The Ior Bock Saga: Is Everything We Know about History Wrong? Chapter two

[Carmen Elsa Irarragorri Wyland]

What makes Ior Bock’s account so extraordinary is that it wouldn’t just mean that history as we know it is wrong, but that much of the physical and social sciences including: geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, archaeology, and even linguistics, are wrong as well. While that is certainly possible, it is something that is, simply by its nature, unlikely and would require a lot of convincing proof.

Assessing Ior Bock’s Claims

Ior Bock claims that modern humans first appeared before 50 million years ago, something for which there is currently no indisputable evidence. The only primates during that time for which there is fossil data were some early prosimians. No apes or monkeys appear until the Oligocene (35-23 Ma) and even the earliest bipedal ape fossils (such as Sahelanthropus tchadensis) are no more than 7 million years old.

Cast of the Sahelanthropus tchadensis holotype cranium TM 266-01-060-1, dubbed Toumaï, in facio-lateral view. Specimen of Anthropology Molecular and Imaging Synthesis of Toulouse. (Didier Descouens/CC BY SA 4.0)

The oldest recorded fossils resembling anatomically modern humans are a fraction of that age, only about 195,000 years old. If we consider phylogenetic evidence, the date is pushed back to perhaps 290,000 years ago.  To be fair, there was a recent finding of an almost modern-looking skull in Morocco dating to 300,000 B.P. But this is still much too young to support anything like Ior Bock’s story of human origins.

Also, the most recent cycle of ice ages started about 2.5 Ma, during the late Pliocene. Over the past 2 million years or so there have been alternating periods consisting of glacial maxima (ice ages) lasting about 100,000 years and interglacial periods where the glaciers retreat, resulting in a temporary warming of the planet for a period of about 10,000 years. We are currently in an interglacial period which is why Europe and North America are not encased in ice. The most recent cycle of ice ages (or glaciations) before the present one ended 260 million years ago during the Permian Period. There is no geological evidence of a major glaciation event at 50 Ma. In fact, paleoclimate data shows that the planet was warmer than average 50 million years ago.

Artist’s depiction of Ice Age on Earth. (CC BY SA 4.0)

Ior Bock’s view of human evolution is also different from what we know from phylogenetics and fossil evidence. Goats and humans are on separate evolutionary lines that diverged 80-100 million years ago which means that by 50 million years ago, they would already be along lineages that had diverged and would have been incapable of merging. The only way that the rise of the human species could have anything to do with a fusion of ruminants and primates is genetic manipulation by an intelligent agent.

Based on our knowledge of humans and goats, there simply isn’t a biological or genetic reason to believe that this ever happened. Humans do have traits in common with goats, but they have just as many traits in common with cattle or horses - so unless his supporters want to argue for those connections, Bock’s view cannot be defended on that basis.

Goat. (CC0) Ior Bock claimed that humans were the result of some sort of combination of goats and monkeys.

His most problematic errors may be in the field of linguistics. Ior Bock creates several etymologies of words that simply don’t stand up to scrutiny. For example, he claims that the word ‘planet’ comes from the words “plan” simply meaning plan and “et”, which Bock claims means family and says that ‘planet’ thus means “family plan to make the world whole.” But practically all scholars agree that the word ‘planet’ comes from the Greek word planets, which means wanderer and is based on the belief that the planets were wandering stars as opposed to the apparently unmoving stars which appeared to be embedded in a celestial sphere.

He also claims that the word ‘history’ comes from “his story” by which he appears to mean the story from the perspective of men and that the word ‘mystery’ comes from “her miss-story” meaning, most likely, the story from the perspective of women. However, the word ‘history’ comes from a Greek word that essentially means inquiry, and mystery comes from another Greek word which means “hidden” or “secret.” Many of the etymologies he suggests are not only demonstrably false but some would only work if we were to assume that the ancients spoke modern English. It could be claimed that there is an effort among linguists to cover up the true etymology of words, but this is just a conspiracy theory that cannot be proven or disproven.

‘Man and Woman contemplating the moon’ (1818/1824) by Caspar David Friedrich. (Public Domain) Bock claimed that ‘history’ and ‘mystery’ made reference to the stories presented by men and women separately.

All the errors in other fields cast doubt on the reliability of Ior Bock when he speaks about history and archaeology as well. There is little solid evidence that support’s Bock’s claim that Finland was a center of civilization before the Middle Ages or that it was inhabited by modern humans before the Holocene. The only evidence of human settlement of Finland before the end of the last interglacial is a possible Neanderthal site dating to 125,000 B.P.

It is possible that Ior Bock is on to something, but the many errors he makes across multiple fields calls his reliability as a preserver of ancient secrets into question. For this reason, it is more likely that the mainstream view, despite its admitted flaws, is closer to the correct view of history… at least closer than the Bock saga.

By Caleb Strom

 

[Carmen Elsa Irarragorri Wyland]

My note:

This is an interesting theory, but it has many holes, and yet most of human history has as many holes as this one does.

The fact that there have been civilizations prior to what we recognize, is probably very true, since this is a World beyond time, and no matter how far back we go, there is still farther back to go.

And what is back and what is forward, is hard to tell in a circle.

But for sure, it seems that he was smoking something that made him see these things!

LOL!