120 Million Year Old Relief Map
Interview with Professor Alexander Chuvyrov, by Adriano Forgione, Feb. 19, 2004

In April, 2002, Pravda announced the discovery in Chandar, a Russian village of a three dimensional map dated at 120 million years. The person responsible for this discovery was Dr. Alexander Nikolaevich Chuvyrov, a physics Professor at the University of Bashkiria in Ufa, Russia, has shocked the journalists and scientists of the entire world by advancing this incredible date.

The map would seem to confirm the existence of an advanced civilization at a time when the world was dominated by giant reptiles. Indeed, the first hominid according to orthodox science did not arrive on the scene until 20 million years ago. Such an early date, if confirmed could well rewrite the history of humanity and give hope to the supporters of the antiquity of man.

There has been surprise that Chuvyrov is an academic, a university professor, which confers a certain amount of credibility to the press releases on the discovery.

In order to move understanding of the discovery along and to address lingering doubts which have been raised about the announcement, we invited Professor Chuvyrov to give a press conference here in Italy. What follows is a result of that invitation. What follows is a transcript of the interview that I had with him….. Adriano Forgione

Adriano Forgione: Professor Chuvyrov, how did you come to be involved in this research?

Alexander Chuvyrov: This discovery was by chance, as are most discoveries in the scientific realm. Along with my team we were studying the culture of the peoples of the Oural. We were trying to discover the historic framework of these peoples, who left visible tracks all over Russia, up to the 15th century, there having been no systematic studies on the subject.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t successful in finding an impartial director for the project among all the specialists that I’d contacted who weren’t overly influenced by their own ideas or by those held by their colleagues. I have therefore decided to direct the project myself.

AF: What were the circumstances that led to the discovery of the artifact?

AC:The principal objective of the project was to locate writings belonging to the south Oural (Ural) people. We thought that perhaps this ethnic group possessed a records system or a ministerial system similar to that of China. Between 1998 and 1999, we screened all the museum storehouses in the area and found a number of seals and inscriptions on decorative objects and pottery, generally written in old Chinese characters, which was a major discovery.

The inscriptions led to the conclusion that the Chinese arrived in western Russia much earlier than had been previously thought. In 1998, we made a systematic catalogue of all the discoveries and were surprised to find that the people of the area had spoken Chinese up to the 15th century. Currently we know that there have been more than 600,000 inscriptions of this kind in the archives and the philologists will have to put forth and enormous effort to examine all of them.

During the two years of our project, we looked for a gemological library like ones discovered in Mongolia, Japan and Singapore. It was difficult to decide on what to focus our research when we decided to follow a “guiding wire”; we noted that archaeologists and historians had always classified what we thought of as Chinese characters as in reality decorations or drawings.

I therefore decided to determine if the etchings were simply decorations or characters on the megaliths.

At the end of 1998, we found a list of south Oural monuments in the archives which had been indexed between 1920 and 1921. The texts were notes written by the scientists that studied the subject of this era. These notes revealed important indications related to the existence of six “sculptured slabs” of the Ul-finca region or River Karadele, a term meaning “black river” in the local language.

They said that these slabs consisted of engravings and etchings and decorations so complex that it was impossible to reproduce them on paper. In addition, the notes mentioned two steles located 12 kilometers from the first location. We extensively searched the zone described by the documents, an area known as Pisanicy, a Russian name designating a place consisting of petroglyphs. At that point, we examined all available documents in order to follow our investigation. At the end of 1999 we set out to find the six rock slabs.

AF: How did you succeed discovering the first rock pad without additional indices?

AC: At the beginning, we used zoom lenses and helicopters, but to no avail. After launching six fruitless expeditions, I had an idea to contact the oldest inhabitant of Chandar, a neighboring town. I went to the location that Schmitt and other archaeologists had conducted an expedition in 1920. I showed him the notes that Schmitt had left and asked if he knew anything about the rock slabs I was looking for. He replied that one of them was located underneath his house!

It was being used as a step to his house but its weight made it sink into the ground causing a seepage. He had planned to destroy it and convert it into gravel. We therefore arranged to exchange the slab against a promise of a truckload of gravel and to construct all the roads to him which he needed. I then returned with a good number of students, some archaeologists and physicist. It took us two days to extract it. The slab is 5 feet high, 40 inched wide and 6.2 inches deep. To raise it we used the Egyptian method, which was to roll it out on wooden cylinders. We immediately took it to the laboratory to wash it and at once we took notice that it was a map of a large area.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. How could I have known that from that era I would have found a map, a three dimensional map? Such a thing simply could not exist, because it had been found in a small valley where the first roads had been built only 10 years earlier. Beforehand, one could not get there except in a small boat because the town is surrounded by marshes. Today, one finds there some wooden houses belonging to those who supervised the course of the river. No one would have been able to bring it there for the last 100 years before the map was dicovered.

AF: In what was the next step? Were you able to proceed to a scientific analysis of the slab?

AC :Initially, just after the discovery of the stone it was stolen and certain fragments were lost for good. The block of stone fell into a river and the missing parts were never found. If one looks at photographs of the chart, it is obvious that pieces are missing. When we discovered it, it was intact. What happened is, with the help of the local police force, we carried to the laboratory in order to examine it.

As I started by working over it with a team of mathematicians, archaeologists, philologists and physicists and it appeared that the block of stone was made of three layers : a dolomite sub-base, a central layer of diopside and a porcelain top layer. During the analysis, we sometimes had to ask for assistance from other institutions.

The map covers a vast zone, the first big problem revolved around the paleohydrologic analysis; there was no specialist capable of processing data related to the south of Oural. A part of analysis was performed in China, on the sculptured idéogrammes in the rock, and on the cartographic principles and surface porcelain. The objective was to understand the procedure that the slab had undergone in view of the links with China of which we spoke a little earlier.

AF: Can you give us more details on the materials of the various layers of the slab? This could be the key to understanding the assembly of the map.

AC: As you know, the map comprises three layers. The first one is a layer of dolomite. The second is a layer of diopside, on which are engraved the canals, the rivers and all that the map represents. In order to avoid reflections, the diopside was covered with a porcelain layer of only two centimeters of thickness. This is the fruit of an advanced technology. Why porcelain? The response came from the mapping Department of the university of Moscow.

. To manufacture a map in 3D, it is necessary that the white surface be perfectly modeled so that while viewing it one is not induced to see error because of shadows and reflections. This is exactly how one would make a 3d map today. It is surprising that this technology already was used in the distant past. The process of dolomitization was completed nearly 250 millions years ago. The fossilized shellfish are 180 million years old and absolutely could not have been incorporated into the layer of diopside at a later date. In addition, this shellfish type did not exist in this region of the Oural.

We took samples of dolomite from different areas of the map in order to proceed to a chemical analysis and radiographic of the structure. The dolomite is an extremely homogenous material but, in the layer of dolomite of the map, there was no quartz – which is usually found - or of magnesium silicate. We dug in the region of Chandar and removed close to 10,000 samples of dolomite, of which analysis revealed that none matched the dolomite that is present in the map. In such conditions, this feature can not be by chance, this is the reason we can say that the layer of not dolomite is not homogenous compared to the local dolomite and that it dates back 180 million years.

Even if it is that old, I think that it is artificial dolomite - once again the fruit of a advanced technology – because the creators of the map used an artificial process of dolomitization, or at the very least bringing back clay dolomite from western Europe to Oural and transforming it. The layer of diopside is equally extraordinary and reveals a sort of nanostructure. Its crystals measure 15 nanometers. It is astonishing because I do still do not understand how it was made. The structure of diopside resembles a pudding with vertical incisions Moreover, its microhardness is equal to that of corundum. That made it possible to preserve the chart perfectly, while the layer of lower dolomite has already broken up.

In order to secure the layer of dolomite to the layer of diopside, the "creators" replaced the atoms of silicium of the diopside with the carbon atoms of the dolomite [passing CaMg (Si03) 2 to CaMg (C03) 2], so that it seems that the two layers were soldered.together. This is a nanotechnology that implies a great precision at the atomic level.

As a physicist, I know of what I speak. These people knew precisely what they were doing. I would not know how to do as much. There are two principal inherent problems with the layers (a) the manufacture of artificial dolomite; and (b) the manufacture of nanostructures from the diopside, because it has a melting point of 2650 °C. Only carbon has a higher melting point. We can imagine that they knew a chemical procedure allowing for the construction of these materials. What that could be raises the issue of an extremely advanced technology.

AF: Is it possible to realize this technology today?

AC: I do not think so! I am anxious to recall to you that the dolomite is a sedimentary rock formed by accumulation of material while the diopside belongs to the family of the pyroxènes, that are volcanic materials.

AF: The analyzed materials are therefore irréfutable proof of the existence of a civilization able to use nanotechnologies?

AC: Yes, absolutely.

AF: You say that the slab is a map. What is it that makes you think that?

AC: At the start, we thought that the surface of the rock was simply cracked because of its great age or its natural structure. But when we began examining a little more near these signs we identified them as rivers. I discovered that the right banks of the rivers were clearly marked, while the left banks were more polished. This is thus in as in reality because of the effect of the rotation of the Earth and forces of Coriolis. I have therefore looked at the edges of the canals to determine the direction of the current of the rivers. The fact is that the laws of Coriolis and Beer weren’t discovered until last century. What a shock to see that this map had been conceived according to these principles. In most cases, these two indices not sufficient to assert that it was a matter of a map.

A map is a mathematical system, thus when I calculated the distance between the height and the width of the rock, I discovered that the angle of the tangential was one of 54 degrees, which corresponds to the Ufa latitude. At this stage, the meaning of a certain sign figuring on the map was clear. This was a circle crossed by two tangential lines and the angle between the two was exactly 54 degrees. That gave me the key to calculate the exact latitude of the drawn area on the map and, from there, find the mathematical system on which the map was based. And this corresponds perfectly to all the recent maps of the region. The system used is neither that of Mercator nor that of Gauss-Kluger.

But to erect a map, the cartographic principles are not sufficient. It is equally necessary to use conventional signs, that we deduced from the inscriptions. One understood that the map represented 32 dams inside a hydrographic system. That shows that the map is the work of a civilization that had to control its rivers with the assistance of barriers - a little like Holland today.

AF: Let us talk about dating. If it is a product of an advanced civilization, to what time window must we associate it?

AC: The dating of the map is extremely important. I am anxious to recall to you that the dolomitization of the Oural ended some 250 million years ago and that the shellfish applied in this process belong to the family of the Narcopsina celote of the family of the Gyroideae. These shellfish appeared on the Earth 180 million years ago and became extinct 60 million years ago. Here is the times window inside which the shellfish were placed – note that : I say were' placed' and not' fossilized' - in the map.

We next have archéomagnétic measures that furnish the following indications: the edge of the map is oriented towards the magnetic center, while the direction of the geographic center drawn on the map is located at an angle of 22 degrees from magnetic center. We can discover the age of the rock pad thanks to 1)the Hiebert curves, that determines the position of the magnetic center at a given moment. If the calculations are good, the magnetic center was located on the peninsula of Yamal in Russia the moment the map was produced.

And that dates back to 120 million years. Dating corresponds perfectly to the times window of which we have just spoken about If such is the case, a carbon 14 dating is a useless test because this test is incapable to designate a date older than 46,000 years. Indeed, the fossilized intestines of the shellfish were carbon 14 tested but, because of their great age, the response was null. Even argon and uranium dating revealed themselves not to be very reliable. The archéohydrologic analysis showed that for the last 60 million years the hydrographic system already was such as it is on the map.

Maybe if it had been only a hundred years old (when the rock appeared for the first time) it would have required a very intelligent geologist, able to understand and to apply the law of Coriolis, to use the imagery by satellite and of mastery nanotechnologies and the chemistry of the materials. But if such was the case, he would have left notes and files for posterity, given the huge work load that would have been needed. We know Plato, Léonardi da Vinci and of other geniuses of the past but we do not know nothing of the creator of this wonder.

AF : Where was the analysis of the map carried out?

AC : Mainly in Ufa. It was also studied by specialists in scientific history in Moscow but the most important assistance came from Division Air Imagery of the Department of Cartography and Geodesy of the ̱University of Moscow. They in particular helped me to include/understand the mathematical principles on which the map is built.

AF : Your colleagues are all arrayed against you. How would you answer them?

AC: I know this well but I think that this is something of very positive nature. I am happy to to have given rise to this debate but I am anxious to say to my colleagues that they cannot study this object knowing nothing but that which can be seen from the photos, no matter how good and precise they may be. To my detractors I would reply that I am physicist, a scientist from the famous University of Bashkiria, and I know how to do scientific research.