Who needs Annunaki ? Although Zecharia Sitchin’s The 12th Planet is around for over thirty years (first published in 1976) and apparently it is very popular (I recently bought 45th printing of the book, published in April of 2007; it has been translated into 21 languages in over million copies), I didn’t know of him till March of this year. It’s a book worthy of reading, regardless of either supportive or confronting attitude.
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Tree of Life (Sumer, ca. 2500 BC) And, if by any chance Annunaki did engineer us, why they didn’t give us a writing medium better than clay tablets? Surely they didn’t use those on their spaceships. |
Zecharia Sitchin masterfully combines archeological, linguistic, and astronomical data to web together religious descriptions and evolutionary science on the origins of Earth and mankind. His main source are clay tablets of Sumer and succeeding civilizations, covering some three thousand years BC. In essence, his main thesis is that Homo Sapiens was genetically engineered from Homo Erectus by the Annunaki, the visitors from Nibiru, the 10th planet of our Solar system (12th, if Sun and our Moon are counted equally in the system) which on very elongated orbit is far away in deep space most of the time but has perigee in the Earth’s proximity every 3600 years (and because of that is still uncounted for by our official astronomy). Putting aside, for now, all the objections to Sitchin’s books (there are six or seven more besides The 12th Planet) coming mainly from the academic establishment, my first question is: why Sitchin needs Annunaki? His answer is that sudden appearance of the Middle East civilizations can’t be explained by the evolution: an evolutionary path from the hominid of half a million years ago to the Sumerian of dozen thousand years ago would require several million years. Well, Sitchin might be in error here: he is consid-ering biological evolution only. For some forty years or so, behavioral scientists recognize many aspects of human society which are not consequences of biological but rather cultural evolution, and which, in many instances, are in conflict with genetically inherited instincts. The decisive change from Homo Erectus to Homo Sapiens was due to culturally determined restrains on innate responses. Human mind did not evolve as a guide for Homo Sapiens biological evolution but is a product of cultural evolution. The existence of mankind in its present size and structure is warranted by the rules of human conduct (e.g., related to property, honesty, trade, competition, and privacy) which are not inherited but evolved by tradition, teaching and imitation. When started concurrently with biological evolution, cultural revolution changed enormously the pace of human development. So, I can propose that the Middle East civilizations are native to Earth, developed in a favorable but rather isolated environment at the time. When they came in contact with some hominids at pre-cultural stage of evolution, surely they were god-like to them. |
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