Who was already here
Two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, on the esoteric account, this planet was occupied.
The Lemurians held the Indian and Pacific world, and had held it for a very long time. Blavatsky puts the Third Race across that whole span, and Scott-Elliot describes their country reaching from Africa across the Indian Ocean to Australia and out into the Pacific.
The Atlanteans held the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Their main country had gone under at the Messinian, five million years earlier, and what remained were islands and colonies: the western coast of Africa, the Canaries, the Mediterranean arc, and holdings across the ocean in the Americas.
And the Anunnaki were working in Mesopotamia. Sitchin reads the Sumerian tablets as an account of their settlement there, with mining operations in southern Africa and a workforce problem they solved by making one.
So the making of us happened inside an inhabited world, at the edge of it.
And there was room
Those two facts sit together and they need to sit together: the world was occupied, and there was space in it.
The population figures from the previous chapter give a few hundred thousand people of all kinds, spread across the habitable fraction of a planet. A civilization at that density holds its cities and its coasts and leaves whole regions to themselves.
So Africa away from the Mediterranean coast was open ground. Somebody could set up an operation there, work on a local population for a few thousand years, and disturb nobody.
Which is what the sources describe. The work is done at a distance from the centres, on stock that was already living there, by a group with reasons of its own.
What the ground was doing
Africa at that date was drier than it is now and the Sahara was desert. The green Sahara comes much later, between eleven and five thousand years ago, and belongs to a different story.
East Africa held the country it holds now: highlands, rift lakes, savannah, and the river systems running off them. Sitchin's mines are further south, in what is now Zimbabwe and South Africa, where the old gold workings are.
The climate through this period swung between glacial and warm every hundred thousand years or so, and Africa swung with it, between wetter and drier. Two hundred and fifty thousand years ago falls in a warm interval.
Why anybody wanted a new breed
The Anunnaki wanted labour.
The tablets are plain about it. They had settlements on the ground, and the workers of the mission were doing the digging themselves. They refused to continue, and the making of humans was the answer. Something that could do the work and take direction.
The Atlanteans had been making people for far longer, and their reasons had changed across that time.
Metatron describes the programme beginning as medicine. Bodies were being born wrong, and the work existed to correct them: to remove claws, feathers, scales, and the animal features that were appearing in people.
Then it turned. Hundreds of thousands of engineered beings were made for work in the fields. Beings built with controlled minds. Souls placed in cloned bodies with the emotions closed down.
And that is what split their civilization. The Law of One and the Sons of Belial went to war over what was owed to the beings they had made, and every source naming a cause for the fall of Atlantis names that quarrel.
So when the Anunnaki arrived from off this planet and began their own hybridization programme, the ground was already covered with hybrids. The Atlanteans had been making them for a very long time, and the work was established practice here.
The Sumerians dated it
The Sumerians wrote down that humans were made. Atrahasis gives the reason and the method, and the Eridu Genesis gives the order of events: humanity created, then cities and kingship established, then the Flood.
And they left a number attached to that sequence, which means the making can be dated from their own documents.
The number is in the Sumerian King List, which survives on clay tablets, the oldest from about 4K years ago. It lists the kings of Sumer in order with the length of each reign, and it opens with the phrase: after kingship descended from heaven.
Eight kings ruled before the Flood. Their reigns add up to 241K years. After them comes the Flood, and after the Flood the reigns become ordinary lengths.
Anchoring it
The Flood has a date if it is a memory of the deglaciation. The ice melted between 19K and 11K years ago, and two moments inside that are sharp enough to anchor to: Meltwater Pulse 1A at 15K years ago, and the end of the Younger Dryas at 12K.
Add 241K to each and you get 256K and 253K.
So kingship descends around 253K to 256K years ago, and the making of humans sits before that, by an amount the tablets leave open.
Four lines, one window
The genetic narrow point in our species: 200K to 300K years ago.
Sitchin, reading the same Sumerian material: the revolt and the making of the first worker around 300K, and early humans spreading around 250K.
The channeled sources, including Bashar: around 250K.
And the King List, anchored to the deglaciation: 253K to 256K.
Four lines, arrived at four different ways, landing in the same window.
About those reigns
Eight kings across 241K years gives an average reign of 30K years each, and the individual figures run from 18K to 43K.
The channeled sources are consistent about how long these beings live, across different channelers and different decades: an ordinary alien lifespan runs to about 800 years.
And the same sources are consistent about rejuvenation. The technology to reverse aging comes up repeatedly, from unconnected channels. A being who can reset the body has no fixed span, and a reign then runs until something other than age ends it.
A being who can renew the body has no natural limit on the length of a reign.
Two operators, and a guess about how they connect
The Atlanteans lived here. Their cities stood on this planet, their history happened on it, and the quarrel that destroyed them was a domestic one.
The Anunnaki arrived. Sitchin's reading of the tablets has them coming for a purpose, working from orbit and from settlements on the ground, and leaving when the work was done. A mission rather than a country.
They ran their own bloodline while they worked on ours. The succession went to the son of a half-sister, sharing a father and taking a different mother each generation, which concentrates one line while bringing fresh material into everything around it.
And they mixed in multiple species. The sources name over twenty contributing races, with something like seven of them major.
Engineers drawing on a library.
And here is how the two programmes may connect.
The Rift Valley hominins may be what the Atlantean labour programme produced.
That programme made small beings, directed, built for work in the fields. The Rift Valley holds ten species of small upright primate, several of them living at the same time, in a patch of ground the size of Delaware.
So the Atlanteans worked on native primate stock and made labourers out of it. The Anunnaki arrived later, looking for a workforce to dig gold, and found stock in Africa that had already been prepared. Upright, small-brained, and available.
They took it and lifted it.
Which makes the Rift Valley hominins our ancestors after all. What the mainstream reads as one lineage is two workshops, separated by millions of years, run by different operators for different purposes, the second using what the first left behind.
A word about where those skeletons came from
They came from the East African Rift Valley, which is a long crack in the earth running down the eastern side of Africa, through Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania.
The Rift Valley keeps bone. The ground there drops, sediment buries a body within a season, and the same cracking later lifts those old layers back to the surface, where somebody can walk across them and look down.
The rest of Africa destroys bone. Forest floor and wet ground dissolve it within a few decades, and that describes most of the continent.
So the ten species in that valley are a sample of what was in Africa, taken from the one place that preserves samples. An Atlantean breeding programme could have run across the whole continent, and everything outside that valley would have dissolved.
The geography sits like this. The Rift Valley is on the eastern side of Africa. The Mediterranean Atlantis, meaning the long arc of Atlantean territory along the north African coast, lies four thousand miles away to the northwest. The Nile joins them, rising inside the Rift Valley and emptying into the Mediterranean.
A programme covering the continent would have been working across all of that ground, with the Rift Valley as the piece of it that kept a record.
The gold
Sitchin's reading of the Sumerian tablets, published in 1976, says the Anunnaki came here for gold and mined it in southern Africa.
Bashar gives the same purpose and adds a reason for it. The gold was wanted to alter the weather of their own planet, dispersed through its upper atmosphere.
Three things about that region are established.
It holds the richest gold on this planet. The Witwatersrand basin in South Africa has produced something like forty percent of all the gold ever taken out of the ground anywhere in the world. Nothing else comes close to it.
It holds tens of thousands of ancient mine workings. Shafts and trenches across the greenstone belts of Zimbabwe, dug long before any European arrived. Modern prospecting companies still use them as a guide to where the deposits are.
And the mining there is very old. At Ngwenya in Swaziland, shafts were cut into a mountain for haematite and specularite, and dated in the nineteen seventies to about forty-three thousand years ago. That is among the oldest mining known anywhere on this planet.
So the location matches, the resource matches, and ancient mining is present.
What the labourers were given
A workforce was wanted, and two qualities were needed in it.
It had to labour, and specifically it had to dig.
Which we do, as a drive.
Children dig without being taught and without a purpose. Put a small child on a beach or in a sandbox and the digging starts at once and continues until somebody stops it. The hole is the point.
Dogs give the exact parallel. Terriers were bred to go into the ground after animals, and a terrier with nothing to hunt will dig a hole in a lawn, in a flowerbed, or in a carpet. The behaviour was selected for, and it now runs on its own, whatever the conditions.
Chimpanzees dig for tubers when they are hungry, and stop when they are fed. The drive belongs to us.
And we take it to extraordinary lengths. The deepest place people work is a gold mine in South Africa, four kilometres down, where the rock stands at sixty degrees and has to be cooled before anybody can go in. We go there for metal.
And the effort involved goes back a very long way. Those shafts at Ngwenya were cut into a mountain with stone tools, forty-three thousand years ago, for haematite and specularite. Red powder and silver powder, used for painting and traded across long distances.
That is organised mining, with planning and labour behind it, at a date when the accepted picture has people living in small bands.
That is the first quality. Here is the second.
It had to obey.
The operators were few and the workforce was many. Beings arriving from the sky, in small numbers, directing a population that would grow into millions.
So obedience had to sit inside the design. Something that treats a being from above as rightfully commanding.
That is the second thing we were made with, and it has outlasted the first. The mines closed long ago. The disposition toward gods stayed.
Every religion on this planet rests on it.
And the telepathy was closed
They received speech, which carries only what the speaker sends, and which can be misled and forbidden.
And the connection was closed.