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AT a time when even a schoolboy knows that the Sinanthropus, our apelike prehistoric patriarch, lived over 6oo,ooo years ago, it is curious to recollect the words of an early-19th-century luminary of, science-Cuvier who once declared that: ‘Prehistoric men, physically different from the men of today, have never existed on earth.’ But they have, and their skeletons exist in museums.
It is significant that while the Europeans of a century or two ago erroneously traced the origin of man and the universe to a date less than 6,ooo years before their time, some thinkers of the ancient past had a truly modern scientific concept of the long evolution of man.
According to the Sanscrit Book of Manu (c. 2cnd century bc) the germ of life first appeared in water from the action of heat. Then it manifested Itself as mineral, a plant, an insect, a fish, a reptile, a mammal and finally in the form of a man. Other Brahmin scriptures of great antiquity list the Incarnations of Vishnu in the following order: the fish, tortoise, boar, lion-man, dwarf, man with an axe, Rama and Krishna. Again we can recognize in this allegory a pre-Darwinian notion of evolution . The fish becomes a reptile, the man comes to take its place. Then giant and dwarf primates appear. The Gigantopithecus was five metres tall while the Pithecanthropus was short. The Cro-Magnon, the ‘man with an axe’, was the true progenitor of modern man. Rama Is a symbol of civilized man. Krishna stands for the future goal of mankind-cosmic man. These remarkable ideas of Indian sages antedate the Theory of Evolution by thousands of years.
‘Man’s procreator is a fish-living creatures came from water,’ said Anaximander in the 6th century B.C. Lucretius, a Roman poet of the 1st century before our era, drew a picture of the ‘survival of the fittest' in his poem On Nature.
It is quite evident that these clear-cut notions of evolution existed long before Lamarck and Darwin. Only one hundred years ago Darwinists met a wall of opposition, ridicule and fear. At a lecture on evolution given in those troublesome years the wife of Sir David Brewster, eminent savant, fainted on hearing the facts which her tender ears could not take. Even until recent years certain states in America have had a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. Actually, there is nothing offensive in the Theory of Evolution—a cosmic process of growth from the low forms of life towards the superior, holds a promise of a greater future for man. And who knows, perhaps the ancient Mayas were right. According to ‘their sacred book the Popol Vuh, the monkey is a descendant of early man.
A comparison of scientific knowledge prevalent over two thousand years ago and the beliefs current in. the past three 4tmdred years, forces upou us the conclusion that the ancients surpassed our ancestors in ~he interpretation of the phenomena they had observed.
The people of antiquity believed in the tremendous age of the world and mankind which they estimated in tens of thousands and even millions of years. To the Euro- pean of Napoleonic times, the earth and man were created by God only several thousand years ago. How- ever, the Asiatics bad different views.
The Brabmins of India calculated the duration of the universe, or the Day of Brahma, to be 4,320 million years. The Druses of Lebanon set the beginning of creation at 3.430 million years. The present age of the earth is con- sidered to be about 4,600 million years. whereas that of the crust is 3,300 million years. There are strange parallels between these figures. What is really extraordinary is the pundits’ time reckoning in milliards of years—cosmic chronology of this type was unknown until this century. According to Simplicius (6th century A.D.) ancient Egyptians kept records of astronomical observations for 63o,ooo years. The archives of Babylon were 470,000 years old, wrote Cicero with a remark that he did not believe this claim. Hipparchus (c. 190-125 B.C.) mentioned Assy- rian chronicles stretching back for 270,000 yearS. The Egyptian priests told Herodotus in the 5th century B.C. that the sun had not always risen where it rose then. This implied that they had kept records of the pre- cession of equinoxes, covering at least 26,000 years. The Greek historian Diogenes Laertius (3rd century A.D) claimed that the astronomical records of Egyptian priests began in 49,219 B.C. He also referred to their registers of 373 solar and 832 lunar eclipses, which would involve a period of approximately io,ooo years. The Byzantine historian George Syncellus said that the chroniclers of the Pharaohs had recorded all events for 36,525 years. Martianus Capella (5th century) wrote that the Egyptian sages had secretly studied astronomy for over 40,000 years before they imparted their knowledge to the world.
The first dynasty after the Deluge was traced by Baby. lonian priests to a date 24,150 years before their time. According to Codex Vaticanus A-3738, the Mayas kept their calendrical system since 18,612 B.C. Herodotus places the reign of Osiris at about 15,500 B.C. from the information given to him by the priests of the Land of the Nile. He made the remark that they were quite certain about the exactitude of the date. The lunar calendar of Babylon and the solar calendar of Egypt coincided in the year 11,542 B.C. The calendrical - computations of India began with the year 11,652 B.C. According to Plato, the Egyptian priests fixed the date of the sinking of Atlantis at 9850 B.C. while the Zoroas- trian books set the ‘beginning of time’ at 9600 B.C. That these dates are correct, can be questioned. But we can not escape the conclusion that the ancients were much closer to truth than the scholars and clerics of one and a half centuries ago who thought that the world had been created in 4004BC according to the biblical chronoligical study of Bishop Usher.
The universe of the Brahmins was almost as old as that of modern science. The chronicles ‘of the Mayas, Egyptians and Babylonians went farther back in time than our his- tory. In view of what our science has yet to learn, it would be presumptuous to accuse them of exaggeration. The mental horizons of the peoples of antiquity were vast and we are only beginning to see today what they perceived yesterday. The priests of Babylon and Egypt believed that man was civilized half-a-million years ago. They kept historical and astronomical records in their archives as Simplicius and Cicero tell us. We can smile at these claims and give civilization five thousand years to progress front the chariot to the automobile, from bows and arrows to the atomic bomb, from the boat to the spaceship.
Although legitimately drawn from the palaeontological evidence available today, certain inferences of anthro- pology are questionable as we shall later see. According to anthropology, anthropoid apes appeared about two million years ago. They were neither men nor apes. There is a possibility that both modem man and present-day ape had a common ancestor. Accordingly, if this period of two million years, rep- resenting the life span of man, is likened to a year, then the Australopithecus appeared arm July 1, the Pithecan- tbropus came on October 14, the Neanderthal on Christ- mas Day and the Cro-Magnon on December 27, 28,29 and 30. Today is the 31st December on this scale, and it has been about 5,500 years long. Primitive man began to make tools between July and September- of this Great Year, and early in the second week of December be discovered fire. For eleven months Magnob, although occasional crossings of races did take place to the benefit ‘of the more primitive, creating a mixed Neanderthal type.
Our immediate progenitor is the Gro-Maguon. He was a six-footer (m.8 metres), intelligent and good-looking. He originated in the last Ice Age about 35,000 years ago, and had a continuous existence until the dawn of history when be became the forefather of modem man.
The Neanderthal of Europe was nothing like him. He was only 1.65 metres tall, with short muscular limbs, broad chest, weighing about 82 kilograms. This prehis- toric man had a very small forehead, almost no chin and incomparisón with the Cro-Magnon, was ugly. During the earliest period of his eristence the Cro-Magnorm was con- temporaneous with the Neanderthal whom be removed from the European scene by his strength and intelligence. The Neanderthal was not the grandfather of the Cro-Magnon, although occasional crossings of races did take place to the benefit of the more primiive, creating a mixed Neanderthal type.
Evolution Iaboured for hundreds of thousands of years to produce the Neanderthal out of the primates. If so long a period of time was necessary to evolve this foreheadless, chinless, thick-necked, stocky creature—how could the more evolved Cro-Magnon have developed in the space of a few thousand years? Here is his portrait—he dressed himself in skin clothes which were sewn and embroidered. He carved mammoth bone, painted beautiful pictures on rock, and kept calendars by watching the moon. He even had art schools.
Our planet has had unexpected glacial epochs of different duration. The last one ended about twelve thousand years ago. But there were interglacial periods before the one we live in today. A warm climate prevailed about 150,000 years ago during which civilization might have been born, flourisjed and then died in an avalanche of ice and ocean waves. The Cro-Magnon could have been a survivor from this Garden of Eden. This hypo- thesis would account for the large brain and high fore. head of the Cro-Magnon. He may have brought with him hereditary traits from a former race, just as we ourselves carry his genes.
Now, using the same comparative scale, let us divide the day we are living—December 31, into 12 hours, from 6 am. to 6 p.m., from sunrise to sunSet. Today at 7 o’clock in the morning we discover bronze, writing and the wheel. At 8 we begin to build cities. Shortly before 11 we learn how to melt and forge iron.. Between 1 and 2 in the afternoon the Greek forefathers meditate on the nature of the universe—from the atom to space travel.. About 4.30 p.m. we emerge from an historical siesta—. the Dark Ages, and begin to develop the scientific legacy of Greece. At 5 in the afternoon, explorers sail the oceans, ‘opening new continents. At sunset we steal the Pro- methean fire of the atom and then soar to the moon. Everything happens in the last hour of the last day of the Great Year.
If all the above is correct, then’the story of man is un- paralleled in evolution. It took the horse sixty million years to become what it is now. The ancestor of the ant lived 150 million years ago, and his descendants have changed but little.
There is something strangely unrealistic in the picture of a tree-climbing animal becoming in two million years a biped who can make machines to sail on water, roll on band, or fly in the air or interplanetary space, while his retarded cousins still jump from tree to tree. It is difficult to believe that man’s history is so short while that of a atomic bomb, from the boat to the spaceship.
Coming to our recent origin, it seems that the Cro- Magnon could not have displayed his artistic talents with- out heredity from another cycle of civilization of which we, know nothing. Neither could we have reached the moon without the’ biological legacy from the Cro-Magnon.
Only material evidence from protohistory can make this speculation truly scientific. But there is a great deal to suggest that the evolutionary road of mankind is much longer than it is considered at present. The discovery of a man-type skeleton in Tuscany in 1958 by Dr. J. Hun- zcler and Dr. H. de Terra in a 10-million year Miccene stratum lends strength to the author’s theory of the ancientness of man.
Or has our growth been accelerated by another galac- tic civilization, millions of years older than our own? ‘May be we are property,’ mused Charles Fort properly of a cosmic super-civilization breeding gods out of monk- eys?