Zecharia Sitchin’s writing is hysterically funny. If you thought Thor Heyerdahl was loony, or that Von Daniken was a kook, then you just have to pick up Sitchin’s book, Genesis Revealed. This guy is the epitome of crackpots.
His theory is two parts science fiction, one part ancient astronauts and four parts pure fudge. Sitchin believes that mankind rose suddenly four thousand years BCE when ancient astronauts from the twelfth planet, variously known as Wormwood, Niburu or Marduk, came to earth, genetically modified Neanderthal and created a slave race called Homo Sapiens. These extraterrestrial godlings are called the Annunaki. We were designed because these extraterrestrials needed someone to do manual labor, which includes building pyramids and such.
Sitchin also claims that nuclear radiation fallout from weapons caused the demise of Ur by an “evil wind,” mentioned in Sumerian literature.
Now, aside from purely entertainment value, the equivalent of watching undergrads at a frat party acting really stupid, there is no scientific value to this theory. Now I know that supporters have concocted a bunch of seemingly rational “but what about” kind of discussion points to confuse matters, but each of these elements taken by themselves proved the paucity of Sitchin’s methodology.
1. Sitchin claims great prowess in translating Sumerian texts and seals, especially VA 243. The difficulty with this is that his translations are very often inaccurate, sloppy and misapplied. He claims that the Sumerians knew about a twelfth planet, when they really only had knowledge of five.
2. Sitchin offers evidence of a rogue planet. The problem with this is that earth has an orbital eccentricity of only 0.0167. That means that if you account for the bodies we know are orbiting earth, there is no other body out there, no matter how eccentric an orbit it may have, that can possibly be impacting us. We can measure the orbital eccentricities of systems 150 light years away with as a great an accuracy, and there just is no room for a mythical twelfth planet of the type Sitchin posits.
3. Sitchin believes that Neanderthal was genetically modified to become human. Sitchin shows a supernal naivet about both Biblical scientific creationism as well as traditional evolutionary theory. He can only see evolution as an either or model, and since the reality doesn’t fit his limited understanding, he throws everything under his kook-mobile. First, if we presuppose intelligent design, we get past the problems of Neanderthal dying out and man rising. On the other hand, if we examine evolutionary theory, we see that Neanderthal dies out when the two PARALLEL evolutionary models come into conflict. And please, don’t listen to the nonsense argument that goes “if we evolved from chimpanzees, why haven’t the chimpanzees died out.” The actuality is that evolutionary scientists believe that man and chimps and other great apes are on separate evolutionary branches, and since they all fall into relatively non-competitive niches in the eco-system, they can all exist quite comfortably.
If this is at all difficult to understand, or if you are falling prey to Sitchin’s evo-babble, then I suggest you invest your time with books on either evolutionary science or intelligent design theory, and not this fabricated nonsense.
4. Sitchin claimed that unusual human genes discovered in 2001 were inserted into the genome by aliens. This theory may fit in well with X-Files theorists, but the reality is that there are a number of possibilities on how these genes came to be part of the human genome. The original idea that there was a kind of horizontal gene transfer from bacteria seems unlikely now, considering all the evidence, but there are several other sources that are logical, scientifically verifiable and do not require the existence of extraterrestrials.
Finally, Sitchin, and all his ilk from Von Daniken and the ancient astronaut crowds, rely on one main piece of argumentation. There eternal question is “How did primitive man develop science, architecture and the other trappings of civilization so quickly.”
These crack pots are fond of noting how immense the pyramids are. How could primitive man build such marvels FIVE THOUSAND years ago when modern man can’t put up a building on the site of the 9/11 disaster seven years after. Well, the truth is the primitive man is primitive, not stupid. Engineering techniques known at the time, including a lot of man-sweat-hours could do an awful lot. And when you are under the kind of despotic totalitarianism of a theocracy or a slave-owning society, you have a lot of potential for getting a whole heck of a lot of people doing the same thing at the same time.
I find it most insulting when we don’t give ordinary human beings credit enough to figure out that you put a bunch of big blocks at the bottom, and fewer blocks on top. I find it insulting when some people think that just because they were using bronze or copper tools that they weren’t capable of chiseling stone to exact dimensions. It’s the same kind of logic that sees aliens making crop circles, when a couple of drunk undergrads with some rope and a plank can do the same thing.
