Robert M. Schoch is a Yale scholar, geologist and palaeontologist. At the invitation of John Anthony West he agreed to inspect 
the Sphinx and offer an opinion of the nature of the erosion to be seen on it. He found that the cause of this erosion was due to precipitation rather than windblown sand. As Egypt has had an arid climate for many thousands of years, Dr Schoch reached the conclusion that at least the front of the Sphinx had been carved between 7000 and 5000 BC, when the climate had been considerably wetter.
In the same book, Voices of the Rocks[454], he endorsed (p.123) the conclusions of Mary Settegast[545] who claimed that Plato’s Atlantis story was a reference to the Magdalenian culture that inhabited the coastal regions of the western Mediterranean during the 9th millennium BC. Schoch devotes a chapter to the subject of Atlantis and interestingly lists (p.87) a number of sites to which the Greeks applied the apellation ‘Pillars of Heracles’ apart from the Strait of Gibraltar.
This 1990 declaration regarding the Sphinx generated an international reputation for Schoch. Such a controversial conclusion was obviously greeted warmly by the supporters of the 9,000 year old date for Atlantis allegedly given by the Egyptian priests to Solon. This accidental intervention by Schoch in the debate regarding the dating of Atlantis has unfortunately done nothing to resolve the issue. Fierce debate continues regarding the date of the Sphinx. However, there appears to be a gradual acceptance of Schoch’s views by other professional geologists such as David Coxhill. Another geologist, Colin Reader, while not accepting all of Schoch’s conclusions, believes that the Sphinx predates King Khufu, the father of Khafre, who has been traditionally accepted as the builder of the Sphinx, with the monument bearing his image.
It appears that Schoch’s experiences regarding the Sphinx has whetted Schoch’s appetite for prehistory as he has now written a further book[455], again with R.A. McNally about the origins of the pyramid builders. Unfortunately, he includes a reference to Ireland’s Newgrange as a form of ‘pyramid building’, an idea I reject since it shares neither form nor function with the Egyptian pyramids. Dr.Greg Little has written a very critical review of this book.
Schoch and McNally have recently dared to enter into the highly charged debate regarding the dating of the Great Pyramid at Giza[456][457].
Schoch appears to be venturing further and further from his natural comfort zone of geology. In 2007 he wrote an article on Telepathy(d) and is now due to address the Electric Universe Conference in Las Vegas in 2012(c) and deliver a paper entitled The Catastrophic Termination of the Last Ice Age. In it, he will claim that that around 10,000 BC the earth underwent ‘dramatic catastrophic changes’ as a result of ‘our unstable Sun erupting at the end of the last Ice Age, melting the extensive glaciers and triggering climate warming. The full paper should be an interesting read.
Schoch’s work is now promoted through his own website(b), which includes a wide range of articles. On it both he and his associate, Colette Dowell, have been very critical of the Bosnian pyramid claims of Semir Osmanagic.
Schoch has now turned his attention to the emergence and demise of very early civilisations, before that of dynastic Egypt or Sumeria. When he combined his early date for the Sphinx with other discoveries such as that of Nabta Playa and Göbekli Tepe he concluded that the origins of civilisation go back much further than generally accepted. He then looked at the bigger and perhaps more important question of the cause of their collapse. In a 2009 special edition (N0.8) of New Dawn magazine he speculated on the possibility that the ending of such early civilisations was caused by the earth’s encounter with one or more asteroids or comets.
In a book(f), Forgotten Civilization, due for publication in September 2012, Schoch claims that coronal mass ejections from the sun around 9700 BC devastated our planet with electrical discharges, the triggering of seismic and volcanic activity as well as ending the Ice Age with its consequent floods. All this ‘eradicated the civilisation of the time and set humanity back thousands of years, only to re-emerge around 3500 BC with scattered memories and nascent abilities.’ In an article written(g) in March 2012, Schoch wrote about the ‘Carrington Event’ of 1859 which resulted from a massive solar event that year.
(c) http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/
(d) http://atlantisrisingmagazine.com/2007/11/01/telepathy-a-sympathy-of-souls/
(e) http://www.robertschoch.com/articles/schochnewdawnjune2009.pdf
(f) http://www.amazon.co.uk/Forgotten-Civilization-Solar-Outbursts-Future/dp/1594774978
(g) http://dailygrail.com/Guest-Articles/2012/3/Death-Star
