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Most readers are
aware of the clash between a statement in The Urantia Book about the
coming of the red man to the Americas about 85,000 years ago and the
"Clovis First" view of early American pre-history. The
latter view claimed that human penetration of the American continent
was blocked by a Canadian ice sheet until 12,000 years ago.
The degree of
fanaticism with which the "Clovis First" view was promoted
by the "establishment" of American anthropology and
archaeology surely came close to promoting "Clovis First"
to the "divinely dictated" status of a fundamentalist's
bible.
According to a
recent review, the publication of the second volume of T. Dillehay's
opus magnum, Monte Verde. A Late Pleistocene Settlement in Chile
(Smithsonian Institution Press) has now hammered home the last nail
in the coffin of the "Clovis First" dogma, at last
enabling studies of American pre-history to proceed on a more
realistic footing.
The destruction
of the "Clovis First" dogma may draw the attention
of readers with an interest in anthropology and archaeology to a
book, first published in 1993 by Michael A. Cremo and Richard L.
Thompson, and entitled Forbidden Archaeology, that has
painstakingly documented a large volume of early archaeological work
in the Americas and the rest of the world, that bore upon the early
history of mankind, and suffered suppression in the interests of
maintaining "establishment" prejudices.
Amongst the large
volume of material in Forbidden Archaeology is an account of
work at a site at St. Prest in France that, according to some
workers, established beyond doubt the presence of tool-making man in
that region around one million or more years ago.
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