Tom Shipley
Part C
“In…The Hidden History of the Human Race, we look closely at the vast amount of controversial evidence that contradicts current ideas about human evolution…this evidence has been systematically suppressed, ignored, or forgotten, even though it is qualitatively (and quantitatively) equivalent to the evidence favoring currently accepted views on human origins…we are talking about an ongoing social process of knowledge filtration that appears quite innocuous but has a substantial cumulative effect. Certain categories of evidence simply disappear from view…
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“This pattern of data suppression has been going on for a long time. In 1880, J. D. Whitney, the state geologist of California, published a lengthy review of advanced stone tools found in California gold mines. The implements, including spear points and stone mortars and pestles, were found deep in mine shafts, underneath thick, undisturbed layers of lava, in formations ranging from 9 million to over 55 million years old. W. H. Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution, one of the most vocal critics of the California finds, wrote: “Perhaps if Professor Whitney had fully appreciated the story of human evolution as it is understood today, he would have hesitated to announce the conclusions formulated [that humans existed in very ancient times in North America], notwithstanding the imposing array of testimony with which he was confronted.” In other words, if the facts do not agree with the favored theory, then such facts, even an imposing array of them, must be discarded.
“This supports the primary point we are trying to make in The Hidden History of the Human Race, namely, that there exists in the scientific community a knowledge filter that screens out unwelcome evidence. This process of knowledge filtration has been going on for well over a century and continues to the present day. In addition to the general process of knowledge filtration, there also appear to be cases of more direct suppression.”—pg. xvii
In the introduction to “The Hidden History of the Human Race,” Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson cite two cases of “knowledge filtration” by the academic-scientific establishment as representative of the state of affairs in paleoanthropology. Given Cremo’s and Thompson’s estimation of the significance of these two cases, I thought it only fair to their perspective to highlight those two cases, as well.
The California Gold Mine Artifacts
One of those cases is that of stone tools found in California gold mines dating, according to evolutionists’ standard dating schema, to 9 – 55 million years old, and reviewed at length by J. D. Whitney, the state geologist of California in 1880 and presented to the California Academy of Sciences.
It should be noted, first of all, that the stone tools were found in abundance. There were hundreds of such stone tools discovered and some human fossils, as well (pg. 94-95, 143-149, The Hidden History of the Human Race). Human bones, including the “Calaveras skull,” were found in gravels underneath several distinct layers of volcanic lava near the bottom, making them older than Pliocene, i.e., older than 25 million years and, per Cremo and Thompson, possibly MUCH older.
This is inexplicable (and intolerable) to evolutionists, so the claim of a hoax was promulgated by W. H. Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution and Dr. F. W. Putnam of Harvard and William J. Sinclair from the University of California, who claimed that the skull had no evidence of coming from the gold mines. Whitney countered that the hoax idea was not put forward by any scientists until after the finds received widespread publicity in the press. Holmes did admit that Dr. D. H. Hall “states that…he compared the material attached to the skull with portions of the gravel from the mine and that they were alike in all essentials.”
Cremo and Thompson quote, W. O. Ayers, writing in American Naturalist:
“ ‘I saw it and examined it carefully at the time when it first reached Professor Whitney’s hands. It was not only incrusted with sand and gravel, but its cavities were crowded with the same material; and that material was of a peculiar sort. A sort which I had occasion to know thoroughly.’ It was, said, Ayers, the gold-bearing gravel found in the mines, not a recent cave deposit.”—pg. 144
So here we have contradictory evaluations about the skull by qualified analysts. (I should remind the reader at this juncture that the skull was not an isolated find but was found in conjunction with hundreds of stone tools at the same levels of strata.) How can this be? How can solid matter, a skull and ground matrix, be so completely differently evaluated by different scientists? Evolutionist, W. D. Holmes, betrays his a priori, assumptive method of “deduction” in this case.
“Perhaps if Professor Whitney had fully appreciated the story of human evolution as it is understood today, he would have hesitated to announce the conclusions formulated [that humans existed in very ancient times in North America], notwithstanding the imposing array of testimony with which he was confronted.”—pg. 100, emph. supp.
In other words, what Holmes is saying is that evolutionary presuppositions have greater authority than empirical data. If the facts contradict evolution then the facts must go or the facts must be distorted to square with evolutionary assumptions—such as making spurious claims of hoaxes in the complete absence of any actual evidence of a hoax. Make no mistake about it, this is the nearly-universal underlying methodology employed throughout any scientific discipline by evolutionists. Most evolutionists are not so straightforward as Holmes about their interpretive methodology. This interpretive methodology indulged in by evolutionists has continued unabated since the 1880’s when Holmes published those remarks and is in full force today almost 140 years later.
So at least one of the three authorities claiming the Calaveras skull to be a hoax is rather plain-spoken about his conclusions being dictated by presuppositions about what is or is not possible. I am not aware of any such incriminatory remarks coming from Putnam or Sinclair, but I think it is a fair conclusion that their assertions about the skull were also dictated by prior evolutionary presuppositions but that they simply did not say so. Nor should we forget in this connection the lesson of the Piltdown Man hoax in which we have the spectacle of many of the world’s leading scientists being utterly led astray by self-delusion about the nature and significance of the Piltdown Man skull. I have no doubt in my own mind that Putnam and Sinclair gave entirely subjective analyses of the skull.
If we accept the standard evolutionary interpretation of geology, then the most rational conclusion to be drawn from the Calaveras skull and the hundreds of stone tools found is that modern humans such as ourselves have been around for at least 25 million years. I would like to propose, contra Cremo, that the better explanation is that the evolutionary age scenario is thoroughly fallacious and needs to be completely overhauled in favor of a young earth model.
The Thomas E. Lee Persecution and the Sheguiandah Artifacts
Cremo’s and Thompson’s second case which they mention in their introduction is that of Thomas E. Lee, an anthropologist at the National Museum of Canada (detailed in pages 87-90). They cite Lee’s case as an example of what I would say can only be fairly characterized as persecution for being the unfortunate discoverer of artifacts that did not square with official evolutionary propaganda. Lee’s bitter complaint is quoted by Cremo and Thompson:
“The site’s discoverer [Lee] was hounded from his Civil Service position into prolonged unemployment; publication outlets were cut off; the evidence was misrepresented by several prominent authors . . .; the tons of artifacts vanished into storage bins of the National Museum of Canada; for refusing to fire the discoverer, the Director of the National Museum, who had proposed having a monograph on the site published, was himself fired and driven into exile; official positions of prestige and power were exercised in an effort to gain control over just six Sheguiandah specimens that had not gone under cover; and the site has been turned into a tourist resort. . . . Sheguiandah would have forced embarrassing admissions that the Brahmins did not know everything. It would have forced the rewriting of almost every book in the business. It had to be killed. It was killed.”—pg. xviii
What was it that Lee found that resulted in this reprehensible and vindictive treatment from the evolutionary establishment? Under the subsection titled, “Sheguiandah: Archaeology as a Vendetta,” Cremo and Thompson note (pg. 87) that at various levels, between 1951 and 1955 Lee excavated projectile points, bifacially chipped implements and quartzite bifacially chipped implements found in and below glacial tills of the Wisconsin glaciation dated by geologists, depending upon the depth, at 65,000 years, or between 75,000 – 125,000 years. As a kind of compromise, the four geologists involved issued a statement arguing for a bare minimum age of 30,000 years, with Lee continuing to favor the older dates. This, of course, conflicts with the “orthodox” view of the Smithsonian Institution and other agenda-setting agencies that modern human beings evolved about 200,000 years ago in Southern Africa and eventually migrated to North America via the Bering Strait somewhere between 12,000 – 15,000 years ago.
As far as I am aware, the tons of artifacts–these silent witnesses refuting the evolutionary orthodoxy regarding human origins and human migration into the Americas–still remain secreted away in the storage bins of the National Museum of Canada, perhaps never to see the light of day again.
Summary
There is solid, hard empirical evidence in the form of man-made artifacts and human skeletal remains unearthed throughout the world (“topsy-turvy” fossils) in strata locations and conditions that defy any evolutionary explanation of human origins or of the accepted evolutionary view of the age of the earth. We have seen in this series just a smidgin of the evidence. The reader is urged to review the entirety of the evidence presented in “The Hidden History of the Human Race.” (An online PDF version is available here, minus photographs and diagrams and the pages do not correspond to the book version.) We have seen that there is pervasive censorship in academia and science research, “knowledge filtration” to use Cremo’s and Thompson’s terminology, designed to uphold the current evolutionary paradigm of origins and human history. We have seen moreover that there is actual and substantive persecution against dissenters engaged in by the evolutionary establishment against those who would contradict the prevailing dogma, and even against those, such as Virginia Steen-McIntyre, who naively bring such information to public attention not realizing the implications of their data. Even they are not safe from persecution at the hands of the Great Darwinian Propaganda Machine.
In my next article, “THE MARK ARMITAGE LEGAL VICTORY AND A CLARION CALL FOR LAITY TO CARRY THE TORCH IN THE CREATION-EVOLUTION CONTROVERSY,” we will look at the Mark Armitage legal victory against California State University Northridge who committed discriminatory job termination against Armitage based upon Armitage’s religious beliefs, and assess the significance of Armitage’s legal victory.
Yes, and there are others who recognize this fact, and are ridiculed.