The stock that would be used
Around seven million years ago, in Africa, our line and the chimpanzee line become two.
Orthodox biology reads that as a population separating. A group cut off, drifting, becoming a species.
Which is also what a hybridization looks like from outside. Somebody takes the stock that is there, makes something from it, and afterward there are two lines where there was one. The ape line continues. The new line begins. The record shows a fork.
The esoteric sources describe that operation repeatedly. Aerrhu has vessels built from primate ancestors found here, worked on until they were compatible. Enki surveys the early kinds and builds from the stock that suits. Bashar has the Anunnaki altering hominin stock.
Seven million years ago is where the first of those forks appears.
What was probably here
Several human kinds, in several places, most of them leaving nothing.
That is not a claim this book has to argue for. Orthodox palaeontology has already been forced to it. The single-cradle model for our own species was abandoned around 2018, and the accepted picture now is of several structured populations across Africa, separated for hundreds of thousands of years, meeting and exchanging.
And the same holds further back. Homo erectus was in Java and China from two million years ago. Homo floresiensis was on Flores. Homo luzonensis was in the Philippines. The Denisovans held half of Asia. Five of the seven parahuman peoples are known only from DNA, with no bones anywhere on this planet.
So the world of that period held many kinds of people. What survives of them is almost nothing, and what survives is not where most of them were.
What was found, and where
One narrow strip of Africa has given up a sequence of skeletons. The Rift Valley, running through Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania.
Sahelanthropus, seven million years, from Chad.
Orrorin, six million, Kenya.
Ardipithecus, five point eight to four point four million, Ethiopia. Upright, living in forest.
Australopithecus, four to two million, East and southern Africa. Lucy is one of these.
Paranthropus, two point seven to one point two million. Heavy-jawed, ended without issue.
And Homo habilis at two point eight million.
The general name for them is hominins, which covers everything on our side of the split from the chimpanzees.
Their brains held about four hundred and fifty cubic centimetres. A third of ours, and the same as a chimpanzee's. No worked stone appears anywhere until three point three million years ago.
Orthodox palaeontology treats them as our ancestors. Not as a single line, since that was given up years ago, but as the population our species came out of.
The bones do not establish that. They give a shape and a date. A skeleton does not record who its descendants were.
So the relation stays open. They may be ancestors. They may be cousins, with both lines coming out of something earlier. They may be the products of genetic work, made and left. They may be degraded: a line that was something better and fell away from it. Or they may be failed attempts, abandoned by whoever was doing the work, with the successful version made somewhere else.
And telling a distant relative from an ancestor is possible with genetics. It is not trivial, and nobody has done it here. DNA does not survive that long in African ground, and nobody has looked for the signatures that would separate a bred line from a grown one.
Why that valley and nowhere else
The Rift is a tear in the crust. The floor drops, sediment pours in and buries whatever is lying there within a season. Volcanoes lay down ash beds between the sediment layers, and ash can be dated to within a few thousand years. Then the tearing lifts those old layers back to the surface, where somebody can walk over them and look down.
Rapid burial, a built-in clock, and later exposure. That combination is close to unique on this planet.
So the concentration of finds in one valley is a fact about that valley.
Where the other peoples lived does the opposite. Lemuria is Indian and Pacific. Atlantis is Atlantic and Mediterranean. Both maritime. Both coastal.
Every coastline older than eleven thousand years is under a hundred and twenty metres of water. Tropical forest floor destroys bone in decades, along with wood, fibre, hide, cordage and boats, which is most of what a sea people builds with.
The comparison is available inside this book, and it is a mainstream one. The Denisovans are orthodox palaeontology. They have been looked for by well-funded teams with every method the field has, across sixteen years, because finding more of them would make a career.
What has been recovered is a fingertip, a jaw, some teeth and a rib. For a people who held half of Asia for hundreds of thousands of years.
Gigantopithecus is the same. A ten-foot ape, hunted for by everyone, known from four jawbones and a collection of teeth.
So the emptiness is not a failure of effort. Those bones are not findable, because the ground where those peoples lived does not keep them.
And they are one root among many
The esoteric sources put a great many contributors into the hybridization, and the hominins are one of them.
Whatever those hominins were, they are material this planet was carrying. They are not the only thing that went into us, and on the esoteric account they may not even be the only terrestrial contribution.
Over twenty extraterrestrial races are named. Lyra, Vega, the Pleiades, Sirius, Procyon, Tau Ceti, Andromeda, Arcturus, and the Reptilian, Grey and Anunnaki lines.
And the two peoples resident here contributed as well, and neither of those was a single race. Lemuria and Atlantis are root races, which in the Theosophical account means seven sub-races each, with their own countries and periods. Finyet says the Atlanteans were more than one species, welcomed here from different parts of the galaxy.
So what was assembled came from many places.
Which was probably not where the attention was
On the esoteric account this was work on the outskirts.
The same sources that describe the African operations put Lemuria across this entire period, and Koot Hoomi puts a fourth race civilization in the far north long before it. Those, on that account, were the peoples of the time, and they were the ones the world was built around.
The upright hominins in Africa were a stock, kept and left to run.
There was no need for us yet. The conditions of that world suited Lemurians and Atlanteans, and they had it.
The strait closes
The first volume of this book covers the Messinian at length, and the argument there is the strongest thing in it. This is the same event told again, briefly, because the chronology runs through it. A little more has come in since, on both sides, and it is included.
Africa had been pushing north into Europe for forty million years by then, and the sea between them had been narrowing the whole time.
Around six million years ago it shut.
The Mediterranean loses more water to evaporation than its rivers supply. It stays full only because the Atlantic flows in through the gap between Spain and Morocco. Close that gap and the sea begins to go.
It went.
What it did
The sea went. Salt was left behind in beds kilometres thick, and the rivers cut down to the new floor, the Nile carving a gorge past where Aswan now stands and the Rhone doing the same under what is now Lyon. Both canyons are buried and both were found by drilling. The basin stayed that way for about six hundred thousand years, and then the Atlantic broke back through and refilled it inside a year or two.
That is the argument of the first volume and it is set out there in full: Finyet's Atlantis is an arc through a basin whose floor lies kilometres down, no fall in sea level puts land there, and the only window in twenty million years when that ground stood dry is this one.
What matters here is narrower, and it is about the sequence.
The event was regional. It emptied one basin and refilled it, and nothing outside the Mediterranean registers it at all. So whatever Atlantean holdings stood on that arc were taken, and whatever stood across the Atlantic was untouched.
The centre could fall while the rest stood, and on this reading that is what happened.
Koot Hoomi, one of the Mahatmas, wrote about this in 1882. He said the sinking of Atlantis began in the Miocene, and that it culminated first in the disappearance of the largest continent, an event coincident with the elevation of the Alps, and second in the loss of Plato's island.
This generally corresponds to the timing of the Messinian, the drying and refilling of the Mediterranean described above.
Who else was on the planet
Five million years ago there was a civilization here.
Scott-Elliot describes Atlantean cities and airships, and gives the motive power as something carried in the operator rather than contained in a machine. Steiner describes building done without engineering knowledge. Blavatsky and the Mahatma letters place the Atlantean cycle across this whole period, and Koot Hoomi puts a fourth race civilization in the far north long before it.
And at that same moment, in Africa, the hominins were upright, with brains a third the size of ours, and no worked stone appears for another two million years.
Our own species is three hundred thousand years old. Five million years ago is more than four and a half million years before anything that could be called us.
What the mainstream account is built on
Everything known about those hominins comes from one strip of ground.
The productive fossil beds in East Africa, taken together, cover something like the area of Delaware. Against the whole land surface of this planet that is roughly one part in thirty thousand.
Put it the other way. If the land of the world were a football field, the piece that has given up these bones would be smaller than a postage stamp lying on it.
And what that postage stamp contains is remarkable. At least ten named species, several of them living at the same time. Ardipithecus, four or five kinds of Australopithecus, three kinds of Paranthropus, and the early members of Homo.
Homo is our genus. A genus is the level above species: the group of closely related species sharing a recent common ancestor. We are Homo sapiens, and the other members of Homo are the ones this book calls parahumans, among them the Neanderthals and the Denisovans.
Australopithecus has nothing to do with Australia. The name means southern ape, from the Latin for southern, and it was given because the first skull was found in South Africa.
Ten species of upright primate in one valley. Whatever was going on there, it was not a single line moving forward. It was a great many species, at once, in a very small place.
What was living across the rest of the world at that date is unknown, because almost nowhere else keeps bones.
The whole account of human origins rests on that fraction, extrapolated outward.