Lorber not only forecast with surprising accuracy what present-day astronomers and atomic physicists were to discover, but also to some extent the research findings of other disciplines that did not even exist in the middle of the last century. These are the field of palaeontology, the study of animal and plant fossils, and anthropology, the science of man, his origins, etc.
In 1856, a strangely formed skull was found in the Neander Valley (= Tal) near Duesseldorf. It was larger than the present human skull, with a receding forehead and large bony prominences above the eyes, like those seen in the great apes of today. In 1872, Professor Virchow, Germany's reading anthropologist, rejected the thesis that this was the skull of a prehistoric man, considering it a ridiculous idea. In his opinion, the strange form of the skull was due to rheumatoid arthritis and rickets. For years, no one dared gave another interpretation, but slowly the situation changed.
In 1886, similar skulls were found in Belgium, in 1887 in France and Spain, and with them stone tools that could be dated. There was no doubt now that there had been a prehistoric man who had lived in Europe forty to sixty thousand years earlier. More human fossils were found near Heidelberg in 1907, and later in Asia and Africa, and these dated several hundred thousand years back. Today, the finds go back over more than a million years, yet although there have been so many of them, no clear picture has emerged. Various theories were put forward, and there have even been occasional attempts to support such theories with very clever forgeries. The search has gone on for a hundred years, but still the missing link has not been found.
It is not our aim in this book to consider the different theories, but rather to show that in this field, too, New Revelation has anticipated major aspects of research that have only been tackled at a much later stage. No one would ever have thought, in the middle of the last century, that prehistoric men could have lived on this earth millions of years ago, people walking upright but never getting beyond a certain level of primitive development, until suddenly, about six thousand years ago, a completely new human being appeared who had intellectual powers and with surprising rapidity initiated civilizations, founded states, invented writing, and produced the concept of justice and laws.
Before that, there had been no appreciable change for millions of years, but now amazing advances were made within a very short period. Suddenly, a new power, quite unknown until then, came to life in man.
"Adamitic man had to come", it says in New Revelation, "Before a spiritual sentience arose awareness of a power that moves the soul to know and seek its Creator." "And that is the divine spark, that is placed in the soul as spirit." (Gr XI 10, 6) "Without God, no deed can be done." (Ha I 116, 8) "Man, however, is unable to perceive the force that is at work." (Gr X 173, 9)
In New Revelation, prehistoric men are referred to as "pre-Adamites". The details given as to their appearance and their faculties are illuminating.
First, however, it is said that the six days of creation Moses wrote about in Genesis should not be taken literally, though not so long ago the churches still demanded that they should be. In Gr VIII 72, the six stages in the creation of earth are referred to, giving the duration of each stage as "very many millions of years". The existence of saurians during the third stage is referred to circumstantially: "The vegetation became much more varied and abundant and reached giant size, animals as much as the vegetation." Towards the end of the fourth stage, "Earth upheavals came again, burying most of what you would have called creatures at that time. You will find many things from that period beneath the soil on earth, but this is already very different from the products of the first three periods."
After the beginning of the "fifth period, it was probably more than a thousand times a thousand years until all soil that was well situated was wholly suitable again for a new creation of a great many different plants - grasses, herbs, shrubs and trees - and all kinds of animals and pre-Adamitic man."
This reference to a "new creation of animals and plants" is of particular interest. The sudden disappearance and then after a long period the just as sudden reappearance of new animal and plant species has been confirmed by modern science." 133 This fact, that there was a total break, means there has been no continuous process of evolution, i.e., it is unthinkable that animals and plants arose through mutation, without a new act of creation. Materialistic scientists have put forward the thesis that all new forms have arisen out of themselves. The long break, the deep trench in the middle, takes away the ground under the feet of that thesis of autonomism or autogenesis. The new cannot be explained on the basis of the structures that went before. Evolution does have a sequence of stages - as New Revelation says very clearly - but there is no unbroken line. "A blind force", we read in New Revelation, "has never yet produced even a small moss plant." (Gr VI 87, 7) "All life is such by nature that it is constantly able to change and grow, because of My constant inflow."
The following is also said about the fifth stage: "As this period began, the earth was brought into a regular orbit around the sun. Night and day were now alternating regularly. Yet there still were all kinds of changes taking place, as the poles of the earth were still shifting considerably."
It is in the discussion of the fifth stage that mention is made for the first time of prehistoric man. In Gr VIII 72, the following is said, for example: "There was as yet nothing resembling agriculture for these prehistoric men, though they did already make use of certain animal herds, reading a rough, nomadic life, wearing no garments and not building houses or huts. But they set up nests on thick branches of the trees where they could live and rest, and built up food stores that would gradually be consumed. When it grew very cold they would move to warmer areas." "They did not have language of the kind now current among men; but they did have better articulated sounds, signs and gestures than even the most highly developed animals, and were able to communicate everything they felt need to communicate." "Although this fifth preliminary evolution stage lasted very many thousand thousand years (= millions of years), no cultural advance of any kind was to be noted among these people, they continued to live their unvarying nomadic life."
"Their skin was still fairly hairy, dark to light grey in color, hairless races were to be found only in the south. They continued generation upon generation in the lowlands until Adam." "In Adam's day, when the sixth earth period took its beginning, the earth in part again had to go through great upheavals, with fire and water, and almost the entire pre-Adamite race we have spoken of perished, with its domestic animals."
Lorber said that the prehistoric, original human race existed for "very many million years". Until some years ago, scientists held the view that original man was present only from the Quarternary period, which would mean they existed for about one million years. But in 1966, Dr. Louis Leakey, a well known anthropologist, showed this assumption to be untrue and stated that prehistoric man had also existed during the Tertiary period. The fossils found by Dr. Leakey are many million years old. Some early human bones found are up to twenty million years old (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 3.10.1972). Lorber's statements on the subject have thus been fully borne out.
Apart from general discussion of prehistoric man, Lorber also goes into details, and these, too, have found scientific confirmation. One particular race for instance is referred to as follows: "As humans, they were enormously tall and strong, and their teeth were so strong that they were able to use them as cutting tools." (Gr VIII 72, 17)
Glowatzki has reported that in 1925, the German palaeontologist von Koenigswald was shown teeth in China that "resembled human teeth in form". "The teeth which had been found were so large that if one were to draw conclusions from their size as to the size of the jaws and hence the whole Gigantopithecus, he would have been about 3.50 metres in height." 134 Pinds made in East Java in 1939 and 1941 indicate that "prehistoric men lived there who were real giants." 135 Dr. Leakey's most famous discovery is "Nutcracker Man", found in 1959, who had unusually powerful teeth in his jaw (Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung, 3.10.1972).
Another detail is given to vol. III of Haushaltung Gottes (God's Household Management), page 453, written down in 1864: "As to pre-Adamitic man, the so-called 'animal man', fossilized remains may still be found here and there. They had the greatest instinctive intelligence of all animal species, setting up their dwellings, invariably the same, here and there. In place where streams and rivers were not too wide, they also placed stones in them, building a kind of bridge ... Not uncommonly they would continue with their building until ten or more such bridges formed something of a crude terrace ... These, then, were the people who had originated the walls of which traces are still to be found today, walls considered to be very old indeed."
Improbable as it may seem, such walls have been found. One of the best known German anthropologists, Professor Gerhard Heberer, writes, in a volume containing a number of contributions on the origin of mankind from the Australopethicines, that the A type of these pygmy-sized people "were able to build small walls", using them, he assumes, for protection from the wind." 136
It is not at all surprising that Lorber's friends did not manage to find a single publisher in the whole of Austria who was prepared to publish his writings. At the time, the disclosures of the true prophet must have seemed utterly phantasmagorical. If Lorber's work had reached a wider public in those days, it would surely have been met with annihilating criticism. From the present-day perspective, when flights to the moon no longer generate a particular excitement and the enormous dimensions of the universe have become a commonplace, the above disclosures made by Lorber seem nothing out of the ordinary, for secondary school pupils are now taught these things in their science lessons. More than a hundred years after Lorber's death, we, unlike his contemporaries and the generations that followed, are able to see the truth of what Lorber had to say.