Forbidden Archeology

Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race is a 1993 pseudoarchaeological book by Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson, written in association with the Bhaktivedanta Institute of ISKCON. Cremo states that the book has "over 900 pages of well-documented evidence suggesting that modern man did not evolve from ape man, but instead has co-existed with apes for millions of years!", and that the scientific establishment has suppressed the fossil evidence of extreme human antiquity. Cremo identifies as a "Vedic archeologist", since he believes his findings support the story of humanity described in the Vedas. He says a knowledge filter (confirmation bias) is the cause of the supposed suppression.

The book has attracted attention from some mainstream scholars as well as Hindu creationists and paranormalists. Scholars of mainstream archaeology and paleoanthropology have described it as pseudoscience.

Academic analysis

In a twenty-page review in Social Studies of Science, Jo Wodak and David Oldroyd describe the book's argument: Early paleoanthropologists, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, interpreted much empirical information as evidence favoring the existence of human beings in the Tertiary period (about 65.5 million to 2.6 million years ago). But starting from about the 1930s, paleoanthropologists turned to the view that human beings first evolved in the next era, the Pleistocene (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). The older evidence, Cremo and Thompson say, was never shown bad; it was just reinterpreted in such a way as to rule out tertiary humans. So what Cremo and Thompson have done is "comb the early literature in great—indeed impressive—detail" and argue, on the basis of their historical study, "that the old arguments were never satisfactorily disproved and should be reconsidered with open minds".

Ultimately, the book questions the Darwinian evolutionary assumptions underlying modern paleoanthropology.