Can history be rewritten?

A few weeks ago I was having lunch with a gentleman who was my former colleague that I have never worked with, he retired long before I joined the company. He was such a friendly chap that willing to share his views on a wide range of issues, from politic, history to even the origin of the human race on this planet. Well, depending on what religion you are believing in, the origin of mankind is always a mystery as no one has live long enough to be able to tell you the truth.

He then told us the theory of inter-planetary war that had resulted in our ancestors, originally alien to this planet, lost the battle and seeking asylum on earth which was then occupied by prehistoric creatures such as dinosaurs. These ancestors which were highly intelligent probably realized that their intelligent was destroying their entire race and chose to not transmitting their intelligent genes to their future generations and as a result, they were designing a new path for their decedents, sharing the common ancestor with apes, making their decedents, our ancestor, dumb so that they would not create weapons to kill each other and could live peacefully on the earth for a long long time. With their advanced technologies at that time, they could easily kill all dinosaur to make the earth safer place to live.

His argument was that our ancestors were smarter than us, because in the ancient time when there was no machinery, the people then were capable of doing wonders such as building the pyramids and so forth. The cavemen, according to him, without modern technologies, could go deep inside the caves, crafting amazing artworks without proper light and so on.

Of course his story sounds fictional, but there are too many things which are until today not explainable, still so mysterious. The fact is that even the historians cannot tell you what was happening in the past. No one will live that long to be able to tell you what happened hundreds or thousands or millions of years ago. We can only apprehend the past by studying the literature written by historians but then again, it was the interpretations of the person who wrote the literature that we are now reading to comprehend.

So when Mat Sabu got himself into trouble by saying that Mat Indera, the communist who attacked the Bukit Kepong in the 1950 was freedom fighter who fought against the colonial British, a knee-jerk reaction by a few local historians shocked us by saying that this land was never ruled by the British. In other words, what we have learned so far from the history books was all rubbish. In that case, we should not even celebrate the 8-31 Merdeka Day.

Mat Sabu has no doubt stirring up shit, as a result, aplenty of flies were quick to be attracted to it, until such stage that prominent politicians and historians alike, were bombarding us for the past few days with their own interpretations of history, which are making us so confuse as to what is true or otherwise.