Worlds Before Our Own

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

Author: Brad Steiger

Publisher: Anomalist Books

Price: £8.50 (Paperback)

1 Star 2 Stars 3 Stars 4 Stars 5 Stars (1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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The idea of an ancient civilization, one pre-dating known archaeology, has long gripped the imagination. Some like to believe fabled Atlantis was the cradle of civilisation, others imagine a supercontinent, Mu, where people thrived at the dawn of time. Then there are the fantasies of H. P. Lovecraft, in which impossibly old extraterrestrial beings colonised an Earth inhabited by dinosaurs.

Steiger’s book delves into the dim and distant past to examine evidence damned by archaeological and paleontological orthodoxy. Could Homo sapiens have existed on the Earth far longer than currently believed? Could a non-human race have lived and created a civilisation millennia before the earliest apemen, when mankind was just a twinkle in God’s eye?

The suggestion is not as fantastical as it might first appear. A fascinating article in a recent edition of Focus magazine considered how long it would take for traces of our civilisation to vanish from the Earth should we be wiped out by a natural disaster. According to author Stephen Baxter, it would take just 100,000 years for every city to have weathered down to dust. Times that figure by two and you realise that there are still millions of years in which a race of intelligent beings could have thrived yet virtually all trace of them to now be lost.

When Worlds Before Our Own was first published in 1978 it was met with fury in some quarters for daring to question established thought on the origins of humankind. It has long been out of print, since when its reputation has grown and grown and influenced many other writers who have found popular acclaim (eg Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods).

In this welcome reprint, Steiger provides a new introduction in which he wryly points out that some of the ideas he expressed have since become scientific truths: whereas opinion in 1978 held that apes and humans split from a common ancestor six million years ago, recent discoveries have pushed that date back to more than twenty million years ago.

Steiger explores a considerable body of evidence, including mysterious ‘man-made’ artefacts found deep in the fossil record before the dawn of Man, and sophisticated machines way ahead of the technological know-how believed possible at the time they date from. He does not intend this evidence to be conclusive, merely to raise the question about our origins and to fire the imagination regarding the possibility of a millions of years-old lost civilisation. He succeeds admirably on both counts.

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