This challenges the long-held belief that civilisation began in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers at about 6,000BC.
Meanwhile, studies by the South African author, publisher and TV producer Michael Tellinger, and others, suggest that countless ancient circular stone structures throughout Southern Africa are the remains of a vanished civilization which could date back more than 200,000 years.
Michael, who will be in the UK in mid-November to promote the studies, says they will “force a complete re-think about civilisation and human origins”.
It is thought that the tall species, known as the Boskop people, evolved in Southern Africa alongside homo sapiens. They were between 5ft 10in and 6ft tall, with a narrow face, small teeth and a pre-frontal cortex a third larger than modern man, suggesting highly developed mathematical, artistic, ethical and moral attributes. Their height makes them giants for their time.
The name Boskop comes from the area near Potchefstroom where, in 1913, the palaeontologist Frederick FitzSimons discovered a large humanoid skull. Subsequently, similar skulls were discovered by others. Archaeologists have been at a loss to offer a realistic explanation of the implied properties of the skulls, which fail to fit in with accepted theories of evolution.
The discoveries were largely ignored until two neuroscientists, Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, of the Brain Engineering Laboratory at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA, suggested in their 2008 book, Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence, that the Boskop species possessed a large forebrain, indicating a high IQ.
Soon after 11,000BC, tying in with latest Earth catastrophe theory, it is suggested a flood destroyed the Boskop civilisation, and survivors fled to the north where they established the first Middle Eastern civilisations.
Best known of the South African stone circles, Adam’s Calendar at Mpumalanga, was investigated by Michael Tellinger and pilot and explorer Johan Heine for their book Adam’s Calendar (2008) and they found that it dates back at least 75,000 years. The site is on the same longitude as Great Zimbabwe and the Great Pyramid, and is said to have been aligned with the rise of Orion’s Belt 75,000 years ago. Until recently, such features were regarded simply as cattle kraal, and considered to be of little historic value.
But it is now claimed that tools, artifacts and petroglyphs indicate that the Sumerians, and later the Egyptians, received much knowledge and imagery from this lost culture, for which there is evidence that it mined gold, diamonds and haematite. Michael has suggested that homo sapiens was used as slave labour in these deep-mining operations.
“These discoveries are so staggering that they will not be easily digested by the mainstream historical and archaeological fraternity,”
The size of the Boskop brain suggested they were much more intelligent than homo sapiens, said Michael, and this possibly caused their demise, for reasons not yet understood. “I trust we will recover many more Boskop skulls once we really start looking,” he added. “The MaKomati Foundation [formed in 2003 to protect and promote the ancient ruins of Mpumalanga] is ready to do a number of groundbreaking archaeological digs at some of these sites: ruins, terraces, mines, leaching tanks, roads and more.
"We are about to take core samples to examine at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, but we need to raise funds to do all this. That is an important part of the message we need to get out there – to mobilise funds for these first ever digs at these sites.”
* Michael Tellinger is among the speakers at the twice yearly Stars and Stones Forum at Rougham, near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, on November 14-15. He is also giving a talk at the Theosophical Society, 50 Gloucester Place, London, on November 18.
