There is so much anomalous evidence from human archaeology that almost any alternative theory you can come up with makes more sense than the conventional theory that is taught in schools. I believe that this observation goes a long way towards explaining the abundance of "alternative theories" for mankind's ancient past.
One large family of alternative theories, of course, involves ancient alien visitors. Some of these theories allege that ancient aliens from other planets or star systems visited earth and were instrumental in teaching primitive humans to stop behaving like animals and to begin raising crops and forming civilizations. Some of these theories even credit the aliens with performing genetic alterations on apes or other species in order to create humans in the first place. Some of these theories argue that the flat-topped pyramids found around the world functioned as alien landing-platforms where alien ships came down to retrieve human and animal sacrifices for their nourishment or other purposes.
While I do not subscribe to such alien theories, I would in fact argue that they are more plausible than the storyline put forward by conventional academia! It is easier to believe some of the scenarios outlined above than it is to believe that, after tens of thousands of years of hunter-gathering, mankind suddenly created in rather short order the civilizations of Old Sumeria, Bablyon, and ancient Egypt and started authoring myths that dealt with the subtle astronomical phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes with a high degree of precision (higher than that achieved thousands of years later by Hipparchus and Ptolemy), and building massive structures that related to the equatorial circumfrence of the spherical earth by a ratio that incorporated a significant precessional number!
I have argued that the reason academia vehemently rejects the extensive evidence of a highly advanced ancient civilization and the possibility of a catastrophic explanation for geology can be found in an a priori commitment to Darwinian evolution, which the entire modern educational edifice is founded upon and which is therefore seen as a dogma that must be defended at all costs.
And yet the problems with the Darwinian theory are so thorny that even the most articulate defender of Darwinian orthodoxy, evolutionary biologist and academic Dr. Richard Dawkins, has famously had to resort to the alien explanation when pressed on some of the more difficult details of biological origins.
In this famous exchange with actor, political science professor and economist Ben Stein, Dawkins admits to being ignorant of the mechanism by which the first self-replicating molecule could have arisen (and points out that so is everyone else). This is a major gap in the Darwinian theory, because the Darwinian mechanism relies upon mutations and natural selection plus vast amounts of time (the requirement for vast amounts of time being the source of their vitriolic rejection of catastrophic geological theories).
In order to have both mutations and natural selection, one must first have self-replicating molecules (such as DNA and RNA). The origin of such molecules, however, is a problem, because a Darwinist cannot very well argue that self-replicating molecules arose through either mutation or natural selection (since those processes require self-replicating molecules). Dawkins knows this, and explains quite honestly that it is a huge problem.
Because the origin of self-replicating molecules is such a problem, Dawkins appeals to aliens in the above interview in response to Stein's dogged questioning on the subject. The conversation went like this:
Dawkins: Nobody knows how it got started; we know the kind of event it must have been – we know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life.
Stein: And what was that?
Dawkins: It was the origin of the first self-replicating molecule.
Stein: Right. And how did that happen?
Dawkins: I’ve told you: we don’t know.
Stein: So you have no idea how it started.
Dawkins: No, no. Nor has anybody.
Stein: Nor has anyone else. What do you think is the possibility that intelligent design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics or in Darwinian evolution?
Dawkins: It could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved by -- probably some kind of Darwinian means – to a very, very high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto, perhaps, this planet. Now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility, and I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer. And that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe – but that higher intelligence would itself have had to have come about by some explicable, or ultimately explicable, process. It couldn’t have just jumped into existence spontaneously: that’s the point.
In other words, Richard Dawkins pushes the problem of the origin of self-replicating molecules off on aliens who "seeded" earth with them. He is quick to point out that such aliens of course must have come about via Darwinian evolution, but does not appear to notice that this line of argument only pushes the problem of the origin of the first self-replicating molecule back by some period of time and to some other star system or galaxy. It does not solve the question of how a self-replicating molecule could have come about at all!
Nevertheless, he finishes with the declaration that the alien civilization "couldn't have just jumped into existence spontaneously: that's the point." And yet he pretty much leaves us with an explanation that is just as useful as saying that these aliens did in fact jump into existence spontaneously, since he gives us no idea how their evolution could have gotten started. If the origin of the first self-replicating molecule on earth is so hard to explain that it required aliens to bring them from somewhere else, then how do we explain a self-replicating molecule in those aliens' early evolution? Perhaps those aliens were seeded by some other, even more ancient, advanced alien civilization from yet another star system, who also evolved rather than "jumping into existence spontaneously."
It's hard not to feel some sympathy for Dr. Dawkins here, because he is in fact faced with a dilemma, and that is the fact that ancient alien visitation is more plausible than the storyline that we feed children (and college students) in schools. This statement is just as true of the storyline we feed them about the origins of ancient civilizations as it is of the storyline we feed them about the origin of species.
