Ever wondered about how old Man is?

Most scientists would reply that modern Man probably appeared around 100,000 years ago, the culmination of a long-drawn process of Darwinian evolution which begun several million years ago. This is the dominant paradigm, one that's taught in schools and universities and one which itself is the crystallisation of the efforts of researchers in the 140 or so years since Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859.

But just how accurate is this date? What if a piece of irrefutable evidence turns up which pushes back this figure significantly?

On July 8, The Straits Times ran a report that Australian researchers had unearthed stone artefacts on Flores, an Indonesian island west of Timor, which showed that boats which could be steered and propelled fairly sophisticatedly were in use 840,000 years ago.

The Flores finding obviously doesn't fit in with what the rest of archaeology says since communication had to be fairly sophisticated in order to build boats like these. But although this in itself is troubling, it doesn't necessarily upset the apple-cart if it's a one-off, or a completely isolated case. The trouble is, it isn't. Shaking current wisdom: The Flores artefacts are actually the latest in a long list of finds stretching back hundreds of years that cast serious doubt on current thinking about Man's age. The entire record of these findings can be found in a massive, 900-page volume entitled Forbidden Archaeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race that was published some six years ago.

Authors Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson are devotees and scholars of India's Vedic scriptures which say that Man -fully evolved homo sapiens and not the other members of the homo genealogies -is much older than is currently thought.

(In anthropological nomenclature, modern Man is more accurately named homo sapiens sapiens, which literally means "double wise man" to emphasise his intelligence. This is to distinguish him from say the Neanderthals, known as homo sapiens neanderthalensis, who may be from the same lineage (although this is disputable) but is thought to lack the same level of intelligence (again, this may be disputed)).

Together with other Hindu traditions, the Vedas are believed to have been brought to India by "Aryan" migrants from the shores of the Caspian Sea, cousins of the Indo-Europeans who were the Hittites of Asia Minor (today's Turkey) and of the Hurrians of the upper Euphrates River.

These migrations are believed to have taken place in the second millennium BC and the Vedas were held to be not of human origin, having been composed by the gods themselves in a much more distant previous age. In time, the various components of the Vedas and the auxiliary literature that derived from them (the Mantras, Brahmanas) were augmented by the non-Vedic Puranas (ancient writings) and the great epic tales of the Mahabharata and Ramayana.

In the Puranas, the conventional view of linear time is rejected. Instead, cyclical or episodic time is postulated, with 3,600-year cycles and multiples thereof being the most important.

Cremo and Thompson propose that the Puranic view of time and history predicts "a bewildering mixture of hominid fossils, some anatomically modern and some not, going back tens and even hundreds of millions of years and occuring in locations all over the world".

"It also predicts a more numerous but similarly bewildering mixture of stone tools and artifacts, some showing a high level of technical ability and others not."

They set out to see if they could validate these assertions and the fruits of their efforts are, in a word, astonishing. There are fossilised human footprints found in volcanic ash in Laetoli, Tanzania, dated to 3.6 million years, anatomically modern human skeletons found in Europe dating to the Middle Pliocene (five million years) and similar skeletons dating to Early Pliocene in Africa, Java and South America, Italy and England.

There are advanced stone tools in Europe dating to the Oligocene era (38 million years), Californian tools dating to Pliocene, South America and Asia and numerous cases of carved mammal bones presumably for decorative purposes dating to the Pliocene and Miocene (25 million years) eras.

Most of these and other anomalous findings were published in respected academic journals like the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland and the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, yet are not public knowledge because of what the authors describe as a "knowledge filter". Against dissent: In short, the hypothesis is that there exists a prejudice against incongruous evidence that doesn't fit the dominant paradigm. This results in researchers ignoring and ultimately forgetting that such evidence exists.

Since the archaeological community has already accepted a certain view of Man's age, then it became unfashionable and in some cases, too dangerous, to challenge this view.

As a result, evidence which agrees with the dominant theory is readily accepted but that which doesn't is subjected to much more rigorous tests. The outcome is usually rejection and the researchers often face ridicule from their peers.

Predictably, Cremo and Thompson's book has been met with derision and criticism by a large part of the academic community, yet by the same token, there's also been enough acceptance from mainstream archaeologists to suggest that it should be taken seriously.

As the authors argue, it would be intellectually dishonest to ignore hundreds of contradictory findings that cast severe doubt on a current theory and yet, that is precisely what postmodern archaeology is guilty of today.

The points raised by the authors are bold and controversial. They make no attempt to mask their religious leanings but in reality, the evidence they have amassed through their eight-year search for the truth has no religious bias whatsoever and can and should be examined purely from the scientific point of view.

More importantly however, if what the authors assert can be taken as a realistic description of the state of archaeology today, then the Flores findings -like the hundreds of others before it -will quickly disappear into obscurity. Bad enough that Man's evolutionary history is already heavily shrouded in mystery but if this sort of suppression continues, things can only get worse.