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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Read and think before you fight for your views, 12 Feb 1999
By A Customer
"Forbidden Archeology's Impact" might be said more appropriately to be a large dossier of letters, papers and documents written by the author and by a great number of people wishing to comment - among other things - on his and Richard Thompson's research into archeological papers containing evidence for extreme human antiquity. The author obviously had no intention of intertwining these textual elements into a cohesive woof, so readers should not expect the book to develop any central argument. Such an argument, however, is to be found in "Forbidden Archeology - The Hidden History of the Human Race" whose intellectual and social impact the present book is intended to register (thus, the dossier-format of this book - and not its contents - explains why I have given it no more than three stars).Readers interested in the issues of human origins (for which archeologists have unearthed quite a bit of puzzling evidence) and the sociology of scientific knowledge (particularly as applied to Paleo-anthropology and Archeology) should hurry up and acquire the extremely well-written and painstakingly researched "Forbidden Archeology - The Hidden History of the Human Race" (914 pages). Readers will also benefit from a perusal of the customer reviews posted on the respective Amazon.com page. Many of them (excepting my own) are beautifully argumented. However, the implications of a deep-rooted belief in Darwinism, the unavoidable practice of peer reviews for scientific journals, the few well-known cases of evidence suppressed or twisted by academic institutions, and the utterly subjective nature of all sciences which pretend to account for our true nature and raison d'être, have given rise to a very heated debate on the possible existence of worldwide conspiracies and powerful groups of mischievous academicians. Such debates, though they must happen, often lead our attention away from the intellectual revision required by discoveries such as those discussed in Cremo and Thompson's "Forbidden Archeology - The Hidden History of the Human Race". Of course, there's no denying that conspiracies and falsifications of History have occurred and may still occur (sometimes even providentially!), but I think readers should be careful not to get caught up too much in the unwholesome anxiety such speculations are prone to produce. Conspiracy is not at all at the heart of the matter, so instead of loitering in a state of indignation and fingerpointing, non-zealots would do better in calmly concentrating on two essential facts: 1) There really is a large bulk of acceptable evidence, both archeological and anthropological, for anatomically modern humans living in very remote times, and 2) there is not one example in the fossil record nor a single logical or scientific basis for the claim that animal or plant species can or did create themselves or could ever transform themselves into completely new forms. Cremo's work has helped expose the fragility and inconsistency of currently favored theories on human evolution, and so has taken an important step towards a new understanding of the discipline of Anthropology. So maybe it really is time we gave up our unintelligible, mechanistic evolutionary models and started taking the wisdom of our forefathers a bit more seriously.
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by Michael A. Cremo
by J. Douglas Kenyon
by Michael A. Cremo
by Michael A. Cremo
by Christopher Dunn
