Erich Von Daniken - The Gold Of The Gods

2 - The War Of The Gods
red hot, but they were not consumed by fire. Smooth of body and fair
of face they appeared in the twilight. The people in the places they had
passed through had wished them dead. But that did not come to pass.
Then consternation seized those from Xibalba." (Popol Vuh.)
The reader is entitled to ask what this detour taking in a Sumerian
cuneiform inscription, the Old Testament and the Popol Vuh has to do
with my tunnel builders. I am trying to produce arguments for my
conviction that in the very beginning there was only one source of the
origin of homo sapiens, namely the spacemen who first made the
mutation. Only much later, when peoples and races had settled in other
parts of the globe, were new experiments in new places introduced into
the first primordial tradition. But the core of the act of creation, namely
that the gods created the first men in their own image, is preserved in
all the worldwide traditions! The creation of man by extraterrestrial
intervention does not interfere with the theory of our ancestry or the
theory of evolution.
Now there are two questions. Firstly, what event set off the process of
becoming man? Secondly, why did homo sapiens alone of all the kinds
of hominids become intelligent?
There are many answers, but none of them is convincing. About a
million years ago all hominid types of ape had a brain capacity of
about 25 cubic inches. If the climate drove the apes down from the
trees during the following millennia, that must have included all kinds
of apes and not just the one which was selected to produce homo
sapiens. But if the ability to produce tools had been a prerequisite for
development and further evolution, there should not really be any apes
left today. "Is it absolutely essential to become man in order not to die
out?" asks Oskar Kiss Maerth in his book Der Anfang war das Ende
(The Beginning was the End). With regard to the problem of the origin
of man, Maerth puts exciting questions like this:
"If one race of monkeys was forced to stand on its hind legs for fear of