There was a time in my father's life where it became important to him to know his family's ancestry as far back as he could find. This led him to his hometown's cemetery in Tokorozawa, northern Tokyo. The tombstones with our family name dated back to as far as 800 years ago, and then started to get too faint to be readable. Not even writings on stone could withstand the passage of time. Beyond that point, we actually don't know anymore.

We have then expanded the search to the family records, which in Japan are kept in Buddhist temples. Even when records exist, they are only provided to direct relatives of the individuals, even if they have died millennia ago. You have to be a first or second degree relative, which makes obtaining the records basically impossible, since several generations have passed in a thousand years. In a way this is imposed as means to "protect" the memory of past generations. If they did something bad, it dies with them.

Now imagine something that has happened 5,000 years ago. What is the likelihood we can obtain usable records from that time? What about 10,000 years ago? If carvings on an 800 years old tombstone has already faded, what kind of records can we get from 10 millennia ago? Can we even know if they had written records? The oldest writing we know of is the Sumerian cuneiform from 5,000 years ago. How could we possibly know what happened before that?

We have the combined study of geology, pottery and carbon dating to try to place fossils and places in a timeline, but even those get blurry depending on the time frame we want to examine. Carbon-14 dating can only cover a period of 14,000 years, and even then, the precision varies depending on the amount of C-14 present on the atmosphere at the time being measured, which can vary depending on many factors. In addition, carbon dating can only be used with organic materials, which excludes buildings, pottery, and everything else.

So how do they know the age of an ancient building? They don't. Geology can measure the age of the terrain the building is sitting on, but not when it was constructed. What they do is to examine the pottery found on the site, if any. But pottery is not organic, so how do they know how old it is? They don't. They instead look at the pottery artistic style, which in many cases can be generic and tell us nothing. So they look inside the pottery, and date the organic material found inside, if any. That tells the age of the contents inside, and not the pottery itself, but that's better than nothing. Add to that the inherited inaccuracies of carbon dating, and we end up with a pretty good chance of error.

Take, for example, a large stone building that was constructed to house workers from a gold mine. Once the gold was gone, the building was abandoned, until it was found and reused by a family of settlers 400 years later. Due to a drought, the place was abandoned again, and settlers have sporadically occupied and repurposed the building for different situations over the next 600 years. Now, archeologists will find pottery contents that date back only to the time of the various random settlers. The original inhabitants were miners, who owned no pottery, and took their tools with then when they left. Carbon dating will tell that the construction is about 600 years old, when in reality it was build 1,000 years ago. Pottery contents will tell that the inhabitants were settlers, when in reality they were miners. The building's original purpose was lost in time. These kinds of indirect readings can be highly subjective.

Now add to this a historian's pride. Once a time and purpose of an archeological site is determined, can that be challenged by others? It certainly can, but there will be resistance that creates inertia - a refusal to change. If the original dating is challenged by new evidence, this also means that someone's professional reputation and credibility is at risk. They will protect their reputation even at the cost of creating a false historical record. It's human nature on its best, and I bet it happens in many other professions. The problem is that historical records affect all of humanity, while many other professions tend to be way less consequential.

A classic example of such historical disputes is the age of the great pyramid in Egypt. The current historical record claims that it was constructed by the Egyptian monarch Khufu in a period of only 20 years. Modern constructors claim this would require that a stone should be cut from quarry, shaped, polished, transported, and placed on its final location every 2 minutes. The stones had varied sizes, so consider that each one weighted about 2.5 tons in average.

It is a known fact that the Old Kingdom had no slaves, so who were the workers? The structure has been labeled as a tomb for the pharaoh, but it has none of the famous wall inscriptions that decorate all other real tombs in that area, and no mummy or even an empty sarcophagus was ever found on location. It was integral part of that period's historical and archeological records that such walls (and ceiling) paintings, carvings and writing were essential parts of death rituals in Egyptian tombs. The official explanation was that the pyramid had been previously ransacked, which could had well happened, but did they also steal the walls and ceilings carvings?

Here again, stone cannot be carbon dated, and there is a possible case where the pyramid was already there when Egyptians arrived, they have no idea who built it even by that time, and it was simply repurposed by the Old Kingdom in the same way that many Christian churches and cathedrals were repurposed to become Muslim temples during the Ottoman empire period in many parts of Africa, Europe and the Middle-East.

There were cases where a pharaoh ordered the cartouche inscriptions of an ancestor to be re-carved with his own name, as means to claim the authorship of a previously created monument. There are cases where the erosion on a monument is much older than the hieroglyphs carved on it, where the carving technique and quality is way inferior to the construction quality of the monument itself, showing that it was not even built by the same people. Nonetheless, historians accept for a fact that these were all build by the same people, no matter what the evidence indicates. Reputations are at risk, and that takes precedence over the validity of the actual work. In this case, the veracity of historical facts, and how they are placed in the timeline.

More recently, DNA tests on ancient Mexican skulls reveals a very different story comparing to the currently accepted one. Some of the prominent monarchs from the Mezo-American areas were northern European, complete with red hair (as still present on the skull), and also African kings in ancient Mexico. This radically defies the current understanding that makes it impossible for these people to be in Mexico 2,000 years ago. The general methodology dictates that if the new evidence doesn't corroborate with existing beliefs, it must be discarded. However, DNA is the math of biology - the results are conclusive and cannot be denied or disputed - especially when the northern European skull still has red hair preserved on it. The DNA test was just a confirmation. When it comes to protecting one's professional reputation, how far could one go to deny the facts?

Another impossible artifact is a large pottery found in a dilapidated pyramid in Colombia. Yes, there are also pyramids in Colombia, mostly ransacked by local farmers, who make some extra income by selling whatever they find to the open market (whoever wants to buy it). The pottery is inscribed with cuneiform writing, identical to that as found in ancient Sumer from 5,000 years ago (Middle-East), but in Colombia instead (South America). It cannot possibly be there, and it cannot be explained. The farmer who owned it was using it to feed his pigs in the backyard.

Another impossible archeological artifact were 3 pinecone-shaped decorations found in South America, with Sumerian cuneiform inscriptions that commemorate the construction of a temple in the city of Sumer. That has happened 5,000 years ago in the Middle-East, present Iraq. How could it possibly be dug out of an archeological site in South America?

One classic example of impossible things is from the city of Petra, located in modern Jordan (Middle-East). The official record claims the entire city was carved on stone in a mix of Greek and Roman styles by an Ottoman nomad tribe, who at the time lived on sheepskin tends in the desert. One could dispute how it was possible for a bunch of nomad tribesmen merchants who had never build anything other than a sheepskin tent have suddenly developed the skills to carve an entire city on stone, in a style they had never seen before. In addition, geologists estimate the level of erosion present on the exposed parts of the stone-carved buildings would require thousands of years, and not hundreds. That is science, and cannot be disputed, but nonetheless, it is still being ignored to keep the current version of the story.

When it comes to the lost city of Petra (in Jordan), they could not defy the geological survey of the site, which makes their version of the story impossible, so the archaeological excavations have been terminated and the site closed. The Jordanian government forbids it to be explored. I have been there in person, and even I (not a geologist) can tell that the wind erosion on the rock could not had rounded the corners that deep in just a few hundred years. That would take thousands of wind blowing years! In addition, some of the buildings on the entrance look brand new in comparison to most of the rest, so it is obvious that this is another case of an existing abandoned site being found and repurposed. This doesn't match the official history, so the site can no longer be studied. Less than 10% of Petra has been excavated before all work was suspended and the site closed to archaeologists.

There is also the case of the largest concentration of monolithic stone constructions in Africa that is being completely ignored by archaeology. It extends from South Africa all the way to Zimbabwe - quite an extensive area. The place is described in 5,000 years old Sumerian tablets, so it wasn't found by accident. It contains tens of thousands of circular stone constructions that are ALL interconnected as a single piece. Each of the structures has its own unique shape and configuration, to include a large amount of terraces like the ones found in the Inca city of Machu Picchu in Peru (South America). If you fly over the region, you can see them stretching over the mountains for miles. The official history record claims them to be cattle corrals, where no more than 5 to 6 thousand farmers have lived. The interconnections were "roads" to guide the cattle to the pastures.

Why (and how) would 6,000 farmers growing cows build tens of thousands of circular stone buildings, and then interconnect them all as a single thing? Take into consideration that none of the buildings had doors or windows. How did the cows get inside? The stone walls that interconnected them also had no doorways, so how were they used as roads? Some of the constructions have monumental scale, so why would farmers build in that scale? All buildings were made using the same particular crystallized stone that rings like a bell, which had to be quarried far away. Why didn't they just use the local stone? What's the purpose of building these by the tens of thousands of interconnected circular structures over such a large area, with no doors or windows? Is this site being excavated by archaeologists? After all, it's not only the largest concentration of stone constructions in the planet, but it's also mentioned in Sumerian records from 5 millennia ago. Nope. It is not being investigated, and they are keeping the cattle corrals story on the books.

One last example of hard-to-believe official historical records come from the monolithic period, where the very same methods were used to build impossible walls in the Middle-East, the Eastern Island, South, Central, and North Americas. Each giant stone was cut into quite a variety of shapes and sizes, and then plugged into each other with laser precision placement without mortar. Thanks to the way they were built, those were the only walls that have survived countless earthquakes over thousands of years, where everything else has collapsed. Current official archeological records still claim that the construction technique matches all over the world, separated by planetary distances and oceans, by mere coincidence. We are asked to believe that those are completely unrelated. Any challenge to these claims will be promptly discarded, because our current understanding of that period cannot explain how these things could be possibly related.

It's impossible, and yet, it's there. If it doesn't match what we have established as true, then it has to be discarded and cannot be displayed on museums or taught in schools. That's the establishment perpetuating its own truth over time. Otherwise, a lot of respected people's reputation may be at risk. It comes down that the official history of humanity hangs by the personal vanity of a few "respected" people sitting on high chairs. For as long as we depend on them, we may never know the truth, no matter how scientific methodologies may evolve. That's the bottom line.