[MUSIC PLAYING]
[APPLAUSE]
MICHAEL CREMO: Thank you for the nice introduction.
And thank you, ladies and gentlemen,
for coming to hear a little something about the topic,
"Forbidden Archeology--
Evidence for Extreme Human Antiquity."
So just to keep things honest, I'm
a researcher in human origins for the International Society
for Krishna Consciousness.
And my research is inspired by my studies
of the ancient Sanskrit writings in India,
especially the puranas, the historical writings.
Now, for many today, those two things
would be complete disqualifications for me
to say anything about a scientific topic
in scientific circles.
However, quite surprisingly to me,
even, there are people within the scientific world
who are interested in hearing what I have to say.
And I've been invited to present my ideas at some of the leading
scientific institutions in the world,
such as the Royal Institution in London,
the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow,
Department of Anthropology, the Indian Institute of Science
in Bangalore, and many others around the world.
So the question I am dealing with is,
how old is the human species?
Today, the most common answer to that question
comes from the modern followers of Charles Darwin, who
proposed that the first humans like
us came into existence less than 200,000 years ago.
Before that, they would say there
were no humans like us present on this planet,
simply more primitive, ape-like human ancestors.
However, the puranas, the historical writings
of ancient India, give a different idea,
namely that humans have been present
for vast periods of time on this planet going back
many millions of years.
Now, of course, in scientific circles,
I wouldn't expect anyone to take a statement
from some ancient writings as evidence.
So in the scientific circles where I'm invited to speak,
and I do something else.
I make a prediction--
namely, if what the puranas say about human antiquity is true,
there should be reports of archaeological evidence
for humans existing much further back in time than 200,000
years ago, perhaps going back many millions of years.
So my method for testing that prediction
is to examine all archaeological reports from the time of Darwin
to the present, and not just in English.
I have a reading knowledge of most
of the major European languages.
So when I speak about examining reports
from the scientific literature, I
mean two kinds of scientific literature, the primary
and the secondary scientific literature.
By primary scientific literature,
I mean original reports by archaeologists, geologists,
paleontologists, and other Earth scientists
reported in the professional, peer-reviewed scientific
literature.
By secondary literature, I mean things
that are based on the primary literature, such as textbooks,
for example.
So I had two principal findings.
The first finding is not so surprising.
There are no reports of evidence for extreme human antiquity
in the current secondary literature--
textbooks, survey studies, and things of that sort.
My second finding was a little more interesting.
There are many reports of evidence
for extreme human antiquity in the primary scientific
literature of past and present.
So I collected those reports in this book,
"Forbidden Archaeology," which was reviewed
in most of the professional academic and scientific
journals that deal with the question of human origins.
So this constitutes a kind of peer review.
Now, as you might expect, many of those reviews were negative,
some extremely so.
However, quite surprisingly to me,
even, even some of my critics were
able to point out some positive aspects of the work.
AUDIENCE: I was also hoping to get your point of view
from Vedic or purana on how old is humanity
and what did you find there.
Because I think in the talk, somebody
replied that you had also come to know about religious books
like Ramayana or Mahabharata.
How much of that is true based on the archaeological
[INAUDIBLE]?
MICHAEL CREMO: Well, it depends upon what kind of circles
I'm speaking in.
For example, if I go to Rishikesh or Haridwar
in the Himalayan Mountains and sit around with a bunch
of Vedic scholars who accept statements from Vedic
literature as evidence, then, well,
I can say in the Bhagavata Purana,
there are statements that humans were existing during
the [INAUDIBLE] period, which is in the first part of the culpa
or the day--
they'll understand what I'm saying,
and they'll accept that as evidence.
If I'm at a meeting of the World Archeological Congress
or speaking at Google headquarters,
my audience is not necessarily going
to accept a statement from the Bhagavat Purana
or the Mahabharata as evidence.
So it's like if you go to a baseball game,
you have to play by the baseball game rules.
And one of the rules is that you can't
use a statement from a spiritual text as evidence.
AUDIENCE: Could you say more about the actual contradiction
between the extreme antiquity of humans and evolution?
Because in my mind, it would just seem--
well, evolution theory could just be,
oh, you just have to push it back a few million years,
and it could still hold up.
It's just that it happened a lot earlier than people thought.
That seems like a simplistic resolution.
But is there something else that's
constraining the timeline which makes it really inconsistent?
MICHAEL CREMO: Well, that's a good question.
I'll refer you back to the statement of William Howells,
who said if the kind of evidence I'm talking about
is consistent, it's inconsistent with the general theory
of evolution.
Because he said--
I didn't quote everything he wrote to me in his letter.
He said, but you're putting evidence
for an anatomically modern human presence
before the known presence of even the most simple apes
and monkeys, which would be our prospective ancestors.
So you could conceivably come up with another version
of the evolutionary theory, but it
would be quite different from anything
that's being proposed today.
So that would be one possible response,
to do something like that.
And if you feel inspired to do it, then right on.
PRESENTER: I think with that, we will end the session.
I will thank Michael Cremo for visiting Google once again
and giving us this wonderful talk.
[APPLAUSE]