Anthroposaurus
Can a Major Civilization Vanish with Hardly a Trace?
Abstract
Contents Updated: Wednesday, December 15, 1999
“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Oddities in the Rock
Can a major civilization vanish with hardly a trace? What could one expect to find remaining of the world of Anthroposaurus sapiens?
Dinosaurs are not just one species like man but a vast group of creatures which lived for millions of years—the modern equivalent is the whole of the mammals. Like the mammals only one dinosaur was likely to achieve intelligence. Just as remains of the intelligent mammal are scarce, one can expect the remains of the intelligent dinosaur to be scarce. Gribbon and Cherfas assure us:
The chances of finding fossils of an evolutionary variation that lasts only a few tens of thousands of years are slim.
Writer, Brad Steiger, in his book, Worlds Before Our Own, develops the theme of the cataclysmic “seven worlds” legends of the Seneca indians. Much of his research supports the thesis of intelligent dinosaurs. The anthroposaurs might have been one of the seven worlds!
Discussing the question of what would remain after an advanced civilization had been destroyed, he compares our own culture and technology with that of an ancient civilization. If a catastrophe were to happen to us now, he asks, what would remain for archaeologists to unearth 15,000 years from now?
He answers:
We are builders in wood and metal. Our most majestic stone buildings are little more than facades supported by thin tendons of steel. In a thousand years, even without flood, fire or nuclear warfare, our major cities would be little more than rubble… But if we were to enter another ice age and enormous glaciers should creep down from the north, as they have several times in the past million years, everything in their inexorable path would be pulverized.
And those scenarios take us forward only a fraction of the time that has elapsed since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. In that time more than 60,000 feet of deposits would have been laid over our fallen cities. Without the continual folding of the earth the remnants of our civilization would be ten miles under the surface of the earth. But folding and erosion can expose these ancient rocks. They are then weathered and eroded anew. Even the most substantial of our engineering efforts like the Panama Canal might well have been worn away and redeposited as sediments several times in that timescale.
Much of our works would have disappeared entirely, subducted under the fringes of continents by movement of crustal plates to be recrystallized millennia hence as new igneous rocks. It is not surprising therefore that only the most vestigial traces of the anthroposaurs remain today—and they may be deep in undisturbed strata. They might also be severely distorted, oxidized or mineralized, and might not be recognizable for what they originally were. Perhaps Velikovsky is correct when he writes:
Prior civilizations are buried so deeply within the lower strata of the earth that we simply do not have any archaeological evidence of their existence.
Yet traces of the very substance of dinosaurs’ bodies have been found. Carbon dust is found with some fossil dinosaur finds—the remains of the soft tissues, the skin, flesh and blood vessels. One wonders whether among it are any undecomposed molecules of the original protein or even DNA. Will we soon isolate DNA from the remains of dinosaurs to enable us to decide how advanced they were and even regenerate the creatures by gene culture (the theme of Jurassic Park)? We might, but, meanwhile, such evidence as there is must be gleaned by raking through ancient rubble.
Although no one has been particularly looking for traces of civilization in rocks predating modern man, and although few traces of such a civilization can be expected, rock rakers, amateur, professional or incidental have nevertheless reported some distinctly anachronistic findings. There are probably yet more in the archives of museums of the world, waiting for some scholar to study and classify them.
When geologists, paleontologists or archaeologists find objects in the wrong place, boulders miles away from their parent rocks or fossils embedded in solid rock, or in apparently undisturbed strata, which, in obvious terms at least, should not be there, they call them “erratics”. Erratics are found at sites all over the world. Of course, objects like bones and fossils can get into strata in which they do not belong. An obvious example for human remains is by burial. But this is usually self evident—the deposits are obviously disturbed.
In 1878, a veritable graveyard of fossil bones of the large herbivorous dinosaur, iguanodon, were found 1056 feet down a Belgian coal mine at Bernisart, near Mons. At first glance this is curious because the coal deposits were laid down in the Carboniferous period almost 200 million years before the iguanodon appeared on the scene. But there was no cause for wonder. During the Cretaceous period the earth had cracked open into a mighty crevasse, an abyss stretching from the surface down to the coal deposits hundreds of feet below.
Over many years, probably centuries, rain had washed Cretaceous mud and gravel into the huge crack and it had carried with it iguanodon after iguanodon. Paleontologists excavating the site found the crevasse stretched for hundreds of feet, and they eventually recovered 31 iguanodon fossils.
Bob Brain excavating in South Africa at Swartkrans knows only too well how rocks of different ages can get mixed together. He had been excavating a limestone cave in which parts of the roof had fallen to the floor. He worked out that on two occasions holes had appeared in the roof allowing surface waters to wash in rocks and debris for long periods. After the first occasion the sediments had sealed the aperture and a rise in the water table had then led to the leaching out of some of the deposits already there causing a multiplicity of new holes and channels in the, already jumbled, deposits. Holes in the roof had then again allowed fresh sediments to wash in filling the spaces left in the deposits already there. Finally part of the whole structure had been eroded away leaving the complicated mixture of deposits exposed as if a vast pit had been filled with crude concrete, a rock called breccia, made up of the mixed deposits. Complicated as it was, Brain had unraveled the sequence of events.
Thus, though it might be difficult to account for in detail, it is often clear when an anachronistic find has an explanation within the bounds of the current paradigm. There might indeed be conventional explanations for many of the examples quoted further on in this chapter—but they are certainly unusual. Some appear to date from long before mankind appeared on earth!
The study of fossil footprints may not sound as exciting as finding fossil bones but as R S Lull, a dinosaur hunter at the turn of the century, pointed out, footprints are fossils of living beings while petrified bones are of the dead. A humanoid footprint appearing at a time when there were no humans is bound to make you think. Yet reports of fossil human footprints are far from uncommon.
According to the American Encyclopedia, some rocks in Tennessee bear impressions of tracks of various animals and tracks of human beings “as visible and perfect as if they were made in snow or sand”. The American Journal of Science of 1833 noted that a Mr Schoolcraft and a Mr Benton had observed prints of “human” feet in Mississippi limestone. An eminent geologist of the time stated they were “certain evidence that man existed at the epoch of the deposition of that limestone”.
Man? Whatever the views of some fundamentalist bible thumpers, man has unquestionably evolved from a common ancestor with the apes over about the last five million years. Human tracks could not appear in limestone—it is much older. But what if some species of dinosaur had evolved by convergent evolution into a “man like” form? Isn’t it possible that the footprints of such a creature, fossilized in the limestone but eroded over the intervening tens of millions of years could be mistaken for the prints of a human being? The eminent geologist goes on to say that the discoverer of the megatherium, Sir Woodbine Parish, had seen similar footprints in the rocks of South America. A man of his reputation is unlikely to get the age of his rock strata wrong. The impressions seen, although unquestionably human like, must have been actually of some anthropic reptilian type.
The American Anthropologist reported in 1896 that the Ohio State Academy of Science had exhibited a large stone containing the print of a human foot 14 inches long. In 1975 Dr Stanley Rhine of the University of New Mexico announced the discovery of footprints human in appearance in strata estimated to be 40 million years old. Similar discoveries were made in Kenton, Oklahoma and in Wisconsin.
Steiger relates yet another instance, an engineer called Johnson found footprints in an ancient sandstone near Tulsa. Johnson had had to remove earth and roots to uncover the fossils which evidently were human like, and which were impressed in a block of sandstone weighing about 15 tons.
In the 1930s, Mr Roland T Bird, who collected dinosaurs for the American Museum, introduced the world to a Lower Cretaceous site at Glen Rose, 80 miles from Fort Worth in Texas. The locals had discovered fossil footprints long before and Bird was startled to see the 20 inch tracks of a carnivorous dinosaur in the foundation stone of the county court house. Subsequently Bird uncovered a remarkable and now famous Cretaceous drama—the tracks of a brontosaurus being harassed by a large flesh eater. More interestingly still, a 16 inch footprint, described as “man like”, and dinosaur tracks were found in strata of the same period.
In 1938 a Mr Berry and his companions found tracks of what appeared to be sabre tooth tigers, dinosaurs and three tracks of humans in the limestone bed of the Palaxy River. Since then many others have been found and an unknown number manufactured as the enterprising locals realized that fortune had provided them with the basis for a cottage industry supplying tourists with mementos. Fortunately the experts reassure us that they can comfortably distinguish the forgeries from the real thing. The “human” tracks seemed to show all the distinguishing features one would expect of a human foot bearing in mind that, coming from Lower Cretaceous deposits, they presumably were a hundred million years old, but they were 16 inches long. Humans could not have made prints of that antiquity, but we must respect the possibility of them being evidence of a human like dinosaur.
Dr C.Burdick has publicized similar “human” tracks. Dr Burdick, it must be admitted, has his own axe to grind, being a creationist. He believes in the strict truth of the Biblical description of the creation and rejects the Darwinian hypothesis of evolution, modified or otherwise. Naturally, creationists like Dr Burdick would be delighted if the discovery proved to be of human tracks because the conventional evolutionary scheme does not allow for advanced mammals let alone human beings to be alive at the same time as the dinosaurs. Having said that, I presume that Dr Burdick would not deliberately be dishonest and fabricate relics to make his point.
He describes “15 to 20 giant barefoot human tracks, each about 16 inches in length and eight inches in width”. Sceptics maintain that the prints were those of giant sloths. But the spacing of the prints, initially six feet, widened to nine feet as the being apparently broke into a run, only the toes and the ball of the foot then being evident as would be expected of a running biped. Sloths were not noted for bursts of speed.
The largest and clearest tracks yet discovered were found in 1973. The footprints were described as 21 inches long, eight inches wide and five inches across the instep. The creature’s stride was seven feet. The impressions are in the same layer of rock as tracks of the anatosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur. Steiger comments that “if the tracks are accepted as human, then scientists will be forced either to place man back in time to the Cretaceous period or to bring the dinosaurs forward to the Pleistocene period”.
But this worst of all worlds stems only from the acceptance of the tracks as human. A more credible assumption altogether is that the prints are not human but are the fossils of tracks made by dinosaurs that had evolved by convergent evolution into a human like form—an intelligent being, or its precursor, that evolved from the bipedal dinosaurs!
In October 1983 Steven Schafersman of the Texas Council for Science Education in a letter to Geotimes questioned the identification of the “man tracks” found alongside dinosaur tracks in places like Glen Rose. The genuinely fossil footprints he considered to be poor quality dinosaur prints in which mud had flowed back into the depressions altering their shapes or where the dinosaur had slipped making a track of odd shape. Others were not prints at all but random indentations containing several fossil worm casts wrongly interpreted as the ridges between toe prints. Finally there were fakes, footprint impressions deliberately carved in the soft limestone.
It is a pity that creationism is still an issue. Some creationists or their less scrupulous supporters are indeed willing to resort to fakery to disprove evolution by proving that men and dinosaurs lived on the earth together. What sort of a God do they have that requires his mortal devotees to fake fossils to defend him? Does he really advocate dishonesty? To the being that created the world in seven days surely a plethora of genuine fossil man-tracks should be no trouble if he felt they were necessary!
Schafersman, as a science teacher facing up to the creationists’ fakery, is perhaps justified in attempting to write off the curious ““man like”” prints. What of the contention, though, that he prints are indeed dinosaur prints but ones which have become ““man like”” through structural convergence? Is this not a reasonable possibility—at any rate just as reasonable as the mixed bag of “explanations” thought up by Schafersman? Perhaps he is substituting bogusly creative answers for bogus creationist answers.
There are odder oddities.
Inexplicable even by the super dinosaur theory are “man like” tracks allegedly found in Carboniferous sandstone by Dr Burroughs of the Geology department at Berea College in the 1930s. He found ten “man like” tracks and parts of others in strata of the Paleozoic era of 250 million years ago, millions of years before the dinosaurs and, in fact, when the highest species then evolved were the amphibians. Both left and right feet were seen with a step length of 18 inches. The prints found in Mississippi limestone mentioned at the outset seem to be from the same period.
Amphibians emerged near the start of the Carboniferous, about 400 million years ago, and radiated into many ecological niches over the roughly 200 million years of their dominance. They eventually attenuated at the end of the Permian period, about 225 million years ago when the reptiles began to assume their ascendancy. 200 million years may seems long enough for intelligence to evolve in a vertebrate lifeform but, if it did, one would expect to see it arise towards the end of the period, whereas these tracks (if the rock matrix has been correctly dated) are at least 50 million years too soon. More importantly, since the amphibians were cold-blooded, all the arguments formerly used against intelligent cold-blooded dinosaurs genuinely applies to them. Perhaps barefooted “gods” visited us in carboniferous times after all. Or have the creative Creationists been at work?
On 25 January 1927, in Pershing county, Nevada, a Mr Knapp found a fossilized shoe print impressed in rocks laid down at the time of the great reptiles. The double stitches in the seams were distinct, microphotographs showing them very clearly. At “one place it was double stitched and the twist of the thread could be clearly seen.” The authenticity of the find was suggested by minute crystals of mercuric sulfide long ago deposited by leaching action in the impression. Such crystalline deposits can not realistically be imitated. A geologist of the Rockefeller Foundation confirmed that the substratum of the fossil was Triassic limestone.
In 1897, the Los Angeles Herald revealed that laborers had discovered a fossil shoe print in solid rock. The imprint was that of a shoe with a high narrow heel and a broad flat sole. It was so clear, in the fine grained shale in which it was found, that it looked as though “the owner had unwittingly put his right foot into soft mud but a day or two ago”. Sandal or moccasin prints have also been seen in the gypsum of the White Sands in New Mexico. Ellis Wright in 1932 found tracks of human form but 22 inches long. Some later tracks were accompanied by marks suggestive of the use of some sort of support like a walking stick by one of the antediluvian beings. The White Sands were laid down as an ancient inland sea gradually dried up around the time of the demise of the dinosaurs.
Oil workers have recovered carved bones and decorated “coins” from deep rocks brought up during well drilling. A gold necklace was found in a piece of coal. What appeared to be an iron tool was found in a Scottish coal seam.
Two workmen signed affidavits to their amazing discovery in 1912 of an iron pot inside a large piece of coal that they were breaking up to be used in the furnace of a power plant. The pot left a clear fossil impression in the remaining pieces of coal.
Coalminers noticed a curious slab in an Iowa coal mine in 1897. Found 130 feet below ground just below the sandstone which capped the seam, it was approximately two feet long by one foot wide and was four inches deep. Its surface was inscribed with diamond shapes having the face of what seemed to be an old man in the middle of each.
Steiger implies that the stone slab must have been 300 million years old. This puts it into the “super-erratic” category in that it preceded the death of the dinosaurs by over 200 million years and can hardly fit our thesis. But could it have been deliberately buried by a later race just as we would bury some sort of time capsule? Perhaps it carries a message meant to be decipherable by future beings.
The features of the faces were said to be all similar, inclined to the right except for two of them, and, interestingly, all had a strange dent in the middle of their forehead. Was this the third eye (our pineal gland) which is most pronounced in some types of modern lizard—and possibly some dinosaurs too?
Steiger relates the story of a man whose grandfather in 1928 came across a concrete wall buried in a coal mine two miles below ground. While shot blasting a seam, the miner found, among the dislodged coal, blocks of concrete about a foot across. Although the broken edges showed that they were made of what passed as an ordinary sand and cement mixture, the faces of the blocks were highly polished. The remainder of the wall disappeared into the coal seam.
Another miner working a coal face about 100 yards away struck what seemed to be the same wall. Mysteriously the coal owners pulled the men out of the coal faces and ordered them to keep quiet about their discoveries. What is more, before he joined that gang, a few years earlier, they had found a similar wall in a nearby pit. They had also found a cylinder of silver with staves imprinted on it, and a large bone described as being “like an elephant’s”. Wouldn’t a layman easily mistake a fossilized dinosaur bone for an elephant’s?
Another coal miner in West Virginia claimed miners had found a well constructed concrete building, and, astonishingly, a “perfectly formed human leg that had been changed into coal”. Though the leg presumably was not human, it evidently was sufficiently human like (“perfectly formed”) to convince observers that it was human, with the implication that some human like creature existed millions of years ago.
The June 1851 issue of the Scientific American described a metallic object blasted out of solid rock by workmen excavating in Dorchester, Massachusetts. The object consisted of “a bell-shaped vessel, 4.5 inches high, 6.5 inches at the base, 2.5 inches at the top, and an eighth of an inch in thickness”. Although the article reported it to be made of a silver alloy which looked the color of zinc, a recent owner, in a letter to Steiger, says it is made of brass with iron and lead. It was inlaid in pure silver with six flowers and the base was also inlaid with what looks like a vine. The magazine described the chasing, carving and inlaying as “exquisitely done”. Yet the vessel had been blown out of solid pudding stone, “fifteen feet below the surface… There is no doubt but that this curiosity was blown out of the rock” the article concludes. The origins of the vessel remain a mystery but man-made objects do not get embedded in rock so solid that dynamite is needed to shatter it.
Animal remains are rarely found in coal deposits because the conditions in the steamy jungles that gave rise to them promoted rapid decomposition. However Otto Stutzer describes in his Geology of Coal an apparently human skull in the coal collection of the Mining Academy in Freiberg. He does not mention the age of the coal deposits but says the skull is composed of brown coal and manganiferous and phosphatic limonite. Although there are deposits of brown coal in Russia that are from the Carboniferous period, brown coal is usually young coal from the Mesozoic era or the Tertiary period, the former of which covered the age of the reptiles!
The New York Times, in November 1926, reported that a Dr Siegfriedt who collected fossils for the University of Iowa, had found a “human” molar in coal deposits laid down in the Eocene epoch. Although the enamel had carbonized and the roots had mineralized into an iron compound, local dentists felt sure it was a human second lower molar. Dr Siegfriedt described the stratum as yielding many fossils for dinosaur research as well as sharks’ teeth and fish scales.
In 1971 bulldozers moving earth for mine exploration revealed traces of human remains in soft sandstone said to be 100 million years old. The remains were underneath about 15 feet of material including “five or six feet of solid rock” and yet there appeared to be no caves or crevices in the overlying strata. Bits of bone and teeth were first found but then the excavators noted a more significant bone embedded in the rock. Local experts from the University of Utah were brought in and under their direction parts of two skeletons and a mixture of teeth and bone shards were uncovered. They described the skeletons as Homo sapiens. One of the bodies seemed to conform with the burial pattern of some Indian tribes.
Oddly, the academic experts seemed to lose interest, moved on to other establishments and apparently never wrote up the find formally. But the bones were, on the face of it, the same age as the rock matrix. If the remains really had fossilized and were of an age comparable with the surrounding rocks, as some reports claimed, then this find would have been highly valuable in placing “man like” beings in distant geological times. One wonders whether a close examination was made of the remains to determine whether the description of them as Homo sapiens would have held up. Or were the fossils assumed to be Homo sapiens because they looked human. Had the local experts only made a cursory examination, lost interest and moved on before rigorous anatomical studies had been carried out?
Let us step back a few years to a particularly interesting case. In 1898 two brothers said to be versed in “desert antiquities” found the fossilized remains of a “female”, who was seven and a half feet tall, in the same stratum as fossils of “prehistoric camels and an elephant-like creature with four tusks”. Fossils of palm trees, ferns and fish were also found. The curious thing about these “human” remains was that the “female” had a tail, having several extra vertebrae at the end of her spine. Our turn-of-the-century archaeologists surmised that Death Valley, where the fossils had been found, had once been on the continental shelf of the Pacific Ocean, and the fossilized lady’s bones had been laid down at that time. Death Valley, like White Sands, lies in the Rocky mountains which were thrust up in a series of gigantic pulses through the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic eras, the very time when the earth was roamed by dinosaurs—until their extinction marked the boundary between the two geological ages.
Could the large “female” with the tail be the best described specimen yet found of the “man like” super-dinosaurs? What though of the “camels” and four tusked “elephant” found with her? Isn’t it quite likely that bones of small dinosaurs could be mistaken for those of camels and that bones of larger dinosaurs that had horns or tusks could be mistaken for the more familiar elephants? Even Mantell, when he reconstructed iguanodon from its remains, thought the thumb spike was a horn like a rhinoceros’s. It is unlikely that any single specimen was complete, the remains were 65 million years old and, although, students of “desert antiquities”, the finders were not professional paleontologists. The evidence may be better explained by our thesis of the intelligent dinosaur.
A letter to Nature in 1873 reported the discovery in Miocene strata of a fragment of bone probably belonging to a dinotherium and engraved with a picture of a horned quadruped and traces of several other figures. This discovery implies the existence of an intelligent creature capable of art work some 25 million years ago. Clearly, there must have been some misdating here. Though a dinotherium bone it could have been, an artist in the Miocene, long before men were around, it could not.
The most likely explanation, that the artwork was of a rhinoceros and was by early man, would require the find to have been in recent strata. The alternative would be that the artwork was of a horned dinosaur and the relic was from the late Cretaceous rather than the Miocene. The bone cannot then have been that of a dinotherium. If the latter explanation prevailed, who could have been the artist in the age of dinosaurs other than our anthroposaur?
A Peruvian doctor, Steiger writes, has the unusual hobby of collecting stones—not fossils, but rocks bearing engraved pictures. The rocks, which were apparently discovered after a cave in, are claimed by the doctor to be around 60 million years old. But, since he would not reveal their source, it is a moot point whether the engraved markings are the same age.
If they are then they are remarkable—they offer a detailed record of a strange race of beings of an alien culture doing things which, in some cases, we have only recently undertaken in our supposedly advanced technological society. The engravings depict “man like” beings along with creatures looking like dinosaurs including pterodactyls. The latter are apparently being ridden through the air by the “man like” beings! The humanoid creatures seemed to have pointed tongues and noses beginning in their foreheads. They also seem not to have an opposed thumb but it is not clear whether this is a stylistic convention.
The interpretation of one scientist is that some of the pictures show, in step by step illustrations, ancient operations including transplants of the heart and other organs, a Caesarean section and brain surgery. There were “operating tables… surgical knives, local and general anaesthetics, sutures and more… The figures were crudely drawn but the organs were masterpieces”.
Unfortunately some investigators claim the engravings are forgeries. But examination of the stones did not show any evidence of power drilling even under 60 times magnification. Alternatively the scenes depicted may have been carved by native peoples in more recent times and show forms of human sacrifice including disemboweling rather than sophisticated operations.
If they do prove to be genuine, or even if there is a core of genuine specimens which the poverty stricken local natives have found profitable to imitate, then they might offer evidence of an advancing, “man like” but reptilian civilization at the same time as the last of the dinosaurs.
