(this material is an excerpt from the book "The Message of the Stones", by Dr. Javier Cabrera)
(EXCERPT #1G)
THE STRANGE POWER OF A STONE
I never could have imagined that a small stone given to me as a ‘paperweight’ could turn into a sort of friendly, living thing, compelling me to enter the unknown world it represented. The thousands of stones I later came to know spoke to me of a people who existed in the oldest geological era, and who had coexisted with prehistoric animals. Laboratory analyses had revealed that these stones cane from volcanic flows in the Mesozoic era (230 to 63 million years ago), and that the patina of oxidation covering the engravings proved their antiquity. Various startling paleontological finds confirmed the coexistence of man and prehistoric animals and thus the archeological validity of the Engraved Stones of Ica.
But the Ica Stones reveal more than this. The representation of the reproductive cycle of the agnato in one series of stones suggests that it was executed in the Devonic period (405 to 345 million years ago), in the Paleozoic era. They reveal also a profound knowledge of science and a technology much more advanced than our own. These revelations raise an important question: if million of years ago there lived on earth an intellectually, scientifically, and technologically advanced people, how is it that modern man has only begun to approach that level of advancement? And more: how do we explain that paleontological discoveries make clear that only 1.7 million years ago there were beings on earth who were just initiating a prehuman phase? One explanation is that man, after he evolved into a thinking being, endured over million of years without becoming extinct as a species, but for various reasons - one of which I discuss in Chapter Six - at least once his scientific and technological knowledge was destroyed, and he was forced to begin all over again. A second explanation is that the destruction of man's scientific achievements occurred because of the extinction of the human species, so that the advancement of knowledge required a new process of evolution from anthropoids or hominids. According to this reasoning, across the millennia a series of human phylums would have emerged, only then to disappear; the last one would be the phylum of which modern man is part. But this second explanation does not seem to me to be particularly convincing. If the human species has become extinct several times and has then re-evolved; how can we explain the cannon reference points shared by peoples the world over: the shared reference in legends, myths, and histories to fabulous animals (dragons, monsters, flying serpents, gargoyles, etc.) that are so like paleontological reconstructions of prehistoric animals; the shared references to the existence of advanced civilizations; the shared references to a cataclysm that buried entire continents leaving only a handful of survivors to repopulate the earth? All of this can be explained, however, if we start with the premise that the human species never became extinct.
The Engraved Stones of Ica are testimonials to the scientific and technological achievements of man in a long-past moment of his history. These achievements were lost. I cannot state categorically if, or how many times, man later rose to equal heights - all I know is that the men who carved these stones lived in a very remote past. But even if we are not related in a linear fashion to this other flourishing civilization, we are certainly related by our common human genus.