years old. The expedition could not explain it.

Alleged Nevada shoe print from God--Or Gorilla McCann, 1925.

The White Lady of Brandberg

The Brandberg rock paintings in South-West Africa depict Bushmen together with white women. Their perfectly European profiles are painted with light tint, and the hair is shown in red or yellow. The girls wear jewelry and an elaborate head-dress of shells or stones. The attractive young huntresses carry bows and water bags on their chests. They are wearing shoes while the Bushmen are not. Some archaeologists consider these young women to be brave travelers who must have come from Crete or Egypt 3,500 years ago. However, there is something peculiar about the white girls. They look like Caspians from North Africa who lived 12,000 years ago. Both have the same long torsos, bows, headdress and garter-like crossbands on their legs.

The White Lady of Brandberg studied by the Abbe Hnri Breuil, is a masterpiece. Because of her costume and a flower in her hand, she resembles a girl bull-fighter of Crete. But for some reason no leopards or hippopotami are painted in this gallery. These beasts were non-existent in that part of Africa a long time ago, whereas they are quite common now. Could the epoch of the white Amazons in Africa be more remote?

• The Giant Stone Spheres of Costa Rica
• The Mysterious Civilization of the Olmecs
• The Mysterious Aboriginal Rock Art of the Wandjinas – Extraterrestrial or Not?

The White Lady, visible in the lower right corner ( CC by SA 2.5 )

Strange depictions in Australian rock paintings

On a rocky cliff west of Alice Springs, in the heart of Australia, Michael Terry discovered a carving of the extinct Notoherium mitchelli in 1962. This animal had disappeared some 2,500 years ago. In the same place, he also found six carvings of what looked like rams’ heads. They brought to his mind Assyrian pictures of the ram.

A human being about two meters tall was among the intriguing rock images. The full legs and thighs, and a mitre, resembling those worn by Pharaohs, made the figure totally unlike the match-stick representation of human form drawn by the Australian Aborigines. Though the figure is in a horizontal position, it is standing as if walking down a wall.

So here we have another mystery – carvings of an extinct animal rhinoceros, the ram, unknown in Australia until the arrival of the English, and a non-Australian man in a Babylonian or Egyptian tiara. Did men from the Near East or Asia reach Central Australia in antiquity, and if so, by what means? It seems that our view on the extent travels of ancient man should be amended.

The Mysterious Megaliths of Marcahuasi

The discovery of megalithic sculpture in Marcahuasi by Dr. Daniel Ruzo in 1952 was a momentous one. Marcahuasi sits 80 kilometers north-east of Lima, Peru, at an altitude of 4,000 meters, where the air is cold and hardly anything is grown amidst the granite rocks.

Standing in the amphitheater of rock, Ruzo found himself confronted by the enormous figures of people and animals carved out of stone. Caucasian, Black and Semitic faces looked at him. Lions, cows, elephants and camels which never lived in the Americas, surrounded Dr. Ruzo. Sculptures of horses posed a burning question? Since the horse died out in the Americas about 9,000 years ago, this gave a definite date to the ancient stone works. The horse reappeared in the New World only in the 16 ^th century when the conquistadors brought it from Spain.

Megalithic faces at Marcahuasi, Peru ( Bibliotecapleyades)

The mysterious sculptors of these giant monuments were aware of the laws of perspective and optics. Some figures can be seen at noon, other at other times, vanishing as the shadow move.  To find this millennia-old museum exhibiting animals that never lived in South America or had been extinct for tens of thousands of years, as well as sculptured portraits of people of various races who came to the New World within the last five hundred years, was a challenge to orthodox science.

The Strange Spheres of Costa Rica

Another strange discovery was made in Costa Rica, also in the fifties. Hundreds of perfectly shaped spheres made of volcanic rock were scattered in the jungle. Similar spheres have been located in Guatemala and Mexico but nowhere else in the world. A number of questions have been raised with the discovery of these balls. What ancient race could have carved and polished them so perfectly and what was the purpose of them? Or are they natural geological formations as some scientist believe? Some rest on stone platforms, others are arranged in clusters, then again others in geometrical patterns forming triangles, squares or circles. Do they have astronomical significance in the manner of the Stonehenge megaliths?

Stone spheres of Costa Rica. Reventazon River view ( CC by SA 3.0 )

The Olmec Heads

The giant stone heads of the Olmecs found in La Venta, Tres Zpotes and other sites in Mexico can be classed as artifacts of a similar type. These colossal heads carved of black basalt are from 1.5 to 3 meters high (5-10 ft) , weighing from 5 to 40 tons. They are placed on stone stands just as the globes described above. The nearest basalt quarries are 50 to 100 kilometers (31-62 miles) away. How could a people without a wheeled vehicle or pack animal bring the masses of rock across swamps and jungles to the erection sites? These immense faces of La Venta and San Lorenzo have been dated to 1200 BC – another surprise for the historians of science.

Olmec head. Parque-Museo La Venta, Villahermosa, Tabasco ( Steve Bridger )

In the next article, we will put these stone heads aside and speak of real skulls, early metallurgy and metal weapons and other wonderful accomplishments of the ancients.

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By Sam Bostrom