The book by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, Forbidden Archeology, describes numerous scientific reports of human remains and artifacts found in truly ancient earth strata dating from hundreds of millions of years ago, prior to emergence of modern human and even the dinosaurs. Are these remains of the first human cohort that was annihilated?

This is definitely the case and the timeline is fitting. There are many such artifacts, most buried irretrievably, but the kinds of things that are found embedded within coal, like pieces of jewelry or tools or hardware items or fabricated objects have no plausible reason to exist in such locations. This is powerful scientific proof indeed, under normal circumstances, and would be accepted as such. While this was so for many such discoveries in the 1800s, with the growing power of scientific thinking in embracing the Darwinian view of evolution, people began to doubt the plausibility of modern humans of such ancient lineage, and this was yet another large gap and obstacle to the idea of natural selection producing incremental changes to morph one species into another over long spans of time. The data just didn’t fit. That, along with mind control manipulation, condemned these early findings and observations and conclusions, largely, from the record. The genius of these authors you speak of was to go back to contemporary accounts and journals because they have largely been expunged from contemporary descriptions of the paleoarchaeological record.