Most people think because we have historical manuscripts that we know quite a bit about our past as a species.
Nothing could be further from the truth. We know almost nothing about our human heritage.
What little we know is from recorded history but when we try to penetrate back into pre-history, things get murky. We have bone fragments and knapped flint—not much to go on. Time eventually turns everything to dust.
But one myth the scholarly establishment tries to perpetuate is that homo sapiens is the latest and greatest of all preceding species of hominids. But is that the truth?
Is civilization 5000 years old, or as Göbekli Tepe suggests, much older and double or triple that estimate. And for that matter, how long has intelligent life been on this planet?
We just don't know...and if we don't know that, we don't know much.
Why this preamble?
Because I'm sitting in the campus pub with Lise Sommer, our resident, a brilliant geneticist, who's calmly telling me she's uncovered a mummy in a better state of preservation than Ötzi, the Iceman, and she whispers, it's not human.
If it's not human, then what the hell is it?
This isn't a wacko conspiracy theory—she has the goods.
And if that's not enough to rattle my brain cage, she goes on to say she's sequenced the complete genome.
What the hell!
"Are you shocked?" she asks.
"To put it mildly," I confess. "What are you saying—that you found a perfectly preserved extinct specimen of some form of higher ape?"
She shakes her head. "No, I'm not saying that at all. I told you, it isn't human."
I'm getting exasperated. "What does that mean?"
"It means, the creature we found is not of this earth. It's the remains of an alien."
I'm staring dumbly into her eyes. They don't flicker. Her face is sober. She's not flinching.
"You're serious—you're not being facetious?"
She continues to stare at me solemnly. "I'm serious, Barnaby. I wouldn't joke about something like this. I felt the same shock as you're feeling now when I found out."
"You're not suggesting it's Silurian, are you?"
She laughs, but then, shrugs her shoulders.
"What the hell are you telling me, Lise?"
She throws up her hands in exasperation. "We just don't know. All we know for sure is it's not human."
I'm getting exasperated. "What does that mean?"
"It means, the creature we found is not of this earth. It's the remains of an alien."
I stare at her in silence a few moments, trying vainly to gather my thoughts.
“So, maybe we should revisit the Drake equation and recalculate the odds of life arising somewhere else in the universe,” I mutter.
“I didn’t say it was from off-planet.”
Again, my jaw drops.
“Then, what are you saying? I don’t get it.”
She sighs, “Look, we don’t know enough about origins or timelines even for our own species. As you asked before, who knows if a pre-human civilization existed before us.”
That set me back. She was right. We really don't know anything.
They say the word science comes from Latin, meaning knowledge with a certainty…
That's a joke.
This whole conversation put me in a nihilistic mood and I wanted to wreck the scientific establishment and bring all the smug scholars to their knees.
