Michael Cremo is a known name in the alternate archaeology community. His and Richard Thompson’s 1993 book “Forbidden Archaeology” has been called anunderground classic.

But he is an outlier when it comes to extreme human antiquity. Cremo has come to the conclusion that humans – modern humans – have existed on the planet for millions, if not hundreds of millions, of years.

This almost dizzying perspective can be derived from the ancient Vedic texts, a tradition that has influenced Michael’s worldview deeply.

Michael Cremo looked into standard archaeology and found that many archaeologists and paleoanthropologists, over the last century or so, had found anatomically modern human artefacts like bones or footprints embedded in geological strata that were known to be millions of years old.

“I thought, why aren’t these reports mentioned in the literature today?” Michael says.

Well, they are, he explains, but they are interpreted in a way that they can fit in with the current ideas of human history.

One example are the footprints paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey found at Laetoli in Tanzania in 1979.

Another smoking gun is a finger bone found in Olduvai Gorge, not far from the site of the footprints. The bone does not quite look like it would if it were from another primate or a known prehistoric hominid, but it fits well with the anatomy of modern humans.

“Theoretical preconceptions can influence how scientists will react to various categories of evidence”, Michael says.

“Evidence that conforms to a particular paradigm will easily pass through this social intellectual filter. You will hear scientists talk about it at seminars. Evidence that doesn't conform is filtered out: ‘It’s an anomaly, we’ll get to that later’.”

An alternative to the rational, physicalist paradigm that dominates archaeology in the West today would be to have a plurality of archaeologies. Cremo highlights theWorld Archaeological Congress and its scientific journal “Archaeologies”.

He appreciates the boom in alternative archaeology in recent years.

“But we deal with different parts of the time spectrum.”

In Michael Cremo’s view, the study of paleoarchaeology cannot really be separated from the study of consciousness and what a human being is.

“The cosmos is no accident. There is a purpose to it.”

“But the cosmos goes through cycles of manifestation and unmanifestation. These cycles go on eternally. In that sense, there is no creation, there is an ongoing event.”

And part of that ongoing event is the existence of human beings.

“We are present, I believe, because it’s in the human bodily vehicle that a conscious self can come to understand the real answer to the question ‘who am I?’”

This entails that entire human civilizations have risen and fallen, time and time again, for millions of years.

In the Vedic worldview, what science calls the Big Bang is perhaps merely one exhalation in the cosmic breathing, by which universes expand and collapse incessantly.

Many people want simple explanations, Michael notes. That goes for Christian literalists and physicalist scientists as well as new age types, who want to explain the mysterious human evolution with extraterrestrial influence.

“But the real situation may be a little more complex. There may be threads of all of those things, woven into a beautiful tapestry, and with some overall guiding intelligence”, he says.

Our time is crucial in many ways, but with a cyclic Vedic view, this isn’t the only crucial era. We entered the most problematic of the fouryugas, world ages, some 5,000 years ago, and we will not leave it until over 400,000 years from now. But there is a silver lining, according to Michael:

“Even in the winter there are warmer periods, and we are entering one such now. It will last for 10,000 years.”

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