Rating: 
Summary: If scienctists are truly skeptical...
Review: Mr Cremo recently appeared on a radio interview show. To read this book, one gets the feeling he went to considerable pains to cite his sources and at the same time make the book readable for other than the lab-rat culture.
To hear the interview on radio, you are given this one golden nugget:
It is not any one instance of supression or omission that makes a case for this view of mankind's history, but rather the hundreds of well documented cases of proof that the scientific culture has it dead wrong.
Paraphrasing his words there, but the essence is in that statement.
He also has said something else that really grabbed me:The creationists are wrong, insinuating that man has had one continuing trip through the 15000 or so years of existance from day 1 to the present.
The evolutionists are likewise wrong, and the "missing link" is their major flaw. In fact, the modern (scientific) movement has a 2-fold agenda: Advance the Chaos Theory, in which all the universe is one big happy accident, and Reduce humankind to mere animals with higher thinking abilities.
Overall, he shows us a very compelling reason why science and faith can BOTH have some of it right. In this, I have found a sense of hope. I only hope that this is the beginning of a renaissance in modern science and theology. Perhaps the knowlege I have long suspected as supressed by governments and religious institutions (read:Vatican) will yet someday come "out".
I do know this- Dogma exists in every institution. When that dogma is challenged, especially with proof, the reaction can be violent at many levels. Witness some of the other reviews...
Meethink thou doth protest too much.
Rating:
Summary: Incredibile Views
Review: I too have just ordered this book. Why? To locate the sites where the information has been obtained to cause Mr. Cremo to write this compendium. I am surprised by the many negative comments received against this book, and those books written by other explorative Scientists, and Researchers. If I were to choose just one book of information to congeal my ideas, then I could consider myself a fool; however I have a large and growing library of authors on similar subjects. Much is unknown about our past history, to the average citizen that is, and our Colleges have not properly educated their students for the past approximately fifty years. More about that another time. I find that the two most virulent detractors on the issue of past technologically advanced societies on this Earth, and perhaps Mars, are the Rosicrucians (upper Masonic levels) and the Fundamentalist Christians. The Rosicrucians have a large and growing economic stake in this information, for it uncovers their actions, and shines light on their idea of superiority to us rank and file inferiors. They see themselves as pre-ordained to rule the Earth, and be the supreme rulers when their leader Lucifer returns to this planet. The Christians on the other hand, tend to represent the uneducated, and non-reading group, who have a similar stake in the misapplied Creation theory. Most of them can not explain the first few verses of Genesis, let alone a real interpretation of the Scriptures. They are also led, for the most part, by people are qualified mostly for jobs as Fund Raisers, Car Salesmen, or paid consultants for various products. The timeline given for creation, does not fit any reasonable known data for archaeology, or known historical records. The Bible used by both groups, although more so by the Christians, plainly states in Genesis, that the Gods created the Heavens and the Earth, not a God as they assume. King James was a nefarious person, and should not be held as a good guy who wanted to share spiritual knowledge. He had his reason for the translation, and you can find that reason in many articles. I for one believe the statements and facts given in the Bible, but prefer the Hebrew translations for accuracy and direction. It, along with Sumerian texts, explains why we find so many Giant Mummies filling the caves in many places within the United States, and other Nations. I for one choose to seek "Right" knowledge, and thank all the authors, for whatever reason drives them, for providing me this choice information. It truly gives credence to why I choose to be "A Follower of Christ."
Rating: 
Summary: My bias doesn't match the authors but...
Review: I can't as easily dismiss the facts presented in this book as some negative reviewers. The book, though scholarly size, leaves holes unexplained. I don't come to the same conclusions as the authors regarding the age of humankind. Though my religious views differ greatly it is hard to dismiss the fact that something is fishy with the Evolution religion as we know it. This book is thought provoking at least and certainly provides a detailed if not factual arguement. Great fodder for coffee break debates at the office ;-)
Rating: 
Summary: Creationist Claptrap
Review: The blurb says it all. It is written by someone who doesn't understand science nor how it works. It also ignores evolutionary research for the last 150 years.
Rating:
Summary: Creationism: The Hindu View (the true title of this book)
Review: When a big square package, weighing over 3.5kg, arrived in my pigeon-hole, a number of thoughts flitted across my mind. Which student hates me enough to send me a letter bomb? Will the postman sue me because of his hernia? After the package, when unwrapped, proved to contain a 914 page book, I felt like the Prince Regent on being presented by Edward Gibbon with a copy of his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire": "Another great damn thick square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?". And then that final, heart rending, cry, "Why me?". There is a letter from the senior author, Michael Cremo, accompanying the book. "Because your work, or that of your colleagues, is discussed in my new book Forbidden Archeology, I am sending you an advance copy." Can this be conspiracy theory as applied to archaeology by someone who feels that The Truth has been suppressed by The Establishment? It can. The letterhead is "Bhaktivedanta Institute, San Diego". Can this be a representative of that other fundamentalism, the Hindu variety? It can. Remind ourselves what fundamentalist Hindus believe. Like fundamentalist Christians and Jews, they dismiss evolution. Unlike the latter, who believe the world has existed only six to ten thousand years, fundamentalist Hindus believe it has been going for billions and billions of years - far more than geology allows, in fact. And human beings, and indeed all living creatures, have been here all along. But in the event, it is going to make little difference; an apologia will consist of a recital of long-forgotten (long-suppressed, in their view) "evidence" of humans coeval with trilobites and dinosaurs, and arguments that supposed ape/human intermediates really aren't that at all. But this time we get nearly a thousand pages! Gish, Bowden and Lubenow, the Christian creationists, can't raise even half of this between them. The difference is that Cremo and Thompson have read much, much more of the original literature than the other creationists, and their survey is correspondingly more complete. Yet I can't really say that their understanding is much greater, for all that; their tone of argument is as perverse, they are just as biased. The fossil and archaeological evidence for human and cultural evolution is not all of consistently high quality. In the nineteenth centure, human remains and artefacts were usually found by accident and by amateurs; they would be dug up, removed from context, and presented with a flourish to the nearest "expert". Controlled excavation was not a widely practised are; photography of a find in situ was an unusual occurrence. The finds' stratigraphy was often vague in the extreme; those re-examining their significance in later times had to rely on the fading memories of untrained workmen who had been enlisted by the finder. This state of affairs improved as archaeology and palaeontology developed, and contextual information came to be recognised as crucial. Today, accidental discoveries are rarities; usually specimens turn up because someone has an idea where to look, given the prevailing geology and landscape, and an excavation is mounted with all kinds of specialists - geomorphologists, geochemists, taphonomists, above all photographers - riding along to ensure that everything about the site and its contents is recorded. Cremo and Thompson seem not to understand this; they seem to want to accord equal value to all finds. One of many, many "out-of-context" human fossils which they discuss is the Foxhall jaw, a specimen of modern Homo sapiens discovered in 1855 and commonly ascribed at the time to the Late Pliocene, when (as we now believe) the human lineage was represented by just a bunch of near-apes called the australopithecines. The jaw was found by workmen, one of whom sold it to Dr. Collyer, a passing American physician, for the price of a glass of beer, and Collyer showed it to the luminaries of the day - Owen, Prestwich, Huxley, Busk - who expressed a variety of opinions, that it could or could not have come from the site and level claimed for it, and so that it could or could not be an example of "Pliocene Man". The jaw not long afterwards disappeared. The authors quote the palaeoanthropologists Boule and Vallois in 1947: "It requires a total lack of critical sense to pay any heed to such a piece of evidence as this", and I can only agree; but, oddly, Cremo and Thompson disagree. Their opinion has nothing to do with the obvious fact that the whole case for the specimen's Pliocene origin was based on hearsay and supposition, and because the fossil has since disappeared, but because the stratigraphic provenances of other, nowadays widely accepted, fossils - "Java Man" and the Heidelberg jaw - were likewise based on flimsy evidence, and the original "Peking Man" fossils have likewise disappeared! One has only to turn to their accounts of these fossils, and to read between the lines, to see why these other fossils are today taken seriously whereas Foxhall is not: other "Java Man" and Heidelberg-like fossils are known, whose stratigraphy has been exhaustively studied; excellent photographs, radiographs and casts survive of the lost "Peking Man" fossils, and others exactly like them have turned up since. But the same sort of non-evidence (Galley Hill, Clichy, Castenedolo, Calaveras, all Homo sapiens fossils briefly famous in their day because their finders thought they were Miocene, Pliocene or whatever) is taken seriously by the authors, who then completely miss the point when they imply, or claim boldly, that the evidence for the australopithecines, habilines and so on is also somehow flimsy. There is an Appendix on the dating of fossils, mainly radiocarbon; Potassium-Argon dating is given the hatchet job in the main text (section 11.6.5). Devastating "exposure" of the alleged deficiencies of radiometric dating is obligatory in all creationist texts on fossils, and this one is no different. There they all are: the 160 million to 2.96 billion year dates for Hawaiian lava flows known to be less than 200 years old; the supposed "cover-up" of discrepant dates; the arguments over the correct date of the KBS Tuff at Koobi Fora, whether it was laid down 2.6, 2.4 or 1.88 million years ago. It is as if Cremo and Thompson think that an invention, as soon as it is made, either works or it doesn't; of course, the understanding of new methodologies - potassium-argon dating like any other - improves as its practitioners make mistakes (and, alas, are often embarrassed enough about their mistakes to keep quiet about them) and learn from them. Potassium-argon dating and its now more generally used successor, the Argon/Argon method, are by now rather well understood. It is understood, for example, that mineral erupted from a volcano will release its store of radiogenic argon, resetting the "clock", only if it reaches a high enough temperature, and that the lava from deep-sea eruptions is chilled and does not usually reach this temperature; so that if you measure argon in an undersea lava flow (say, for the sake of argument, in Hawaii) you will be measuring what has been stored up over millions and millions of years, not just what has accumulated since the eruption. It is understood, too, that tuffs are volcanic products brought down by water and deposited alongside other, much older sediments; so that if you simply pick up some grains from a tuff (say, for the sake of argument, at Koobi Fora) you are very likely to get some very ancient ones along with your recent volcanic ejecta, and unless you clean the smaple very carefully you will get anomalously high readings because of this mixture. This all seems very obvious nowadays, but the earlier practitioners of the method had to learn it the hard way. And in the main it is not suppressed: their errors are in the literature for all to see, and for creationists to point out with a delighted "see, it doesn't work!". Now, palaeoanthropology is a speciality of mine, but archaeology is not, so I showed the book to a couple of colleagues whose speciality it is. Dr. Andrée Rosenfeld was not highly delighted, but offered some comments on the book's long, long, discussion of Eoliths. These are (no, were) supposed stone tools from extremely ancient deposits, believed in by many archaeologists in earlier generations but now universally discounted. "The problem", Andrée explained, "lies in their selective emphasis and choice of language; have they not heard of semiotics? For example, on p 106 they quote an early objector to eoliths, Worthington Smith in 1892, and totally misunderstand its significance; eoliths can be extracted from any gravel from any period, whether with or without other artefacts, and with any range of patina - eoliths in fact only ocur, as far as I am aware, in gravel or similar deposits." That is to say, in any deposit with lots of small stones in it, you are going to find some stones that by chance
Rating:
Summary: Poor understanding of science
Review: A book that proclaims man has existed in anatomically modern form for hundreds of millions of years? could this be a creationist tract? Unfortunately it is. The authors misunderstand the concept of a theory, bring religion into science (science ends up being based on a particular religious viewpoint, thus rendering it invalid), misrepresent scientists' theories and statements, and ignores work which contradict their religious ideas. The pieces on Laetoli, Kanapoi and the Hans Reck skeleton are particular disgraceful examples - all of which will be dealt with in a forthcoming book by myself. The "evidence" presented by Cremo hasn't a leg to stand on.
Rating:
Summary: The scientific method is not dead yet.
Review: "Forbidden Archeology" is a superb, well-documented compendium of both the evidence favoring the conventional picture of human evolution, and the anomalous evidence that casts this picture into doubt. Its larger significance, however, lies in its detailed documentation and analysis of one particular exampe of a disturbing phenomenon that has increasingly crippled mainstream science: the establishment of a new scientific orthodoxy, i.e. a quasi-religious belief by leading scientists in the absolute and unquestionable validity of the basic theories of their field. These theories are then elevated to "facts" of which any dissenter is accused of being ignorant, which makes for a convenient, easy dismissal of any anomalous evidence. Since any such evidence is thus automatically ineligible for publication in the proper journals, this lack of documentation is then in turn taken by researchers in the field as proof that the evidence must be of low scientific value. With "Forbidden Archeology", Cremo and Thompson have attempted to break through this self-perpetuating cycle of ignorance and denial. The many angry dismissals by "experts" one can read on this page shows that they have done their job well. A truly educational book that will open the eyes of many who are searching for the true origins of humankind. Those who don't have the time or patience to peruse this 900-page tome should consider reading the abridged version instead. Either way, they will come to appreciate one of the fundamental tenets of true science: theory never overrides evidence.
Rating:
Summary: The scientific method is not dead yet.
Review: "Forbidden Archeology" is a superb, well-documented compendium of both the evidence favoring the conventional picture of human evoluton, and the anomalous evidence that casts this picture into doubt. Its larger significance, however, lies in its detailed documentation and analysis of one particular exampe of a disturbing phenomenon that has increasingly crippled mainstream science: the establishment of a new scientific orthodoxy, i.e. a quasi-religious belief by leading scientists in the absolute and unquestionable validity of the basic theories of their field. These theories are then elevated to "facts" of which any dissenter is accused of being ignorant, which makes for a convenient, easy dismissal of any anomalous evidence. Since any such evidence is thus automatically ineligible for publication in the proper journals, this lack of documentation is then in turn taken by researchers in the field as proof that the evidence must be of low scientific value. With "Forbidden Archeology", Cremo and Thompson have attempted to break through this self-perpetuating cycle of ignorance and denial. The many angry dismissals by "experts" one can read on this page shows that they have done their job well. A truly educational book that will open the eyes of many who are searching for the true origins of humankind. Those who don't have the time or patience to peruse this 900-page tome should consider reading the abridged version instead. Either way, they will come to appreciate one of the fundamental tenets of true science: theory never overrides evidence.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinated, then disappointed
Review: I have recently started to research the topic of human origins... something I've always wanted to do. Never allowing myself to become too close-minded or to just accept *anything* people tell me without thought, I gathered all the info I could find. This book was perhaps the third significant item I read. At first I was absolutely fascinated by the finds discussed in the book. They seemed soundly researched and presented ... though at odds with the other information I was researching. So I decided to research some of the specific finds discussed in the book, starting with the Hueyatlaco site. One after another, the finds presented in the book lost their "hidden" aspect. Don't just swallow what this book says, do your own research. If you do, and are open-minded, you will be let down by this book like I was...What is really "hidden" is the authors' real agenda ... they do anything, even distort historical facts, to promote their faith. (And to think that, at first, I thought they were open-minded! Man, was I fooled.) Very, very disappointing.
Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking
Review: I am not a scientist, but I have been fascinated by science since I was young. This book goes to great pains to try to document its claims, and in many cases does an admirable job. The author is obviously sincere in his belief that humankind is much older and, in times past, has been more intelligent than it is now. Personally, I would love to believe this is so, therefore I am prejudiced towards wanting to believe what is here. "Forbidden Archeology" is, more than anything else, important for its thought provoking content and assertions. It is so difficult to get the average American to question the status quo any more that any work, no matter how outre, that stirs the fancy is welcome. I look forward to more books like this. In spite of everything, I think intelligent people will not depend solely on one reference to form their beliefs and opinions on the truth of man's history. I trust to the instinctual skepticism of each person toward things out of the ordinary to protect them from the more bizarre assertions while they assimilate the more obviously useful.
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