We Are the Children of the Stars (10 page)

Such dusty and forgotten specimens may already be resting on museum shelves.

The trained eye may have passed them off long ago as being “unexplained mysteries” or “freak” anomalies not to be taken seriously. Some researcher may already have catalogued them as they cropped up over the years throughout the world. This would be fortunate, for it might save a great deal of time if we find bona fide evidence of outer-space intelligence in the future.

Some of the most important characteristics of Man – the ones that truly separate him from the apes – are virtually impossible for anthropologists to discover in skeletal remains. For instance, the vocal cords of skeletons are almost beyond detection or even conjecture. Their presence or absence must be deduced through patient detective work of a type that constitutes a none-too-certain method of discovery.

For all its good work, anthropology has failed to penetrate one major mystery in the fossil records.
Why is there a 12-millionyear gap between the earliest man-ape fossils and the fossils of the more recent Hominids?

Hominids
is the term for primate species that authorities admit to the pre-human family, as distinguished from the Pongids, or pure ape genera.

To continue basic definitions of terms that will appear frequently through the book, we will include here the system of classification of all fauna (animal life) and flora (plant life).

A
species
is an individual group of the same kind of creatures who can interbreed only among themselves (with some few exceptions) and have common characteristics.

Species that are similar to, yet distinctive from one another, and incapable of crossbreeding, are grouped together in a genus.

The
genera
(plural of genus) are again lumped together into
families
, a broad conglomerate of animals that follow a basic pattern of some sort.

The families, in turn, are filed in a still larger grouping called an
order
, and may by now include thousands of species and genera.

Orders of animals join a more generalized and wide-ranging fraternity called a
class.

Finally, the classes with a few common denominators but widely divergent individual species, are indexed under a
phylum.

All the
phyla
(plural of phylum) together make up the animal kingdom as distinguished from the vegetable kingdom.

Another set of definitions is less important but perhaps edifying, to help the reader understand the relative importance of various ideas and statements made by scientists.

A
postulate
is an assumption of what might be possible, in any field of science, but without any positive proof. Sometimes, if it is axiomatic, it is taken for granted. The
hypothesis
is one rank below a theory, usually offered as a tentative new idea requiring investigation before it can be accepted or rejected. It is meant as a possible stepping-stone to a theory, if all goes well.

Finally, the
theory
itself may be born out of one or more hypotheses that graduated into the big time, so to speak. Though it cannot be accepted as established fact, a theory carries considerable weight by way of a good deal of firm evidence and some empirical (experimental) proof. Yet a theory is always subject to modification and change, and sometimes final rejection if too many adverse facts against it come up.

Note that Evolution is a
theory
only, not an established body of factual data, with few of its “laws” of natural selection being accepted universally among the authorities in the field. It is, and has been, in a definite state of flux since its inception over a century ago.

Armed with these clarifying definitions, we can end our digression and return to our topic – the fossils of Man's extinct predecessors.

A book combining the views of the latest and greatest authorities on anthropology states quite frankly: “Considering the number and variety of primate fossils recovered in recent years from the late Miocene and early Pliocene, we should [expect to] be able to look confidently ahead to finding even more illuminating ones to fill the gap between this time and the beginning of the Pleistocene.”
³

Our italics follow: “
Astonishingly and maddeningly, we find nothing
. Almost the entire Pliocene is a
total blank
as far as human ancestors are concerned. That exasperating and cryptic epoch lasted for some 12 million years.”

Some authorities will challenge this conclusion, but, for what they are worth, we will give the basic factors involved.

The earliest Hominid fossil known is that of
Ramapithecus
of 14 million years ago, who teetered between ape and human attributes, being neither one nor the other.

The next oldest accepted fossil specimen of a Hominid species is that of Zinjanthropus (nut-cracker man), found by the late Dr. Louis Leakey at the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.
⁴
Some anthropologists insist this specimen does not belong to the
Australopithecus
line but represents a new family, which they have named Paranthropus.

Under either name, this subhuman fossil has been dated as of 1.75 million years ago. There is a claim that the African Hominids go back 2 million and possibly as much as 2.6 million years, based on a fragment of an armbone found in northern Kenya
⁵
and also, recently, of a skull in Tanzania.

But even if this latter figure is admitted into the Hominidfossil parade, it lops off less than a million years from that “maddening” blank of 12 million years in the human story. Even 11 million years without a valid humanoid fossil unearthed is still an enormous gap in the anthropological record, one that gravely weakens the Theory of Evolution as applied to mankind. True, that gap may be further closed by other finds of Hominid fossils, but it is unlikely that they will form an unbroken line back to
Ramapithecus
.

That gap, large or smaller, is what the anthropologists have long been trying to fill with the notorious “missing link.”

Or perhaps the missing link goes still further back, as certain anthropologists feel, anywhere from 15 to 50 million years ago (which indicates how varied the views of the experts are in this uncertain field). What they are all looking for is some common ancestor of both apes and men, from which the two branches of anthropoids and Hominids split off.

For this purpose,
proconsul
was invented as a purely theoretical creature without any fossil pieces of him being known. When Leakey found some bones of an odd creature 20 million years old, older than
Ramapithecus
, he named it
Kenyapithecus
and believed it might be the very first ancient Hominid.
⁶
Or the “mythical” proconsul.

Few other authorities go along with him. This is the fate of many special theories or concepts in anthropology. As one writer in the field expresses it – “Paleoanthropology has been the most argumentative of sciences since its beginning. Experts who agree are rare.”
⁷

Professor Sherwood L. Washburn, University of California at Berkeley, says it in another way that might bring scowls from his colleagues – “The study of human Evolution is a game rather than a science in the usual sense.”
⁸

As for any authority thinking he has the correct solution to the mystery of the Hominids and the missing link, F. Clark Howell, who has dug up many puzzling fossils says – “Anyone who feels that we already have the problem [of Man's origin] solved is surely deluding himself.”
⁹

With this clear mandate to us to take none of the claims of anthropologists as established fact, we can go on with the confused picture of how and when Man's progenitors appeared in earthly history.

The whole controversy centers around the Australo-pithecines, the general name (
Australo
meaning southern hemisphere) for several different kinds of Hominid fossils, some found in Asia but most in southeast Africa. Various authorities recognize (or deny)
various Hominids, such as
Africanus Boiset, A. Robustus, A. Africanus, Paranthropus
, and
A. Habilis
.

The last one has led to the most controversy, and one school of fossil hunters claims it is the first ancient
Homo
species, as distinguished from the Hominid ape-men.

Homo habilis
would thus be the proto-man, first of his kind, and would presumably have evolved into the well-known
Homo erectus
. This would put the origin of Man's direct ancestors back to about 2 million years ago.

Still, this does not solve the mystery of the missing link, for there is no fossil lineage for
Habilis
(Hominid or Homo) that stretches back through that big 12-million-year gap between
Ramapithecus
and the Australopithecines.

Thus, the reward for finding that “missing person” of dim antiquity is still uncollected and unclaimed by any anthropologist.

Perhaps the answer is easier than they suspect.

We suggest, as mentioned before, that starmen are the real “missing link.” That they came along 12 million years ago, when
Ramapithecus
roamed his apelike knuckle-walking way, and began experimenting with methods to improve him.

In short,
artificial Evolution
, by incredible biogenetic “magic.”

The result, some 12 million years later, was a manlike creature of the
Australopithecus
genus. Or
A. Habilis.
And the “missing” fossils in between?

There might not have been any.

The starmen, for instance, rapidly developed small numbers of mutants in their biolabs, too few to leave fossil remains, or even took them away to be
Homogenized
on another world and replanted on Earth later. At any rate, their grand experiment took 12 million years to jump from primitive
Ramapithecus
to much more advanced
Australopithecus
.

Whether the above admitted speculations are anywhere near the truth is not relevant, only the undeniable fact that there is no record via fossils to show Man's turnabout from apehood to manhood via Evolution.

And there is no evolutionary record because the laws of natural selection and survival of the fittest did not operate in the classic manner.

The laws of
biogenetic selection
by the starmen could much more logically have operated in perhaps some fantastic way inconceivable to our less-advanced science.

We will find in another chapter that this concept of biogenetic hybridization of Hominids is bolstered considerably when it comes to explaining Man's great brain.

One more example of how anthropologists deal with palpably misfit aspects of Evolution, by hazarding explanations that can only be called “wild,” is as follows. It is known that, contrary to the “smooth” transitions demanded by evolutionary theory, there were, at certain periods in the past, very sudden and wholesale changes of species.

Immanuel Velikovsky, who is considered a maverick by other scientists, has given his own theory for those gross changes in species – his “cataclysmic” theory of Earth periodically undergoing major geological catastrophes that wipe out most existing species, requiring a whole new line of species to appear through “emergency” mutations. Though we do not necessarily agree with Velikovsky's explanation for how the new species arise (we suspect Starman intervention), we do agree that the abrupt and worldwide changes in species, at certain times, is not explained by classic Evolution.

“The boundaries between eras, periods and epochs,” reads one study of this phenomenon, “on the geological time scale generally denote sudden and significant changes in the character of fossil remains. For example, the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods of the Mesozoic era [about 180 million years ago] was supposedly marked by spontaneous appearance of [many] new species.”
¹⁰

Even they admit that – “Researchers have sometimes come up with drastic explanations for these changes, such as an increase in mutation rates due to cosmic rays.”

Then, offering a more “reasonable” explanation, a German authority denies that there are “sudden” changes of species, only sudden diversification of established species.
¹¹
He claims that is “normal” Evolution and offers a sweeping change in worldwide ecology as the spark causing “diversification.” Somehow, that explanation seems less acceptable than even cosmic rays! It's simply juggling words semantically.

Yet, the cosmic-ray angle itself simply does not hold up, for it would mean that periodically the cosmic-ray bombardment of Earth shows sudden and enormous increases. But there is not one shred of proof that such cosmic-ray “bursts” occur at all, at least of sufficient strength and duration to affect the genes and cause mutations of living things all over the Earth.

The experts are definitely straining, and sacrificing credibility, when they offer suggestions like that out of left field.

The true answer? It comes out in a more credible way, we believe, from our Hybrid theory. The starmen, in order to increase the mutation rate of their widely flung Pongid and Hominid guinea pigs, showered down their own “cosmic radiation” by deforming the Van Allen belts from a spaceship, for instance.
¹²
The radiation inevitably struck other forms of life under this “shotgun” method and resulted in wholesale changes in species.

Since cosmic rays do
not
come in significant “bunches” at random times by natural means, certainly our guess as to
deliberate
radiation showers does not similarly violate any science facts or laws.

Nevertheless, still standing out like a sore thumb is that 12-million-year gap in the fossil record of prehuman species, with the elusive missing link still missing – and perhaps nonexistent.

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