Thursday, December 29, 2005

Another mammoth story
In 1979, Jack Cuozzo, a dentist from New Jersey and a creationist, took his family and a borrowed portable x-ray machine on the first of several trips to France to study the skulls of Neanderthals. The international paleo-anthropological fraternity of evolutionist Bible haters somehow found out that he was there and sent their homicidal minions to stop him. The amazing story is told in his book Buried Alive: The Startling Untold Story About Neanderthal Man.

Dr. Cuozzo has two theories to advance in his book. First, he believes that an honest examination of Neanderthal remains will show that they grew slowly and lived to great ages. They are, in fact, the generations of that followed Adam and who lived to be hundreds of years old. Adam lived 930 years, Seth lived 912 years, Enoch lived 365 years, Methuselah lived 969 years and died in the year of the flood, and his grandson Noah lived 950 years. In fact, Neanderthals aren't a separate species, that's just what you get to look like after a few hundred years. Dr. Cuozzo's other theory is that paleontologists and anthropologists know that this is true and have systematically falsified evidence in order to support evolution and cast doubt on the Bible.

While Dr. Cuozzo was traveling around Europe trying to uncover the truth about Neanderthals, he just happened to stumble across proof that men and dinosaurs lived together. Lucky for us, he's posted that entire chapter of his book on his website. Of course, a woolly mammoth features prominently in his story.

In 1982 Dr. Cuozzo and his family went back to France to look at some of the caves associated with the late Pleistocene. The famous cave art of southern France is not traditionally assumed to have been a product of Neanderthals; it is assumed to have been produced by modern humans. Anthropologists have a number of reasons for this belief; Cuozzo is sure it is a result of anti-Bible and anti-Neanderthal prejudice.

We pick up his story in Les Eyzies:
Les Eyzies is the capital of pre-history in France. In three of these caves we were escorted by tour guides, but when we entered the fourth we examined it closely without any authorities present. The first tree: Rouffignac, 14 km from Les Fyzies; Combarelles, 3 km from Les Byzies; and Font-de-Gaume, 2 km from Les Byzies, all had fees for entrance and tours of the long, selected routes in each cave. There were many public passageways in these first three caves and many that were blocked off to the public.

The standard evolutionary cave propaganda was preached by each of the tour guides in French, whether it was a walking tour or a miniature train tour. If you were a creationist, you needed a very thick skin and a lot of anti-acid medicine for your stomach when you visited these caves.

[...]

The fourth cave or "Grotte," as the French call it, was the very dark and extraordinary Bernifal. Bernifal is 5 km from Les Eyzies and required some real searching to discover its whereabouts. There were no signs in Les Eyzies or outside of town indicating where it was located.

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I had previously purchased a small booklet at the Museum of Saint Germain-en-Laye which described this cave along with many others. It was a guide book which described the decorated caves "ouvertes au public" (open to the public).

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In another book that I had taken with us, Ann Sieveking describes the important caves of the valley of the Petite Beune River. She says, "Eleven decorated shelters have been found in the valley of the Petite Beune, distributed on either side of the river over a distance of about seven kilometers. Only one of these, Bemifal, is a cave of major importance and it is a deep cave while the majority of the lessor sites are daylit shelters.

[...]

Another problem arose when we looked for this very important cave in the recent Michelin map of the Perigord. We had just purchased it in 1982, but it did not reveal the location of Bernifal, even though it did display all popular grottes (caves) and shelters. The little guide book from the museum was published in 1976 and Sieveking's book in 1979. Both had spoken about it in detail. It was strange that the Michelin map had completely left it out when it was of major importance. The guidebook advised bringing one's own light to see Bemifal. While it was open to the public, no light was provided for you to see the walls. I had never heard of a public cave with no lighting. It also said that the floor of the cave was very slippery and you just might fall without a "appui de la main" or cane. That, in itself, is enough to make one suspicious.

[...]

By the time we arrived in the summer of 1982 a decision was made to close Bemifal to the public. It didn't make too much sense since the caves are large tourist attractions and therefore sources of revenue. Bemifal was open at least from 1976 to 1979. So, with Bernifal not on the Michelin map, it became almost invisible. All we could conclude was that something was wrong with Bemifal and that tourists were not to be allowed inside anymore. After weighing all the previous knowledge, we became more determined to find it.

Apparently someone else thought that closing the cave was a bad idea, too. Whoever this was unofficially opened it to the public once again. This time the cave was not opened by a bureaucratic government agency, but by someone using a much more rapid method called "the axe or sledge hammer" technique, to bash in the front door. That's how we found it when we finally located the entrance.

[...]

We proceeded towards the farm house after we noticed that the only bridge across this stream was directly in front of the house. It was a small bridge which had a chain extending from one side of it to the other and a sign hanging from the middle of the chain. It read, "Passage interdite," meaning crossing was forbidden.

That's enough to give you a flavor of Cuozzo's prose. He employs more than one styly in his book. This is his travelogue/adventure story voice. It's chatty and informative. There are shadows, but they don't overwhelm the narrative. Later he employs full throated conspiratorial prose, with its shrill sarcasm and wailing sense of persecution.

Cuozzo's key points, so far, are these: The caves are controlled by a tourist industry that pushed "standard evolutionary cave propaganda." Parts of some caves are closed to the public. Although Bernifal was mentioned in older books about the region, it was not marked on the newest map. The only access to the cave was chained off and marked with a "No Trespassing" sign. Someone had attempted to block the cave with a door, but this had been vandalized. There were no lights in the cave.

The cave was cold and dangerous, so the Cuozzo family only stayed for a few minutes. Cuozzo photographed everything that he could, including a well-known drawing of a mammoth in the first chamber of the cave. As they were leaving, they met the farmer who was upset that they had entered the cave. He chased them to where their car was parked and away from his land.

Cuzzo finds all of this "interesting" and "suspicious," words which, in his use, usually mean "sinister" and "evidence of a cover-up."
One of the last things an evolutionist will ever admit or believe is that Paleolithic man or woman saw a live dinosaur. This simply will not do. According to their theories, the age of man did not begin until some 2.5-3 million year ago with his predecessors in Africa, and certainly, they believe the men who decorated this cave existed within the last 200,000 years, most likely within the last 30,000 years. Dinosaurs, on the other hand died out at least 65 million year ago. This, to them, is fact.

Every cave that we visited and every decorated cave that the public is allowed to tour will "mammal" you to death. I mean all they will show you are mammals. This doesn't mean that down some other passageway reptiles can't be found. Where they take you there are no drawings or carvings of reptiles. It's as reptiles never existed. We know that this is not true because we still have reptiles today. Snakes, lizards, turtles, alligators, and tuataras are all part of our modern fauna, but conspicuously absent from cave drawings. The cave painters and engravers surely had reptiles in their age. Where were they? More specifically, we must make direct inquiry about cave evidence concerning the existence of those "terrible lizards" or dinosaurs. Are there dinosaurs depicted on cave walls?

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One of the amazing things that happened inside the Bemifal Cave was that in the process of shooting pictures in all directions, I took a picture of an actual dinosaur carving. This could be the very reason why Bemifal was suddenly closed to the public when the creation movement of the seventies and eighties started to gain public acceptance. No dinosaurs ever existed with man, they said; therefore, no paintings and no carvings. The other caves must be neatly cordoned off so that no unjaundiced eye ever sees a reptile figure on a wall. We were never supposed to see this. It was mainly carved into the rock with only a little dab of paint on it, therefore not easy to see, especially with flashlights.

My photograph... actually shows a dinosaur-like creature in head-to-head combat with a mammoth. This, I believe, is the first time that this carving has ever been revealed to the public. These images were carved into the walls using some of the natural configurations of the limestone as part of the anatomy. What type of dinosaur is this?

To give Cuozzo as fair a shake as possible I'm showing his illustrations from his website. I haven't even cropped them differently that he did. This is his evidence as he presented it.




There are two great orders of dinosaurs: the Saurischia (lizard-hipped) and the Ornithischia (bird-hipped). This division is based on the structure of the pelvis (hip). We can't see the pelvic (hip) structure in this sculpture so we have to classify it by some other means.

In the Saurischian dinosaurs the teeth of the jaws are set into the margins or only in the front. In this specimen, there are what appear to be teeth along the one side towards the front part of the snout, but not much is seen in the front of the snout. Ornithischia tended to be herbivorous while the Saurischians were carnivorous. This dinosaur is in a combative stance. Carnivores tend to be combative, but some herbivores are also combative. However, only Saurischians had a hollowed area in front of the eye. We may also infer from the short upper limbs that this was a bipedal dinosaur (walked on two hind legs).

From these features it seems possible to tentatively classify this dinosaur sculpture into the suborder Theropoda. These Saurischian creatures were almost exclusively carnivorous, bipedal, with strong hind legs and small forelimbs. They supposedly flourished during the entire Mesozoic era (230 to 62 million years ago). To go any further would be pure guesswork. To say it was a Teratosauris, Allosauris. Acrocanthosauris, or such would not be possible, given the limited data. However, to be very forthright, it must be stated that this is a dinosaur, period.

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Regardless of whether this sculpture was done in the Upper or Middle Paleolithic, by either Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, Magdelaine, or Gravettian people, it was still accomplished by a human. This human either saw a dinosaur and mammoth in battle or had a portable piece of artwork that contained this piece of information and had been handed down for several generations. Because I believe that we have rather good evidence for these caves being post-flood caves and for post-flood burials in other caves, I believe that the latter is true. It was accomplished by a person who had a piece of portable art, but a human saw it happen.

One other possibility exists and that is the post-Hood existence of both dinosaurs and mammoths originating from the ark. They both could have come off together, but because of unsuitable environmental conditions the dinosaurs became extinct while the mammoth and other mammals adapted to the harsher atmospheric and terrestrial surroundings.

The kindest thing I can say is that Cuozzo is able to see a lot more detail on that cave wall than I can. To me, even in Cuozzo's drawing, the dinosaur looks like a children's hand puppet, possibly of the same genus a Cecil the Sea-Sick Sea Serpent. For that matter, his mammoth has a rather soft and lumpy look to it, too. This is not to say that I believe Bob Clampett and Stan Freberg were around during the late Paleolithic putting on puppet shows to entertain the Cro-Magnons, though we probably shouldn't exclude that theory until more evidence as to their whereabouts has been gathered.



Let's look at Cuozzo's mammoth. It's is unlike any other Paleolithic mammoth I have seen, including the one directly below it on the same cave wall. Although most cave art has an almost abstract simplicity to it, the key identifying elements of an animal are usually crystal clear. With a mammoth, the identifying element is usually the silhouette--domed head, high shoulders and sloping back. Even more than the tusks and trunk, the silhouette protruding above the brush, would be the first part of a mammoth to be seen by a person and the part used to identify the animal. Compared to other Paleolithic mammoth paintings, the silhouette of Cuozzo's is shapeless.

In addition, since the outline of his mammoth continues around the head and on to the front leg, the lack of tusks or a meaningful trunk is almost inexplicable. The only explanation must be that this contest between mammoth and dinosaur occurred before the elephant got its trunk. As Kipling explains:
IN the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side; but he couldn't pick up things with it.




Back to Jack:
This wall paint was probably red ochre mixed with animal fat. It seems to allow the time frame of this cave to be in a Neanderthal period.

Keeping the red ochre and the dinosaur carving in mind, we must ask how does this fit in the modern scientific view of history? It really doesn't fit at all because the dinosaur eliminates approximately 62-65 million years and makes man, dinosaur, and mammoth (a mammal) contemporaries.'(4) The red ochre on the same cave walls as a dinosaur throws all the timetables off. No wonder the cave was closed.

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Is it because no one has seen it, no one will admit to seeing it, or no one will dare go to see it? I think the latter two reasons are the most plausible. What we are dealing with is a monolithic structure in modern science where there is absolutely no evidence which could possibly shed some doubt on the evolutionary interpretation of life. According to them, it just doesn't exist. And if it did exist, it wouldn't be scientific. Therefore, why go see it? But she did say she had no doubt that the images were there. As I write this a number of years later, I can almost guarantee that those images don't exist anymore, or at least a padlocked steel door has replaced the broken wooden one.


If Dr. Cuozzo had bothered to check, during the fifteen years that passed between his visit to the cave and the publication of his book, he could have found out what happened to the cave and its art. If he had looked deeper and not relied on his sense of persecution to supply facts, he would have discovered why Bernifal was closed in the early eighties. Alone among the caves of Les Eyzies, Bernifal is privately owned. The farmer whose "No Trespassing" sign, fields, and demolished door Cuozzo and his family tramped over is the owner of the cave.

Today, the cave of Bernifal is open to the public four months out of the year and is included in a number of package tours of the region. The farmers who own the cave are also the tour guides. I don't know if the image of a dinosaur puppet attacking a trunkless mammoth has been carved off the wall by the evolutionist establishment or not. However, if I were to write a book making major claims based on one fifteen year-old, illegally obtained photo, I would at least try to find out.

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