In 1921, an Arkansan named Rowlands was digging in one of the many gravel pits on a line of small hillocks known as Crowley's Ridge, located two miles north of Finch. At a depth of 10 feet, Rowlands' shovel suddenly struck something large and solid. The object appeared at first to be a boulder, but excavating around it, Rowlands soon discovered that it was a large rock-sculptured head of a man. It stood about 4 feet high, and the figure had a squared, protruding chin, small, tight-lipped mouth, a short nose, and a furrowed brow and stare accented by two flat "buttons" of inlaid gold for eyes. Two more gold discs ornamented the figure's ears, and a heart-shaped plug of copper was embedded in the chest. The top of the head was covered by a carved hood that draped down the nape, and attached to a piece around the neck. Near the head, and in the same layer, Rowlands dug up a number of smaller objects: a gold ring, a small coffer made of volcanic pumice (which does not exist in this region), and tiny carvings of men, animals, moons and stars.
The head and artifacts soon became a local attraction, and the newspapers dubbed the glowering figure "King Crowley." Several investigators authenticated the find, though they could not explain its presence in the ten-foot layer of gravel - geologically dated at 175,000 years. The head and objects were sent to the Arkansas Natural History Museum in Little Rock. The museum curators, who also examined the artifacts and had double-checked and documented their discovery, were confident in the findings' authenticity to place them on public display. At the same time, however, some of the small carving samples were mailed to the Smithsonian in Washington. The Smithsonian - being a far more conservative institution -described the carvings as truly "unexplained items," but could not reconcile the antiquity of the strata in which they had been brought to light. Finally, after fifteen years of vacillating on the subject, orthodoxy triumphed: The Smithsonian concluded that the Crowley Ridge artifacts could not be 175,000 years old as this contradicted established theory on the age of human civilization, and therefore declared the artifacts fakes. Conforming to this prestigious conservative pronouncement, the Little Rock museum promptly took the stone head and other objects off display, and eventually sold them to unnamed private collectors. The "King Crowley" head was shipped off to California, and the rest of the collection was similarly scattered to the four winds. Today, the location of even a single object is unknown.
One wonders how many other valuable out-of-place items, because they do not conform to "acceptable" schemes of history and geology, have been likewise thrown out or lost by Establishment institutions.
On June 27,1969, workmen cutting into a rock shelf situated on the Broadway Extension of 122nd Street, between Edmond and Oklahoma City, came upon a find that was to create much controversy among the experts. The find was an inlaid tile floor, found 3 feet below the surface, and covering several thousand square feet. Durwood Pate, an Oklahoma City geologist, commented on the floor in the Edmond Booster of July 3, 1969:
"I am sure this was man-made because the stones are placed in perfect sets of parallel lines which intersect to form a diamond shape, all pointing to the east. We found post holes which measure a perfect two rods from the other two. The top of the stone is very smooth, and if you lift one of them, you will find it is very jagged, which indicates wear on the surface. Everything is too well placed to be a natural formation."
Pate also discovered a form of mortar between the tiles. He believes now that the tile surface served as a common floor for several human shelters over a wide area. Delbert Smith, a geologist and president of the Oklahoma Seismograph Company, summed up the mystery concerning the tile floor in the Tulsa World of June 29, 1969: "There is no question about it. It had been laid there, but I have no idea by whom." Yet another facet of the mystery involved the question of age. There are some differing opinions as to the geology involved, but the best estimate places the tiles at 200,000 years old.
On August 1, 1889, a professional well-driller, M.A. Kurtz, was working near his home in Nampa, Idaho, along with two other crewmen, when their steam pump suddenly spat out a piece of brownish clay 11/2 inches long that was clearly humanoid in appearance. The discovery was also eye-witnessed by several prominent citizens of Nampa. What amazed these men was that the little clay "doll" had come from below a 15-foot layer of lava rock, 100 feet of sand, 6 inches of clay, 40 feet of more sand, then 165 feet composed of clay, sand, clay nodules mixed with sand, and coarse sand layers - a total of 320 feet.
The small "doll" is composed of half clay and half quartz, and according to at least one expert, Professor Albert A. Wright of Oberlin College, it was not the product of a small child or amateur, but was made by a true artist. Though badly battered by time, the doll's appearance is still distinct: it has a bulbous head, with barely discernible mouth and eyes; broad shoulders; short, thick arms; and long legs, the right leg broken off. There are also faint geometric markings on the figure, which represent either clothing patterns or jewelry -they are found mostly on the chest around the neck, and on the arms and writs. The doll is the image of a person of a high civilization, artistically attired.
The Nampa doll came to the attention of Dr. G.F. Wright of the Boston Society of Natural History, who sought to verify the depth at which it was found - and thus also establish its great antiquity. In an on-location examination of Kurtz's equipment, the hole drilled, and interviews with the witnesses, Dr. Wright became convinced the find was genuine. Kurtz demonstrated that the well had been tubed with heavy iron tubing 6 inches in diameter, so that there was no mistake about the occurrence of the artifact at the stated depth. Furthermore, the pump worked in only one direction - had the object fallen into the hole from above, it would have been destroyed by the pump. Wright concluded in a report to the Boston Society that, "There is no ground to question the fact that this image came up in the sand pump from the depth reported." In another study, fellow Bostonian Professor F.W. Putnam found through microscopic analysis that quartz grains under the doll's right arm had been cemented by iron molecules. This too - independent of the fact of the depth of the discovery - is indicative of a great age.
How old is the Nampa object? The lava rock layer through which Kurtz's drill penetrated is part of the prehistoric lava flows of the Columbia Plateau which occurred before the advance of the last Ice Age. And below this layer, the image was discovered another 300 feet down. The best modern geologic estimate puts the date for the layer in which the doll was found at over 300,000 years. Today, the Nampa doll is on exhibit at the Idaho State Historical Society in Boise.
Curiously enough, a second doll-like figure was discovered sometime before 1880 near Marlboro in Stark County, Ohio, by workmen drilling a well. The image - made of black variegated marble and standing 6 inches tall - was unearthed from a depth of only 120 feet, but was embedded in sand and gravel of a similar type and age as that of the Nampa doll. There were two things remarkable about the Ohio figure: First, the marble it is made of is not indigenous to Ohio; and second, it bears an astonishing resemblance to the image found at Nampa. One can see in it the same bulbous head, simple facial features, stocky frame and long arms and legs. Did the two, the Ohio and Idaho "dolls," come from the same enigmatic lost civilization? The evidence answers yes.
One of the most convincing signs of a high civilization is the written word. In the early spring of 1891, a farmer named J.H. Hooper was examining a wooded ridge on his property, located in Bradley County, 13 miles from Cleveland, Tennessee. A peculiar stone caught his attention, which he first took to be a grave marker. But digging around it, he soon discovered that the stone was only a surface projection of a subterranean structure that extended into the depths below. Hopper spent the next several weeks in an attempt to uncover his unusual find: A length of wall, traced for a thousand feet, on the average 2 feet thick and 8 feet high, with numerous projections - like the first one - spaced along the top every 25 to 30 feet. The wall ran roughly at an angle of 15 to 20 degrees east. The structure continues on beyond the section exposed, in both directions, following the crest of a ridge that extends from the Hiawassee river north of Chattanooga southward, where it dips beneath the Tennessee river. Its position dates it geologically to near the beginning of the Quaternary - well over a million years old.
The wall is composed of red sandstone blocks constructed in three courses, cemented together with a dark red clay mixed with salt, and in numerous places is plastered over with red, slate and yellow clays. Along one stretch of wall, near the northern end a distance of 16 feet, Hooper made without a doubt the most important discovery: Hidden beneath the outer clay plasterings, a number of the sandstone block surfaces were covered with the hieroglyphs of a lost language. The letters were arranged in wavy, parallel and diagonal lines, interspersed with small pictures of strange animals, many unidentifiable. There were other symbols too, of the sun and crescent moon, which appear to have some astronomical significance. All together, 872 individual characters were made out, many repeated - suggesting the script is a form of pictographic writing, like Chinese.
Despite the implications of the wall, and the challenge of the discovery of an unknown writing, the find was met by the scientific community with overwhelming apathy. A short notice on the Tennessee mystery wall appeared in the Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences (11:26-29), written by A.L. Rawson, who examined the structure and script first-hand, as well as published copies he had made of some of the glyphs and pictures. But that was all; no further study was ever made.
In 1936, Tom Kenny, a resident of Plateau Valley, a town located on the western slope of the Rockies in Colorado, was excavating for a winter cellar to store vegetables, when at a depth of 10 feet his spade hit a barrier. Clearing the covering material away, he unearthed a pavement made of tiles, each man-made and five inches square. The tiles were laid in mortar, the chemical composition of which later analysis showed was different from all materials found in the valley. The perplexing problem is that the strange pavement was found in the same layer containing the three-toed Miocene horse - upwards of 30 million years old.
In November, 1829, a block of marble measuring over 30 cubic feet was excavated from a depth of between 60 to 70 feet, from the Henderson quarry, located 12 miles northwest of Philadelphia. The block was sent to the Savage marble saw mill in nearby Norristown for cutting into slabs for construction. After taking off one slab about 3 feet wide and 6 feet long, workmen noticed something strange: They had exposed an unnaturally straight-edged, rectangular indentation. Several respectable townsmen were called to the scene, and in their presence the rest of the block surface was carefully removed. Revealed were two sharply defined engraved letters, resembling an "I," and a "U" with a squared base. The indentations were 11/2 inches long and five-eighths of an inch in width. There was no way the letters could have been of recent origin - they were deeply embedded in the marble. More mysterious, the marble had come from a very old lime rock. Estimated age: About 65 million years.
The Los Angeles News of December 17, 1869 printed an account supplied to the paper by a correspondent of the Cleveland Herald, writing from Wellsville, Ohio. The account described how in the autumn of the year, at a coal mine operated by a Captain Lacey of Hammondville, a miner named James Parsons was loosening a large mass at a depth of 100 feet, when he suddenly exposed a smooth slate wall covered with strange alphabetic writing. The letters were raised and well defined. The coal that had covered the wall bore their distinct impression - which means the letters date to a time when the coal was in a vegetable state, and had molded itself against the wall. Each sign was three-quarters of an inch in size, and arranged in rows precisely spaced 3 inches apart. The first line of letters contained 25. Local teachers and ministers examined the find, but could offer no explanations. Unfortunately, just before a number of university professors arrived to verify the discovery, the slate surface disintegrated from exposure to air, and the script was lost. Nevertheless, the find was well-documented, and attested to by several reliable witnesses. But the most disturbing fact about the mysterious slate wall and its glyphs was their undeniable presence in coal - coal from the Carboniferous era, well over 200 million years old.
A naturalist named Isaac Lea reported in the American Journal of Science (volume I, number 1, page 155), in 1822, a find he had made in a stretch of sandstone located a quarter mile north of Pittsburgh, on the same side of the Monongahela river. Lea described it as the most singular specimen he had ever seen: An unusually flat rectangular surface, 3 feet long and varying from 5 to 6 inches wide. One end was cut off by a break in the rock - so there is no way of knowing the real length of the original impression. The other end terminated in the middle of the rock face in a straight, square line -as if a roll of paper had been torn off clean. On this flat surface were row after row of evenly spaced, perfect diamond shapes, each with an oblique, raised band across its center. Lea was mystified as to how to classify the impression, as belonging to the animal or vegetable kingdom. The answer is neither: The pattern is too precise to be natural, the diamond shapes too square to be designed by anything but an intelligent hand. Luckily, Lea had forethought enough to make accurate measurements and draw sketches of the impression, for when he returned to remove it for further study, he found that a quarryman had beaten him to it, and had done his work. The naturalist also took meticulous note of the position of the rock surface in relation to the geology of the surrounding area. The hill in which it existed is not high enough to take in the bed of carboniferous coal found in a horizontal stratum about 250 feet above the locality. In fragments of the impressed rock, Lea found fossils of primitive jointed plants - the type which made its appearance in the Devonian era, 400 million years ago.
What exactly was the mysterious pattern in rock? We do not know, but the fact remains that it bore the artistic and measuring hand of man. That hand was contemporary with purportedly the earliest plant life on earth.
Today, besides the Uniformitarian-evolution-linear model, there have been three new and alternative models proposed, and each of these offer their own interpretations of the past. These are: Extraterrestrialism, Catastrophic evolution, and Creationism. Let us look at each one separately.
Most people have become aware of the Extraterrestrialist model through the writings of Erich von Daniken, author of Chariots of the Gods, and other similar works. What is not often realized, however, is that von Daniken's ideas not only have had popular appeal to the man on the street, but they are having a definite impact on the academic and scientific world as well. Von Daniken offers what appears to be a plausible answer to the riddle of out-of-place artifacts of an advanced nature which have been unearthed from the archaeological record -and, as we have seen from the fossil and geological records as well. According to him, aliens from other worlds have supposedly been visiting the earth throughout history and prehistory, and the out-of-place remains we find were the product of contact between the spacemen and early man. In the case of those objects discovered in those layers believed to pre-date man's appearance, then the items were left by the extraterrestrials themselves. By giving the out-of-place artifacts an "other world" source, Von Daniken has thus neatly explained their presence, while at the same time preserving accepted" theories of evolution. In effect, he has placed the artifacts in a realm outside the earthly scheme of things, where they do not conflict with slow, progressive evolutionary development - only intervening now and then.
But there are several flaws in the Extraterrestrialist model. In not one instance has Von Daniken been able to demonstrate the existence of a single "ancient astronaut." His "evidence," on close inspection, is largely based on his own personal interpretations of primitive drawings and ancient records which look and sound (to him) like men wearing spacesuits, or riding around inside spaceships. In every case, there is another simpler and literally more "down to earth" interpretation for every "space" drawing and record he offers as proof.
When we examine closely the out-of-place artifacts themselves, especially those we have studied embedded in the geologic layers, we find that they do not appear alien to us, and they certainly do not exhibit a technology exclusively different from that of, say, our own civilization today - that is, what man himself has and could have once before produced. What is more, where we have found the presence of artifacts, we have also found clear evidence of the presence of man: You will remember that among those discoveries made in the fossil record, not only did we observe objects of worked metals, stone, etc., but there were also human skulls, bones and footprints. Man was there; the artifacts logically were of his making. There is no need to invoke spacemen, or look to the stars, for an answer - the answer lies here on earth, or as in the case of our study here, in the earth.
A second modern model of the past is Catastrophic evolution -and as its name implies, it is a modification of the old Uniformitarian-evolution model. Catastrophic evolutionists propose to fully accept the existence of human remains in the geologic column, while leaving the column and the dating of the various rock layers intact. What this means is a scenario of human history in which civilizations have been born, risen to intellectual and technological heights, and then were destroyed by earth upheavals, again and again over 600 million years. At first glance, this model might seem plausible enough to explain the facts. But there are problems to consider. As noted earlier, historians measure the antiquity of our own civilization as being no more than 10,000 years. If we take this as the average "lifespan" for the development of a technological society, and attempt to apply this to the multiple civilization scenario, we find that we must presuppose the existence of an incredible 60,000 civilizations to each down to the Cambrian age. What is more, there is the major difficulty of how all these societies would have disappeared -unless one is also to imagine 60,000 separate cataclysms. Unfortunately, the geologic record does not support that many world changes. The geologic record also reveals that, if only simple forms of life supposedly existed in the earliest levels, there was no way such environments could have supported a human population, let alone active civilizations. Finally, there still remains the unanswered question of where man originated - and for that, we have already seen, evolution cannot even attempt a solution.
Our third alternative model to examine is by no means new - in fact it was the accepted model of the past long before uniformitarianism of geology came to the forefront. It is called Creationism, or Creation-Flood science, because it is based on the Biblical account in Genesis of the Divine creation of the world, life and man, and the world-destroying Deluge. What makes Creationism distinctive from the other proposed models is it teaches that mankind existed on the earth before most geologic strata were formed. What is more, he was created and lived as an intelligent, civilized being from the outset. The Genesis record describes how after Creation and before the Flood, the descendants of Adam - the Antediluvians - possessed an advanced culture that included agriculture, urbanization, the arts, metal-working and sophisticated engineering abilities. The Flood completely destroyed the Antediluvian civilization and the entire world, depositing the remains (according to Creationist-Flood geology) in a short time in the form of all the strata from Cambrian to early Tertiary. After the Flood, the first descendants of Noah built another civilization culminating in the technology that constructed the Tower of Babel. The remains of this post-Flood civilization, after the destruction of Babel, were swept away by the Ice Age disaster, and were preserved in the strata of the Tertiary-Pleistocene.
The Creation-Flood model can thus accept the appearance of human remains and advanced artifacts in the geologic past, as evidence for pre-Flood and immediate post-Flood civilizations. Because of the cataclysmic nature of the Flood, and the abruptness with which the Babel-Ice Age disaster occurred, the Creation-Flood model predicts further that buried artifacts are probably few and far between, appearing as rare surviving remnants in the rock - which is the case exactly.
Another upset in Creationism's favor is that, by its rejection of uniformitarian long-age dating of the earth's strata, it is able to explain remarkable similarities among the out-of-place artifacts, in diverse levels. For instance, we found several examples of giant human bones and footprints - in Tertiary, Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, and Pennsylvanian rock. This would mean, in "accepted" geologic time measurements, the persistence of a very specialized life form - Homo gargantuan - over a span of 300 million years. There is no precedent for that kind of survival anywhere in the fossil record. But by viewing all these layers as having been laid down in a short time period, and by regarding the remains within as the remnants of one destroyed world, the various giant finds and their similarities are explained. In addition, the large bones and prints confirm what was recorded in Genesis about conditions before the Flood: "There were giants in those days, mighty men, men of renown."
There is, however, one problem that Creationism must contend with. But that problem at least may have a satisfactory answer. It involves the presence of foot and sandal prints - and, for that matter, the prints of extinct animals - found in the fossil record. Dr. John D. Morris of the Institute for Creation Research, in San Diego, noted that in the case of the mantracks and dinosaur tracks found on the Paluxy river, there is a layer of sedimentary rock 8,500 feet in thickness underlying these Cretaceous formations. Now according to the Creationist model, this must all have been deposited during the Flood. The problem is, as Morris put it, "How could man and dinosaur witness such massive deposition at the beginning stages of the Flood and survive long enough to leave their prints so high up in the geologic column?"
The answer may lie in an uplift of pre-Cambrian rock located just to the southwest of Glen Rose. The uplift shows only small traces of the deposits which covered the Paluxy area, which means it could have served as a refuge for men and animals during the first part of the Flood. The waters appear to have retreated momentarily, and the men and dinosaurs climbed down from their summit, to cautiously walk across the mud-filled Paluxy region, probably in search of food. It is significant that all the Paluxy man prints are clear impressions of the whole foot, indicating that the stride of their makers had been slow and deliberate, and not running, as the impressions then would have been deep prints of the forefoot only. The tracks also go off in different directions, as if the survivors had split their company to search over more ground. But just moments after the impressions were made, the Flood waters must have returned, sweeping men and creatures away, and quickly burying their tracks by new deposits - deposits which aided in the perfect preservation of the prints to this day.
This particular scenario of waters retreating and returning may not only have applied to Paluxy, but to the making of the other fossil foot and shoe prints as well. Flood geologists note many examples in various sedimentary rocks of evidence for tidal water action. Some coal seams, for example, contain numerous layers of limestone alternating with carbonized vegetable matter (coal). These, the geologists say, were created by the "rocking" motion of a large body of water, that carried the remains of marine organisms at one end and land life on the other, and dropped portions of its two different loads with each surge, as it moved back and forth. Sometimes in these layers, coal appears directly on coal, or limestone on limestone, without the alternate material between - indicating a complete retreat of the waters temporarily, and then their dramatic return and deposition. Noteworthy is the fact that in the book of Genesis, Noah described the Flood waters as "prevailing upon the earth." In the Hebrew, the word used for "prevail" has the connotation, "a movement to and fro."
Images and Messages from the Incredible Past
Metal-working is by no means the only sign of advanced culture: Other characteristics include such developments as art, architecture and writing. Since we have already observed several examples of metal production encased in geologic rock [see Out-of-Place Metal Objects], it should be no surprise to find examples of other cultural elements also entombed deep within the earth. Analysis and conclusions
How can this evidence of the presence of man from the very beginning of the fossil record be explained? Certainly, the prevailing Uniformitarian-evolution-linear model of the past is in no position to do so, because the mere existence of deeply buried human objects completely destroys the whole premise of slow, gradual, progressive development of the earth, of life, of man, and of human culture -the very cornerstone of the model. If man and his products can be found all the way down to the lowest level of geologic life, where is the evidence for his continual evolution, or for his long cultural climb from primitive beginnings? It is clear we must look elsewhere for the answers.
[Source: Strange Relics from the Depths of the Earth - by J.R. Jochmans, Litt.D., 1979
- pub. Forgotten Ages Research Society, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA]
