Africa: The cradle of humankind? Part I & II
L M Leteane | Friday March 21, 2014 13:09
Being no doubt the least developed continent, two main things give us solace in Africa: firstly, the fact that we are very resource rich and, secondly, the widely-held concept that we are the “Cradle of Humankind”. We all evolved from apes, evolutionists hazard, but modern man is confidently deemed to have emerged from Africa – where the ‘oldest humanoids’ once resided. Indeed, given this, we oftentimes feel that humanity ought to be more grateful to us in Africa, especially when bargaining with our more developed cousins to shell out more aid for us. But should we eagerly raise (or is it ‘race’?) our hand in agreement as to our place in this perceived order of things? If we are so old and everyone else comes from us, why are we so behind? When and why did others overtake us?
The concept of ‘evolution’ does not, firstly, satisfy many people: it leaves too many unanswered questions, some of which we will squarely address in this article. Secondly, its underlying premise contributes greatly to a negative perception of Africans. Indeed, even as we appear to be showered with certain ‘accolades’, people may be subtly, almost subliminally, laughing at us: the race that remained stuck just a little above the primitive level of our primate cousins; the race others left behind as they forged ahead with scientific and technological development. And as we will quickly find out, the concept of evolution – as it is currently understood – ties in directly with the factuality, or not, of whether Africa is indeed the Cradle of Humankind.
In order to properly lay the premise for a reasoned and coordinated debate, we must first consider how old modern man actually is. To do this, we have to peer into the very heart of Time itself, separating – as best as we can – fact from fiction. Actually, as regards time and evolution, there are two main lines of thought today. The first is that God created everything, including mankind, but He has neither beginning nor end. The other is that everything began at some point in the distant past with the formation of basic matter which slowly evolved into present life forms that continue to be affected by the process of adaptation to the environment through the process of ‘natural selection’. Both are weighty subjects but let’s try and deal with them as simply and lucidly as we can.
Simply put, religion in general has reached the conclusion that there is an Intelligent Designer and Controller (‘God’) behind all that there is. Science has, by and large, reached the same conclusion; it accepts that ‘evolution’ or ‘Natural Selection’ is driven by a Ghostly Logic of sorts; a sentience (self-awareness) that has not only the will to survive, but to survive well. The main difference is that leading atheists like Richard Dawkins refute the concept of an Intelligent Designer and favour a ‘blind clockmaker’ which, supposedly in our ignorance, we call ‘God’. Their piece-de-resistance, their ‘unconquerable’ argument, is that the process of evolution must have begun blindly and gradually since to attribute an Intelligent Designer to this only raises an even bigger problem: who designed the Designer?
But it is not so unconquerable if we tackle this argument from its roots. A fundamental level, there can only be two states that can obtain: the Grand Nothing (The Void) or the Grand Everything – and nothing in between. Why nothing in between? As Einstein intuited, everything can be traced to a primordial energy of sorts. Nothing exists outside of it, even sentience. So, it does not matter if one attaches sub-parts or developmental stages to it; it is all an intricate interplay involving the same primordial stuff. As such, we need only content ourselves with the mechanics of how this Primordial Energy, this Grand Everything, manages to transforms itself into almost anything it pleases. In fact, the greatest mystery is sentience itself. We know that it is present when even the simplest life form begins to selectively (read: intelligently, discerningly) acquire certain material from surrounds and shows a propensity to survive – including the process of creating replicas of itself (reproduction). At that stage, the process is no longer ‘blind’; at best it may be now be termed trial-and-error… another way of saying ‘developing by actively selecting and making decisions’.
However, as I observed, my only contention is that if ever there was any period of trial and error, it is long over: Nature (ostensibly an aspect of God), is an Intelligent Designer and she is still hard at work today effortlessly producing designs that we cannot even begin to match. Please tell me: how can a ‘blind clockmaker’ (and we are talking about individual cells, each performing a ‘small job’ but somehow having a better understanding of the whole than even the brain, the very seat of conscious thought) create systems and subsystems of such complexity we cannot hope to emulate them any time soon?
Indeed, even with a head start of millions of years – how can a blind, groping, trial-and error process beat centuries of studied, deliberate, systematic and applied sentience as embodied in a highly intelligent being like mankind? Thus, per my Truth-Matrix, the Primal Sentience first got to know Itself – then It designed everything with a level of coordinated intelligence we can never hope to match – especially when we can only use the instrument It happened to assign to us: the brain.
Scientifically, there is no exact determinant as to where Life might have begun on Earth. The natural biological cycle would suggest that from bacteria, algae, and other such very simple life forms plants eventually evolved, their oxygenation of the atmosphere and their ability to form food from minerals and sunlight thus aiding the further evolution of the rather more complex animals (from Latin animus: “able to move”). However, most are in agreement that modern man first appeared in Africa some 250 000 years ago and from there spread out to other parts of the world. Apparently, from very primitive, ape-like animals, anatomically modern man eventually branched out and began to outstrip his fellow primates, beginning a slow evolutionary process of increasing sophistication.
But things do not appear to be quite so neat. The findings of what is has now been termed “Forbidden Archaeology” has turned up surprisingly sophisticated artefacts embedded and fossilised in rock structure – even coal – 400 million years and more. In January 2013, a Vladivostok resident was lighting the fire during a cold winter evening when he found a rail-shaped metal detail embedded in one of the pieces of coal he used to heat his home. Responsibly, the man decided to seek help from the scientists of Primorye region. After the metal object was studied by the leading experts it was dated to at least 300 million years old. The question of who might have made an aluminium gear in the ‘dawn of time’ remains unanswered (aluminium smelting began in the AD 1800s).
Finding a strange artefact in coal is a relatively frequent occurrence. ‘The first discovery of this sort was made in 1851 when the workers in one of the Massachusetts mines extracted a zinc silver-incrusted vase from a block of unmined coal which dated all the way back to the Cambrian era which was approximately 500 million years ago’. Sixty one years later, American scientists from Oklahoma discovered an iron pot embedded into a piece of coal aged 312 million years old. Then, in 1974, an aluminium assembly part of unknown origin was found in a sandstone quarry in Romania and the piece dated back to the Jurassic era. Not long ago in Russia a mechanical device was found in volcanic rock which was dated 400 million years before the current era (B.C.E).
As with Nature herself, technology appears to have been already sophisticated 300-500 million years ago, sometimes far more than it was a mere couple of centuries back, which runs against the grain and flow of a slowly evolving sophistication. Apparently, sophisticated artefacts have also been found in Africa, but none yet quite as fascinating. What makes things more difficult is that although such discoveries appear to have been made all over the world certain Powers-that-be are not keen about what has now been dubbed “Forbidden Archaeology”.
Given this, the sad truth is that there is nothing to show that Africans came before everyone else. On the contrary, if, as we will see below, certain ‘mythological’ stories are to be believed, the White race appears to have a far older history than is generally known or acknowledged. As such, the basis of employing intrinsic genetic biodiversity as suggestive of precedence is an assumption based more on conforming to the concept and expectation of gradual evolution than scientific indications of a ‘genetic clock’ of sorts encoded in the genome. While to some extent we can determine who came before whom through looking at unique traits that are carried down into successive generations especially by the female mitochondria, it becomes less easy to do this as we go back into distant times: many assumptions have to be made, as we will very briefly explain below.
Indeed, biodiversity today can be easily explained by advances in travel and the consequent mixing of races. As such, if African biodiversity was in fact caused by ancient worldwide travel in what are labelled ‘prehistoric’ times, yet historians and archaeologists are of the view that such ancient travel was improbable, geneticists would have no choice but to ascribe it to a time when “races began to split” – with the one having most biodiversity logically fitting the role of “common ancestor”. But, as we will show in Part II of this article, Africans did indeed travel widely in so-called ‘prehistoric’ times…
Given all this, it is very difficult to determine exactly when mankind first appeared on this planet, and whether Life first started on Earth in the first place. Is there, lying somewhere out there, some other coherent explanation of where Life began? We turn to Mesopotamia, whose civilisation is widely deemed to be the oldest yet uncovered (barring of course the fossil record we have just unearthed). When all the symbolism therein is correctly interpreted, it is quite clear that the Enuma-Elish epic of Babylonian times tells a story of not only the origins of our solar system – but of Earth itself. This epic, marking the Babylonian New Year, was celebrated annually. What it says about these origins is proving to be distinctly ahead of what modern science is only beginning to piece together.
Before it was utterly devastated, they say, a watery planet called Tiamat was the mother-planet of all Life and ‘sat proudly in the midst of the gods’ (i.e. in an orbit between Mars and Jupiter). A ‘god’ with ‘long members’ (a comet) named Marduk soon rose to challenge her (i.e. came in a clockwise orbit that put her ‘retinue’ on a collision course with Tiamat). Catastrophe ensued and out of the ‘dismembered’ pieces of Tiamat the Asteroid Belt was formed, but the main piece, Earth, was forced into a different orbit by the impact.
This epic not only explains the origins of the Asteroid Belt (which lies between Mars and Jupiter), it explains the mysterious fact that although Earth’s crust on the continental mass of land was formed around 4.6 billion years ago, the ocean floor in the great ‘bitten off’ cavity containing the Pacific is determined to be only some 200 million years old! This coincides with the great Permian extinction of 200 million years when something caused 95 % of all life to become extinct, and I would suggest that this was the date of Marduk and Tiamat’s clash. The Enuma Elish suggests that the ‘gods’ had inhabited Tiamat but were forced to flee to the nearest planet Mars – which they called ‘Erim’.
The identity of the mysterious, apparently pale-skinned owners of the artefacts was thus known to Sumerians and Babylonians. If indeed ‘gods’ still reside covertly on Earth, they are naturally far ahead of us. Being ostensibly ‘pale-skinned’ would suggest that they are ancestors of Europeans. If so, why did ancient Europeans also worship ‘gods’? Facts point to a secretive elite who, accounts such as the apocryphal Book of Enoch suggest, have survived cataclysm after cataclysm, each time reseeding breeds and races of mankind “after their image” – who then become their plaything. However, following the Flood of 10983 BC (the cataclysmic end of the last Ice Age, the beginning of Pleistocene epoch) a new dispensation left many of their kind to fend for themselves – effectively left out of a covert parallel civilisation only the ‘gods’ were privy to – but that is quite another long and detailed story.
Are the Sumerian Illu (‘Shining Ones’), as well as the Egyptian ‘Akhus’ (Makgoa), flesh-and-blood ‘gods’ of old? Did their elite fashion us in their own image (not as genuine makers but as age-old masters of genetic manipulation and hybridisation; experienced unbundlers of Nature’s unmatchable technological complexity)? Knowing that knowledge is ‘God-given’ and freely available to us all, did they forge an apartheid of sorts – the better to keep some of us relatively simple and therefore able to view them as ‘gods’? Is that why there is ‘Forbidden Archaeology’? Is that why the ‘gods’ of present times try so hard to discourage traces of their ancient and chequered history?
Next week, some of these questions come to life as we investigate African artefacts in Egypt (pyramids), Zimbabwe (Mwanamutapa) and Mexico (Olmecs) and determine the place of Africa not just as the discerned ‘Cradle of Mankind’, but in civilisation itself – with many a surprising answer.
Africa: the Cradle of Humankind? Part II
Africa is supposedly the very ‘Cradle of Humankind’ and the San of southern Africa are touted as prime candidates for the ‘oldest race of humans’. Technologically, however, both were behind most others. Something is wrong here
Last week we saw fossil evidence that mankind is far older than science gives him credit for. Sophisticated artefacts, we showed – including intricate aluminium gears and gear-trains, were found embedded in coal or volcanic ash 300-500 million years old. Coal and ash, of course, are relatively easy to carbon-date as they are mostly carbon.
Per archaeologist Michael Cremo (see his website http:// www.prabhupada.ca), the author of a 1993 book entitled Forbidden Archaeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race (co-written with Richard L. Thompson), even skeletal structures of anatomically-modern humans were found in rock strata millions of years old, whereas the general date for this species is about 250 000 years ago, with Africa touted as the very ‘Cradle of Humankind’. But here again, as with the ancient artefacts we discussed, most were found in places other than Africa which puts paid to this dubious accolade, which seems to follow the maxim: “the more relatively ‘primitive’ you were when they ‘discovered’ you, the likelier you are to be the ‘common ancestor’ of everyone”. If not necessarily the oldest, why do Africans show greater genetic biodiversity than others?
Genetic biodiversity, I argued, is not a reliable measure of precedence. Today, we can easily ascribe wide genetic biodiversity to advances in modern travel, which facilitates the mixing of races. As such, since historians and archaeologists confidently rule out ancient, worldwide travel by Africans, geneticists have no choice but to ascribe African biodiversity to a time when “races began to split” – with the one having most biodiversity logically fitting the role of “common ancestor”. Stark evidence, however, suggests that Africans did indeed travel widely in so-called ‘prehistoric’ times.
In 1976 Michelle Lescot of the Natural History Museum made the shocking discovery of tobacco inside the mummified body of Ramses II (1279 - 1213 BC). In 1992 another respected woman scientist — forensic pathologist Dr Svetlana Balabanova – detected not only tobacco but cocaine inside the body of an Egyptian temple priestess. Both plants are indigenous only to South America therefore suggesting ancient cross-Atlantic travel by an African power.
In Mesopotamia, clay artefacts depicting African Kutheans were discovered, backed by contents of the Erra Opos texts that show that they were brought in as crack troops by the ‘god’ Nergal in support of the ‘goddess’ Inanna’s against the Babylonian god Marduk. Since ‘Kuthea’ evidently means ‘Strong Ones’ (goo-tia in Tswana), this suggests that the strength and hardiness of Africans has always been put to use in many areas of the world.
The case for African-Egyptian travel to South American is literally cast in stone. Indeed, as if to clearly mark their presence there – perhaps knowing that some would later try to deny this (as certain debunkers strain to do even today) – a mysterious race called the Olmecs left behind gigantic heads of sculptured stone – each weighing several tons – clearly depicting their Negroid features. Although no orthodox scholar seems to know how they got there, Egyptian chronology by Manetho – along with Mesopotamian legend – show that after 350 years of wrangling for power in Egypt, sibling rival ‘gods’ Marduk (Ra) and Ningishzidda (Thoth) were eventually toppled in 3113 BC by a ‘mortal’ named Nemes/Menes – Egypt’s first historically recognised king (contrary to the legends themselves, scholars do not recognise ‘gods’ as flesh-and-blood rulers of proper history).
Since Marduk’s was the well-known ‘god’ of Babylon, he returned there taking along his brother but soon expelled him in 3110 BC, 650 years since the Nippurian Calendar (still used by Jews) began in 3760 BC. Thoth-Ningishzidda opted to settle in South America along with a ‘band of followers’. In South America, where he was known as the ‘Winged Serpent’ (Quetzalcoatl) he began the famous ‘Mayan Calendar’ of 3113 BC – evidently to commemorate the toppling of his older brother. His ‘band of followers’, I aver, were Egyptian Africans. Why?
Bantu migration to southern Africa, I have shown, began not in Cameroon but as far afield as Egypt – confirmed by a Sotho poem called Khama-Roggo (a well-known surname in Kenya; now ‘Ramaloko’ in Se-Pedi). The name denotes Egypt’s contrasting black-red topography: the ‘Khemet’ (kgemeta: black (rich) with fertility) and the ‘Roggo’ (red and barren) soils. Indeed, Egypt’s ancient name is ‘Khmer’ or ‘Khemet’. This Bantu migration appears to have been forced, as oral traditions of the Luhya of East Africa confirm, who, just as my own research concurs, relate their ancient displacement, in the time of King Kitanga, to the Lord’s threat, in Ezekiel 29: 9, to make Egypt (their M’sir) ‘desolate’. Indeed, this helps better understand the enigmatic Tswana idiom go lelela Khama le Mogogoro, literally: ‘to cry over Khmer and Mmu-roggo (red-soil)’.
Talking of Egypt, pyramids in her Giza plateau are without doubt the most fascinating buildings ever designed and constructed. “But if we, south of the Sahara, claim them as our own one more time”, Ali Mazrui once proclaimed, “I’ll scream”. Why? Firstly, Egypt’s chequered history is peppered mainly with pale-skinned pharaohs (as their art clearly shows). Even their writings are full of praise for the Ne-teru (Tswana: ‘Bearded Ones’; indigenous Egyptians were clean-shaven) and for ‘these Akhus’ (Sotho-Tswana: ma-Akhu-a, i.e. Makgoa (Whites) in present terms). Khu is ancient Egyptian for ‘at the centre of power’ – hence the Sotho words se-khu (spider) and mo-khu (school principal). Secondly, Egypt is located in a region of Africa that is more Arabic than African Negroid.
Actually, per legend, the Giza Plateau pyramids were designed and constructed by a pale-skinned ‘god’ (a ‘Shining One’ as Akhu implies, an interpretation confirmed by the Sumerian term for a god: Illu – the root of ‘illuminated’) who they knew as Thoth (Tehuti), the ‘Divine Measurer’ (i.e. architect) – also known as the ‘Wisdom-God who knew and taught us everything’. Indeed, his Sumerian name ‘Ningishzidda’ – often shortened to ‘Gizidda’ – reverberates in the very name ‘Giza’.
What, then, can we, south of the Sahara, showcase? If there are ancient buildings that make us proud in southern Africa, it is the Mwanamutapa ruins in Zimbabwe, near the Victoria Falls. Archaeologists have determined that they were built on the ruins of buildings of even greater antiquity – but that is another story. Unfortunately for us, they have been shown to be decidedly Phoenician in architecture, which distinctive trait is not repeated elsewhere in their wider vicinity as would have been the case if stonemasonry was well-known in the region. Phoenicians came looking for gold. They worshipped Baal and this is where, I suggest, the Tswana term bala-bala comes from. As we watched these gold-seeking visitors read aloud long, repetitive praises to their god, we must have promptly associated the term ‘Baal’ with longwinded utterances read aloud from some strange markings…
What does the term Muana-mutapa mean? An (from Sumerian) is well-known to mean ‘heavens’ or ‘out there’. Mu-ana is thus ‘alien, foreigner” – literally: “he who comes from out there’. This evidently became synonymous with ‘master’, thus mwana (singular) – and later bwana (a plural term of respect) in Swahili. Mu-tapa – literally ‘watery (soft) [one]’ – is Tswana for ‘lazy [one]’, and tepa and ma-tepe also relate to ‘watery’ in the sense of a soft, spoilt, cry-baby who wants everything done for him. Since ‘tap’ is ‘[that] of water’ and ‘tepid’ means ‘[of a temperature] as if straight from the tap’ these terms are evidently cognate (of same protolanguage roots). As such, mwana-mutapa actually meant ‘lazy foreigners’, but since these ‘lazy’ teachers in stonemasonry were evident ‘Masters of Stone’, this, I intuit, is the obscured reason why tapa (watery) became synonymous with its ironic opposite: stone.
Sad as it may seem, although Africans no doubt featured prominently in the founding civilisations of North Africa, Mesopotamia and even to as far as South America, they were neither the real drivers nor, evidently, can they confidently claim to be the oldest human race. This is the bitter pill we have to swallow. As such, even in South America where most agree that the Olmecs preceded and inspired all other subsequent civilisations there, Mayan, Aztec and other legends are unanimous in that they were taught ‘all that they know’ by the sudden arrival of a bearded, pale-skinned ‘god’ on their shores who (in the manner of Egyptian royalty) favoured a white robe.
There are three clear indicators of the veracity of this legend. Firstly, all Amerindians, in North and South America, are genetically beardless, so where did they pick up on this ‘strange’ trait? Secondly, as Charles Berlitz notes in his 1976 book The Mystery of Atlantis, Aztecs were inexplicably partial to black and red colours and I put this down to tales they must have heard of Khama-Roggo – the Black-and-Red land their ‘civilisers’ evidently came from. Thirdly, the insignia that earned their beloved god the epithet ‘Winged Serpent’ is easily traceable to both Egypt and Mesopotamia. It features two intertwining snakes coiled around a winged staff, and it is still very well known: it is our present universal symbol for medicine and healing.
If beings such as the ‘Winged Serpent’ were so technologically advanced – as ‘myths’ about them clearly imply – would it not be logical to assume that they were the mysterious owners of the 200-500 million year old sophisticated artefacts noted in the beginning of this article? If so, where did they come from and how did they come to far outstrip everyone else, including Africans? Indeed, neither Sumerian or Egyptian legend, nor the perplexed scientist who carefully examined the 300 million years old aluminium gear-train noted at the beginning of this article, have attributed their origins to Earth; even the latter had no choice but to attribute the artefacts to an unknown ‘alien’ civilisation.
One thing is certain: the correct answer won’t be found in the conventional history taught in high school and university syllabi. Why? The aforementioned artefacts are anachronous to the ‘established’ theory of a ‘slow and laboured evolution’ of the human species. Millions of years ago, we were all supposed to be little above the level of apes and science is not inclined to abandon this tenet any time soon – leaving ‘alternative theories’ to fill in the vacuum.
However, the fully-unmasked and convoluted history of this mysterious race of people, I have come to conclude, is neither to be found not in the doctored pages of the Old Testament, nor in wildly popular ‘conspiracy theory’ tales of alien races from outside our solar system subtly competing with each other for our resources, nor in the rather more scholarly elucidations of ‘alternative historians’ like Zecharia Sitchin, but only in what I call my super-integrated Truth-Matrix (see my e-book They Came From the Sky at http://pitoronet.com). When all is fully understood, the enigmatic place of Africans in the surreptitiously guided unfolding of mankind’s destiny becomes clear – something, I note with sadness, well outside the present periscope of all but perhaps a dozen people worldwide today.
*L.M. Leteane is a Gaborone-based independent researcher, author and columnist