It is my great pleasure and honor to introduce this abridged edition of Forbidden Archeology.
Let me say at the outset that I believe this book to be one of the landmark intellectual
achievements of the late twentieth century.
It will take more conservative scholars a long while, prbably many years, to come to terms
with the revelations it contains. Nevertheless, Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson have put
the revelations out there and the clock cannot now be turned back. Sooner or later, whether
we like it or not, our species is going to have to come to terms with the facts that are so
impressively documented in the pages that follow, and these facts are stunning.
Cremo and Thompson's central proposition is that the model of human prehistory, carefully
built-up by scholars over the past two centuries, is sadly and completely wrong. Moreover,
the authors are not proposing that it can be put right with minor tinkering and adjustments.
What is needed is for the existing model to be thrown out the window and for us to start
again with open minds and with absolutely no preconceptions at all.
This is a position that is close to my own heart; indeed it forms the basis of my book
Fingerprints of the Gods. There, however, my focus was exclusively on the last 20,000 years
and on the possibility that an advanced global civilization may have flourished more than
12,000 years ago only to be wiped out and forgotten in the great cataclysm that brought the
last Ice Age to an end.
In The Hidden History of the Human Race Cremo and Thompson go much further, pushing back the
horizons of our amnesia not just 12,000 or 20,000 years, but millions of years into the past,
and showing that almost everything we have been taught to believe about the origins and
evolution of our species rests on the shaky foundation of academic opinion, and on a highly
selective sampling of research results. The two authors then set about putting the record
straight by showing all the other research results that have been edited out of the record
during the past two centuries, not because there was anything wrong or bogus about the results
themselves, but simply because they did not fit with prevailing academic opinion.
Anomalous and out-of-place discoveries reported by Cremo and Thompson in The Hidden History
of the Human Race include convincing evidence that anatomically modern humans may have been
present on the Earth not just for 100,000 years or less (the orthodox view), but for millions
of years, and that metal objects of advanced design may have been in use at equally early
periods. Moreover, although sensational claims have been made before about out-of-place
artifacts, they have never been supported by such overwhelming and utterly convincing
documentation as Cremo and Thompson provide. In the final analysis, it is the meticulous
scholarship of the authors, and the cumulative weight of the facts presented in The Hidden
History of the Human Race, that really convince. The book is, I believe, in harmony with the
mood of the public at large in the world today, a mood which no longer unquestioningly accepts
the pronouncements of established authorities, and is willing to listen with an open mind to
heretics who make their case reasonably and rationally. Never before has the case for
a complete re-evaluation of the human story been made more reasonably and rationally than
it is in these pages.

Graham Hancock
Devon, England
January 1998

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