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Robert Schoch Ph.D.


Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D., a full-time faculty member at Boston University since 1984, earned his doctorate in geology and geophysics at Yale University in 1983. In addition to his teaching duties, Schoch serves as the director of the Institute for the Study of the Origins of Civilization at Boston University’s College of General Studies.

In the early 1990s, Dr. Schoch stunned the world with his revolutionary research that recast the date of the Great Sphinx of Egypt to a period thousands of years earlier than its standard attribution. In demonstrating that the leonine monument has been heavily eroded by water, despite the fact that its location on the edge of the Sahara has endured hyper-arid climactic conditions for the past 5,000 years, Dr. Schoch revealed to the world that mankind’s history is greater and older than previously believed. Schoch’s assertions of decades ago have been confirmed by the discovery of the extremely sophisticated 12,000-year-old megalithic complex of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. Initially placing the Great Sphinx in the period of circa 7000–5000 BCE, new data and discoveries have led Schoch to now push the monument back to the end of Earth’s last ice age (circa 9700 BCE), a glacial period brought to a close by massive solar events. Dr. Schoch details his research and these epic events in the revised and expanded 2021 edition of his book Forgotten Civilization: New Discoveries on the Solar-Induced Dark Age.

Dr. Schoch is the author of numerous books and articles, both technical and popular, that have been translated into multiple languages, including Forgotten Civilization (co-authored with his wife, Catherine Ulissey) and Origins of the Sphinx (co-authored with Robert Bauval). He has reached audiences internationally via television, radio, live presentations, and the Internet. The Emmy-winning documentary The Mystery of the Sphinx, which first aired on NBC, remains a favorite among audiences. For his contributions to our understanding of history, in 2014 Schoch was awarded the title of Honorary Professor of the Nikola Vaptsarov Naval Academy in Varna, Bulgaria.

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