It is possible, however, that these skeletons were from individuals buried during the Eocene or Miocene periods. A burial does not necessarily have to be recent. The truly frustrating thing about finds such as these is that we are not able to get more information about them. We find only a brief mention by an author bent on discrediting them. Because such finds seemed doubtful to scientists like de Mortillet, they went undocumented and uninvestigated, and were quickly forgotten. How many such finds have been made? We may never know. In contrast, finds which conform to accepted theories are thoroughly investigated,extensively reported, and safely enshrined in museums.
In December of 1862, the following brief but intriguing report appeared in a journal called The Geologist: “In Macoupin county, Illinois, the bones of a man were recently found on a coal-bed capped with two feet of slate rock, ninety feet below the surface of the earth. . . . The bones, when found, were covered with a crust or coating of hard glossy matter, as black as coal itself, but when scraped away left the bones white and natural.” The coal in which the Macoupin County skeleton was found is at least 286 million years old and might be as much as 320 million years old.
The evidence documented in Forbidden Archeology demonstrates that we genuinely need an alternative to the Darwinian picture of human evolution. Even confining ourselves to physical evidence in the form of fossils and artifacts, an evolutionary picture fails to emerge. The explanation that best fits the facts is that humans like ourselves and other more or less humanlike beings have coexisted on this planet for hundreds of millions of years. This conclusion is consistent with the accounts of extreme human antiquity found in the ancient Sanskrit historical writings, which tell us that humans have been present since the beginning of the current day of Brahma. But the question remains, how did we get here in the first place? For an answer to that question, we need to look beyond stones and bones.
The Extreme Antiquity of Nonhuman Species
In response to the evidence for extreme human antiquity presented in Forbidden Archeology, many have naturally asked, “Is it just our picture of human origins that is in need of revision? What about the history of other living things on earth?”
Of course, there are millions of species. Among them, I chose to first look at the fossil evidence for the antiquity of the human species because many scientists claim that the human species provides the best evidence for evolution. That effort took eight years of research, during which I studied original archeological reports of the past one hundred and fifty years in English and many other languages. When I began that effort, I did not expect that I would find as much evidence as I did for extreme human antiquity. On the basis of that experience, I cannot predict in advance what would happen if I spent several years going through the entire scientific literature on fossil discoveries relating to another species. However, some preliminary research shows that one can find in the scientific literature discoveries that challenge the Darwinian explanation for the origin of species other than the human species. In this chapter, I will give one example, based on a paper I presented at the XXIst International Congress for History of Science, which was held in July 2001 in Mexico City. The title of the paper is “Paleobotanical Anomalies Bearing on the Age of the Salt Range Form tion of Pakistan: A Historical Survey of an Unresolved Scientific Controversy.” This paper presents evidence showing that flowering plants and insects existed on earth far earlier than most Darwinists now believe possible.
For well over a century the Salt Range Mountains of Pakistan have attracted the special attention of geologists. Starting in the foothills of the Himalayas in northeastern Pakistan, the mountains run about 150 miles in a westerly direction, roughly parallel to the Jhelum river until it joins the Indus. They then extend some distance beyond the Indus.
The southern edge of the eastern Salt Range Mountains drops steeply two or three thousand feet to the Jhelum River plain. In this escarpment and other locations, the Salt Range Mountains expose a series of formations ranging from the earliest Cambrian to the most recent geological periods. Such exposures are rarely encountered and are thus of great interest to geologists and other earth scientists. At the bottom of the series, beneath the Cambrian Purple Sandstone, lies the Salt Range Formation, composed of thick layers of reddish, clayey material (the Salt Marl) in which are found layers of rock salt, gypsum, shale, and dolomite. For centuries, the salt has been mined and traded widely in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. Ever since professional geologists began studying the Salt Range Mountains in the middle part of the nineteenth century, the age of the Salt Range Formation has been a topic of extreme controversy. Some held that it was of early Cambrian antiquity, while others were certain the Salt Range Formation was far more recent. The controversy intensified in the twentieth century when scientists discovered remains of advanced plants in the Salt Range Formation.
The History of the Controversy
Scientific investigation of the Salt Range Formation began in the nineteenth century, when Pakistan was part of British India. The Cambrian age of the overlying Purple Sandstone, which contains trilobites, was generally undisputed. But there were various opinions about the age and origin of the Salt Range Formation, usually found beneath the Purple Sandstone. Questions also arose about the relative ages of the Salt Range Formation and the Kohat salt deposits, located to the north of the Salt Range Mountains.
A. B. Wynne (1878, p. 83) surveyed the Salt Range Mountains in
1869–71 and concluded that the Salt Range Formation was a normal sedimentary deposit of Paleozoic age. This view was shared by H. Warth, who had extensive knowledge of the region gathered over twenty years (Wynne 1878, p. 73). Wynne and Warth thought the Kohat salt formations were younger, perhaps Tertiary (Wynne 1875, pp. 32–37). These views were shared by W. T. Blandford (Medlicott and Blandford 1879, p. 488).
Later, C. S. Middlemiss of the Geological Survey of India (1891, p. 42) proposed that the Salt Marl was not a sedimentary formation. It was instead a secretion from an underlying layer of magma that had intruded beneath the Cambrian Purple Sandstone. R. D. Oldham (1893, p. 112), superintendent of the Geological Survey of India, came to asimilar conclusion. This opened up the possiblity that the Salt Range Formation was younger than the overlying Cambrian Purple Sandstone.
The German geologist F. Noetling originally thought the Salt Range Formation was Precambrian (Zuber 1914, p. 334). But in a paper published in 1903 (Koken and Noetling, p. 35), Noetling said the Cambrian Purple Sandstone was the oldest formation in the Salt Range Mountains and assigned the underlying Salt Range Formation a much more recent age, without explicit explanation. T. H. Holland (1903, p. 26) reported that Noetling believed that the Cambrian Purple Sandstone and other overlying formations had been pushed over the Salt Range Formation by a massive overthrust. According to this idea, the Salt Range Formation was a normal sedimentary deposit, the same age as the Eocene salt deposits of the Kohat region, just north of the Salt Range Mountains. This overthrust version was accepted by Rudolf Zuber (1914).