We Are the Children of the Stars Page 8
These great apes include the orangutan, gorilla, chimpanzee, gibbon, and baboon. Since 15 million years ago there were no big-game hunters and no commercial trapping for furs, we must look to another reason for the decline of the great apes.
This mystery may or may not be related to the Hybrid Man story, but it indicates again that Evolution can only give weak explanations for such ancient events.
If the apes were class-A specimens from the school of natural selection, why should they decline as if unable to compete with other animal species?
Now, the primate line in general, apes as well as man-apes and true men, displays one characteristic vastly superior to all other creatures on Earth – brainpower. Therefore, it is not out of line with our theory, even if lacking any firm proof, to suggest that, not inconceivably, the primate line was imported to Earth by the starmen. The primates would be their basic starting point for creating an eventual species of intelligent human.
We must keep stressing the point that the age-old civilization of original Man or Starman on a far-off homeworld would not be dismayed at a long-range biological project spanning millions and millions of years.
And that biological project was tested and tried previously on uncounted other worlds. The goal was sublimely worthwhile – populating the universe with humankind so that the glorious gift of intelligence would never die out.
We have several clues to the possible importation of extraterrestrial forms of life on Earth, fitting our basic theory.
One is the mystery of the complete lack of fossil remains of the present living desert flora and fauna.2 No one knows at the present time why it is that, while countless fossil specimens of grasses, trees, ferns, and shrubs of tropical and semitropical climates can be found in many geological strata, not one single desert plant has left its fossil traceries in places where it can be found today. The desert palm tree is the one exception.
Another point difficult to understand is the rather astonishing basic difference in structure that exists between desert plants and most other Earth plants.
But these odd mysteries can be solved, if we assume that many hybridizing visits to Earth by our outer-space ancestors were required in order to infuse the proper mixtures into Hominids to create modern Man. It is not unreasonable to assume further that, on one of these fairly recent visits (geologically speaking), our outer-space sires brought desert forms of plants to Earth.
These desert types may have, all too often, been the only plant forms they knew. For, as was shown earlier, some of our outer-space ancestors might have spent the major part of their lives and times on waning planets that were not nearly as green as our lush planet Earth. Because of incessant population pressures, they would have had to dwell on planets that were drier, older, and dustier than we care to think about.
Consequently, desert-plant species that we see only in our dry regions are forms that may have been familiar to the starmen for perhaps millions of years. When our deserts developed, our starmen relatives may have seen an opportunity to bring some seeds from their dry and dusty homes elsewhere to plant in the new Earth world.
Our outer-space ancestors knew all too well that in a few million years or so, the desert areas on Earth would grow and grow. In time, earthmen would be thankful for the starmen's foresight in planting imported desert-plant species so soon, so well, and in such profusion.
There is another clue, among animal species, that the starmen may have planted certain creatures from other worlds on Earth. We refer to the puzzling “living fossils,” or species that have existed through hundreds of millions of years practically unchanged and seemingly extinction-proof. Yet, by far the vast majority of species that go back that far have completely vanished except for their bones.
Among the “living fossils” are included the following:
The queer duckbilled platypus, which – most any reasoning biologist would say – because of its “mixed up” characteristics of being a mammal that lays eggs and has a duckbill, had the least staying power through the ages. Yet there it is today, flourishing as if eons of time had not gone by since its kind first appeared on Earth.
The oyster is another long-lived specimen of early life; also the opossum, the Australian lungfish, the horseshoe crab, the coelacanth fish, and, to include a botanical item, the ginkgo tree.
How much of a riddle they represent can be seen from the following review of what evolutionists think about these “time anomalies.”3 The so-called living fossils puzzle and annoy the evolutionists, who feel obligated to explain why, in a world of change, these forms continue in their old placid way without either changing or becoming extinct. In hundreds of million of years [since they originated] there must have been changes in climate, changes in the environment, new enemies, new parasites, new diseases. Yet these creatures, without showing any special virtues or abilities, continue unchanged.
Then the redoubtable G. G. Simpson of Harvard is quoted as saying that these unchanging and persistent species “are a standing challenge to the hypothesis of ceaseless flux and have defied the explanatory efforts of many famous biologists.”4
We think the explanation might be profoundly simple: that they were imported to Earth by the starmen, for reasons not to be guessed at, unless it was as a test of the earthly environment, important for later Hybrid Man experiments.
Perhaps those time-lasting species came from some harsh world, so that earthly conditions, even though fluctuating wildly, seem like soft living to them, thus giving them their amazing durability.
Since other worlds can have an Evolution quite parallel to Earth's, those species might be closely related to similar but extinct species here and thus, to the paleontologist, would not seem grossly “alien” or out of line.
But now to return to our main theme in this chapter – early mankind.
In the so-called Evolution of humans there are two major steps to be accounted for. One is the use of crudely shaped tools by early Man, an attribute shared by no other creature, not even the apes. This subject will be taken up in detail in the next chapter.
The second question we will take up here: When did apemen come down from the trees to become prehumans walking on two feet?
Again, a source book of anthropological authority presents that mystery in a nutshell: “From squatting in a tree to strolling upright in a meadow is an enormous leap. Any explanation of the change can be only speculative. But the speculations, even though there are no fossils to back them up, have an uncanny way of hanging together.”5
The key phrase is “even though there are no fossils to back them up.” Again the “stones and bones” men (archeologists plus anthropologists) must admit their fossil method of piecing together mankind's origin has the annoying habit of leaving gaps marring their pet theories. The 12-million-year gap between man-apes and submen again hides this major transition from treeswinging apes to ground-walking men, and from knuckle-walking (when apes did occasionally descend to the ground) to full-time ground locomotion on two legs as practiced by humans.
Another authoritative work on early Man also has trouble bridging the gap between tree-dwellers and ground-walkers:
When Man's apelike ancestors descended from the trees, they must have been exposed to attacks from predators and, like male baboons, macaques and gorillas, the male Hominids almost certainly possessed [one would think] long canines which they used to defend themselves, their females, and their young.
Had they not done so, the Hominids would surely have been wiped out.6
Then comes the damaging admission: “Yet, the Australopithecine fossils show these little apelike men possessed canines no longer or sharper than modern Man.”
All of which is pithily highlighted by another quote, “This problem [how Man got from the trees to the ground] has puzzled experts for a long time and many imaginative theories have been put forward.”7
“Imaginative” is the word!
Which is the trap the authorities fall into, trying to expl
ain that disturbing anomaly, when they fish up this one – that the Australopithecines of about 2 million years ago were not the earliest representatives of the ground-walking Hominids.
But, as we saw before, the great Hominid fossil gap intrudes by furnishing no preAustralopithecus species for a long age, thus giving them not the slightest evidence that their theory is valid. It is not very scientific to predicate a hypothesis on what should be, when the fossil proof is totally lacking. That is little better than unscientific guessing.
Can our theory do any better? We believe so.
First of all, it is part of our concept that whenever Hominid species in the past made inexplicable leaps ahead, in any area, those leaps had one common cause – the biomanipulations of the starmen. We, too, must resort to pure speculation (which at least places us on an equal footing with the anthropologists) and imagine that, as part of their plan to bring out the step-by-step creation of Hybrid Man, our star-sires somehow got early Man down to the ground on two feet.
But how? Here is where we will make another daring proposal – it was done by genetic control. By the deliberate introduction of specialized genes into the systems of the early Hominids.
As we now dimly realize in modern biology, the genes are a complex “ladder” of chromosome trails within each cell that control some memory-pattern or instinct or biochemical process for the whole body. Thus, if the starmen simply incorporated dominant new genes for walking upright, while turning the old treeswinging genes into recessive traits, early Man would, in a few generations, abruptly switch from being an arboreal acrobat into a walking plainsman.
This was vitally necessary, for one cannot build civilization in the tops of trees. The starmen had to get the dawn men down on the ground before their magnificent earth colony could come to fruition.
Read any anthropological work that tries to explain just how the early men did exchange their tree life for prairie life, and you will see a tortuous interweaving of how the need for game, use of tools, seeing further when standing up, and other somewhat irrelevant or farfetched ideas are thrown together, begging the question entirely.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
It forms the forlorn basis for every tautological attempt, under evolutionary theory, to get early mankind out of the trees and down to solid ground.
And the theorizers only leave themselves higher in the air than Man was in the treetops.
If the forests did not decline but grew more lushly as time passed, why in the world should a tree-dwelling species of animal desert his original habitat? It is questions like these that tonguetie the anthropologists.
We do not mean to denigrate them, but their “authority” on such ancient mysteries, when not backed up by any fossils – their basic tool – is certainly far from authoritative.
It is another big “hole” in Evolution, as applied to Man, that neither Darwin nor Wallace could ever cover in the first place.
Where did the Homo family of species come in, according to Evolution? Homo, meaning human or the true men as distinguished from the ape-men Hominids.
Homo erectus is the first such specimen following the long chain of Australopithecine ape-men (although Leakey, as we have seen before, sees Habilis as a Homo going back almost 2 million years).
Back in the 1890s, the famed Java Man's fossil was found, but it was first thought to be a non-Homo type and labeled Pithecanthropus erectus, meaning an ape-man who walked upright. But careful study revealed that he was much more manlike than apelike. A new genus was started under the Homo tag, and the Java Man became Homo erectus. He lived from 300,000 to 600,000 years ago (perhaps, according to some authorities, up to a million years ago).
Subsequently, many Erectus specimens were found, including the Peking Man and others around the world. Two major riddles arose.
How did Erectus, without vehicles or transportation of any kind, spread around much of the world?
Why did Erectus disappear completely about 300,000 years ago?
Classical Evolution cannot permit any single species of any animal to appear simultaneously at several different points around the Earth. A new species arises in one certain place under propitious conditions and then, if it is vigorous and prolific, it gradually spreads out. But for primitive Erectus to start from Africa, his presumed place of genesis, and eventually spread into Europe and Asia (but not into the New World), makes him an extraordinary globe-trotter.
Since the world of half a million years ago was still filled with fierce predators, and Erectus had no weapons beyond crude sticks and sharp flintstones held in the hand, his bold invasion of fardistant domains is entirely incongruous. There are many other controversial aspects of this “world conquest” by Erectus, too numerous to go into, that make it a deep mystery.
Again, as smoothly as gears locking into place, we can use our new Hybrid Man theory and simply propose that the starmen moved members of the Erectus species around the Earth.
Why? Because Erectus was a culmination of their strenuous hybridization program, representing the breakthrough, so to speak, from ape-man specimens to manlike specimens who could in time lead to true Man.
Such a hybridization program is perfectly plausible, even in terms of the budding science of biogenetics on Earth today. The spokesman for one team of Harvard biologists said that a wellfinanced crash program (a la the Manhattan Project) could make genetic engineering on human beings a reality within a few years. By that, he meant manipulating the genes of people to “make them over” in any way desired. If our kindergarten biogenetics know-how is already that close to the goal of “engineering” humans in miraculous ways, then surely the college techniques of the aliens could easily accomplish their programmed plans in changing around the subhuman species of prehistoric times.
As for Erectus then melting away into oblivion 300,000 years ago, this too may have been planned by the starmen when the next-higher type of Homo was bred. Not that Erectus was ruthlessly exterminated by them but was perhaps simply left to shift for himself. Prey to carnivores and to a hostile environment, and without the brain development to survive against such odds, Erectus huddled helplessly to be sent to the limbo for extinct species.
Erectus had to go because Neanderthal Man showed up, a far more advanced type of prehistoric human being with a much larger brain. Which leads to another “gap” that severely damages the case for Darwinian Evolution.
As our previously quoted book of anthropological authority puts it:
“The Auchelian [toolmaking] industry, introduced by Homo erectus, lasted from about 500,000 to 75,000 years ago, but Homo erectus [himself] did not. The last we know of him [via fossils] is more than 300,000 years ago, which means that there is a stretch of nearly 200,000 years from which no definite Homo erectus fossils are known, and at the end of which an entirely different type of man appears on the scene – Neanderthal man.”8
An entirely different type of man! Is that part of the smooth, uninterrupted process of Evolution in which species gradually change in many transitions, with each step traced in fossils?
Hardly!
Borrowing a physics term, it is a quantum jump of a whole magnitude, from one species of early Man to one totally different and far more advanced.
It almost seems unnecessary to point out that such an abrupt leap forward in subhuman species is not only covered by the Hybrid Man theory but is essential to it. It almost shouts aloud that some outside factor manipulated the development of the human species, not in slow steps by natural selection but in giant steps, by means of “unnatural selection” or planned hybridization techniques.
From the evolutionary viewpoint, 200,000 years are unaccounted for. But, in the Hybrid Man theory, these are 2 years in which the starmen found the way to create Neanderthal Man from the basic stock of Homo erectus.
Of course, the anthropologists and evolutionists will always say confidently (or in wishful thinking?) that more and more digging in the ground will eventually reveal
the “missing” fossils that will fill this gap and also will fill the 12-million-year gap between the earliest and latest Hominids.
In fact, Richard E. Leakey, following in his great father's footsteps, has recently announced new fossil-finds at Lake Rudolph in northern Kenya, including “what is almost certainly the oldest complete skull of early Man.”9
He means a species of genus homo, not a Hominid of the Australopithecine type. This would antedate Homo erectus by far and put true Man's ancestry, back to 2.5 million years ago. However, these finds are too new yet to be fully evaluated and accepted, and Leakey's opinion must be called tentative. He first of all makes the startling suggestion that the Homo genus was contemporary with the Australopithecines, and that they both came from a common ancestral line (another unfound missing link), from which Homo broke off about 4 million years ago. This is highly speculative, it must be said, and will have to await much more close study by others than Leakey himself.
Obviously, Leakey is striving to fill that 12-million-year gap between the early and late Hominids, and he puts his faith in further fossil finds to bridge the chasm. But this easy way out of thinking more fossils will conveniently be found – is sternly denied by Ernst Mayr of Harvard, leading authority in evolutionary matters.10 He refers to the Sewall Wright Effect which postulates that missing fossils are those of a species of such low population, or of such short duration in the geological scale, that there was little chance of a highly accidental event like fossilizing to occur. In short, an extinct species of numerous members existing for millions of years will, by the law of averages, leave a few of its fossilized skeletal parts around, whereas species of low numbers and brief tenure may leave none.
It sounds very logical – except for the fact that fossils of the second type have been found many times, notably Steinheim and Swanscombe Man. The rarity of the species is no guide to whether it will show up or not. And the finds of the bone-digging anthropologists cannot depend purely on geographical luck. They most often dig in the most likely places for any particular type of fossil, hence putting the odds strongly in favor of finding even the rarer species.