In other words, the core of vedantism (the basic philosophy of Hinduism) is an undogmatic belief in the spiritual nature of reality. So it would be incorrect to compare Cremo’s assignment with that of some Christian fundamentalist who sets out to prove that Darwinism must be false because it conflicts with the Book of Genesis. The Hindu equivalent of the Book of Genesis is the Vedic hymns, probably the oldest literature in the world, and commentary on the Vedas, the
Bhaga-vata Purana
, states that human beings have existed on earth for four immense cycles of time, known as
yugas
, each lasting for several thousand ‘years of the demigods’; since each year of the demigods is equal to 360 earth years, the total cycle of four yugas amounts to 4,320,000 years.
But Cremo was not being asked to ‘prove’ the
Bhagavata Purana
—merely to examine the evidence of palaeoanthropology, and to assess it objectively.
He and his colleague Richard L. Thompson, a mathematician and scientist, were to spend several years studying material on human origins. Eventually their book,
Forbidden Archaeology
, would appear in 1993. This is not a polemic arguing for or against Darwinism, but simply an exhaustive study—more than 900 pages long—of the history of palaeoanthropology.
Cremo’s curiosity was piqued by the fact that there seemed to be so few reports about ancient man from 1859, when
The Origin of Species
was published, to 1894, the year of Java man. Studying volumes on anthropology from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cremo found negative comments on many reports during this period, which made him aware that there
had
been plenty of reports, but that because they seemed to contradict the new Darwinian orthodoxy, they had been ignored. By tracking them down through footnotes, and then searching out the original papers in university libraries, he was finally able to get hold of many of these reports.
Here are some typical examples, from the hundreds offered in the book.
In the early 1870s, Baron von Ducker was in the Museum of Athens, and was intrigued by animal bones that showed signs of deliberate fracturing to extract the marrow—they included those of an extinct three-toed horse called
Hipparion.
The sharp edges of the fractures seemed to argue that they had been broken by heavy stones rather than by the gnawing of animals. Von Ducker went to the place where they had been found—at a village called Pikermi—and soon excavated a huge pile of fractured bones from a site that was undoubtedly late Miocene (certainly earlier than five million years ago).
Professor Albert Gaudry, who had selected the bones for the museum display, admitted: ‘I find every now and then breaks in bones that resemble those made by the hand of man.’ He went on to add: ‘But it is difficult for me to admit this.’ Other academic colleagues insisted that the bones had been broken by animals like hyenas.
At about this time—in 1872—the geologist Edward Charlesworth showed a meeting of the Royal Anthropological Society many sharks’ teeth with holes bored through them, as if to make necklaces—like those of modern South Sea Islanders. The layer from which they were recovered was between two and two and a half million years old. Professor Richard Owen commented that ‘human mechanical agency’ was the likeliest explanation.
Australopithecus
, of course, did not make ornaments. Although Charlesworth ruled out boring molluscs, his academic colleagues decided that the holes were made by a combination of wear, decay and parasites.
In 1874, archaeologist Frank Calvert reported that he had found proof of the existence of man in the Miocene era. In a cliff face in the Dardanelles, he found a bone that belonged either to a dinotherium or a mastodon, engraved with the picture of a ‘horned quadruped’ and the traces of seven or eight other figures. A Russian geologist named Tchihatcheff agreed that the stratum was of the Miocene period. But since Calvert was regarded as an amateur, his find was ignored.
I am offering only a brief summary of these examples; Cremo cites dozens more. Among the most impressive is the case of Carlos Ribeiro.
In the writings of the geologist J. D. Whitney—mentioned in the last chapter in connection with finds in California—Cremo found several mentions of a Portuguese geologist named Carlos Ribeiro who had made some interesting discoveries in the 1860s. But no works by Ribeiro were found in the libraries. Finally, he found an account of Ribeiro in
Le Préhistorique
by Gabriel de Mortillet (1883), and from de Mortillet’s footnotes, was able to trace a number of Ribeiro’s articles in French journals of archaeology and anthropology.
What they learned was that Ribeiro was no amateur. He was the head of the Geological Survey in Portugal. In the early 1860s, he was studying stone implements found in Portugal’s Quaternary strata (i.e. Pleistocene). When he heard about flint tools being found in Tertiary beds of limestone in the Tagus River basin, he hurried to examine them and do his own digging. Deep inside a limestone bed inclined at an angle of more than 30 degrees to the horizontal, he extracted ‘worked flints’. This embarrassed him, for he knew that this was too early for human artefacts. So his report stated that the beds must be Pleistocene.
When, in an 1866 map of Portugal’s geological strata, Ribeiro called the beds Pleistocene, he was challenged by the French geologist Édouard de Verneuil, who pointed out that the beds were generally agreed to be Pliocene and Miocene.
Meanwhile, more interesting finds had been made in France by a reputable investigator, the Abbé Louis Bourgeois, at Thenay, near Orleans. The flints were crudely made but, in the Abbe’s opinion, undoubtedly artefacts; moreover, the fact that some of them showed signs of having been in contact with fire seemed to support this view.
Now the Abbé Bourgeois had been digging for flints since the mid-1840s, long before Darwin’s revolution, so he was not deeply concerned that the flints had been found in Miocene beds (from 25 to five million years ago). But when he showed them in Paris in 1867, his colleagues were not happy.
Their first objection was that they were not artefacts, but ‘nature-facts’. There are, however, various simple ways of distinguishing human handiwork on flints. A natural piece of flint, found in the ground, usually looks like any other stone, with round surfaces. But the difference between flint and other stones is that when struck at an angle, it flakes, leaving a flat surface (although the blow often causes a ripple effect).
The first step in making a flint tool is to knock off the rounded end. This flat surface is known as the striking platform. After this, the flint has to be struck delicately again and again, with great skill. One result that is usually found is a ‘bulb of percussion’, a gentle swelling like a blister. Often small chips are struck out, leaving a scar-shaped hole known as an
eraillure
(graze). A flint with two knife-like edges and these other features is certain to be man-made. Being rolled along the bed of a torrent or struck by a plough may produce an object that looks vaguely man-made, but an expert can usually distinguish at a glance.
When, as in the case of Bourgeois, there are dozens of such flints, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain them as ‘naturefacts’. When Sir John Prestwich (who would become Benjamin Harrison’s patron) objected that the flints could be recent because they were found on the surface, Bourgeois dug down and found more. When critics suggested that these flints may have fallen down through fissures in the top of the plateau, Bourgeois disproved it by digging down into the plateau, and finding that there was a limestone bed a foot thick, which would have prevented man-made flints from falling into an ‘earlier’ layer.
When Ribeiro heard about this, he ceased to declare that his Tagus River beds were Quaternary, and agreed they were Tertiary. Subsequent geologists have agreed with him. And he began openly speaking about worked flints found in Miocene beds.
In the Paris Exposition of 1878 (which inspired Don Marcelino de Sautuola to explore his cave at Altamira), Ribeiro exhibited 95 of his flint and quartzite ‘tools’. De Mortillet examined them, and although he felt that 73 were doubtful, agreed that 22 of them showed sign of human workmanship. This, as Cremo points out, was quite an admission for de Mortillet, who was flatly opposed to the idea of human beings in the Tertiary. And Émile Cartailhac, who was among those who later denounced Sautuola as a fraud, was so enthusiastic that he came back several times to show the flints to friends. De Mortillet said he felt he was looking at Mousterian tools (made by Neanderthal man), but coarser.
We have to remember that at this time, Haeckel was proposing that the missing link would be found in the Pliocene, or even late Miocene, while Darwin thought he might be found as early as the Eocene, which began 55 million years ago. So Cartailhac and the rest did not necessarily feel like heretics.
In 1880, Ribeiro showed more flints at an International Congress of Anthropology and Archaeology in Lisbon, and wrote a report on Tertiary man in Portugal. The Congress appointed a team of geologists to go and look at the beds, including Cartailhac, de Mortillet and the famous German Rudolf Virchow, who had declared Neanderthal man an idiot. On 22 September 1880, they all set out at six in the morning on a special train from Lisbon, and from the train windows pointed out to one another the Jurassic, Cretaceous and other strata. They reached the hill of Monte Redondo, where Ribeiro had found so many flints, and split up to search. They found many worked flints on the surface, while the Italian G. Belucci found
in situ
, in an early Miocene bed, one flint that everyone agreed to be ‘worked’.
In the subsequent discussion at the Congress there was virtually universal agreement that Ribeiro had proved that man existed in the Miocene era.
There was no change of heart about Ribeiro, no sudden denunciation by the scientific establishment. After Dubois’s discovery of Java man (which, as we have seen, was itself hotly contested), his views—and his evidence—were simply forgotten. No one has disproved that his flints were Miocene, or suggested a convincing reason why they were found in Miocene beds. They were merely allowed to drop out of the record.
Late in the summer of 1860, Professor Giuseppe Ragazzoni, a geologist of the Technical Institute of Brescia, was in Castenodolo, six miles south-east of Brescia. He was going to look for fossil shells in the Pliocene strata exposed at the base of a low hill, the Colle de Vento.
Among the shells he found a top piece of a cranium, full of coral cemented with blue clay, then nearby, more bones of the thorax and limbs.
Two fellow geologists had no doubt they were human bones, but thought they were from a more recent burial. But Ragazzoni was not happy. He knew that, during the Pliocene, a warm sea had washed the foot of the hill. The bones were covered with coral and shells; ergo, they had probably been washed up by the Pliocene sea. He later found two more fragments of bone at the same site.
Fifteen years later a local businessman, Carlo Germani, bought the area to sell the phosphate-rich clay as fertiliser, and Ragazzoni asked him to look out for bones. Five years later, in January 1880, Germani’s workmen found fragments of a skull, with part of a lower jaw and some teeth. More fragments followed. Then, in February a complete human skeleton was unearthed. It was slightly distorted, apparently by pressure of the strata. When restored, the cranium was indistinguishable from that of a modern woman. It was buried in marine mud, with no intermixture of yellow sand and iron-red clay of higher strata. The possibility that the skeleton had been washed
into
the blue marine clay by a stream was ruled out by the fact that the clay that covered it was itself in layers—strata—which meant that the skeleton had been slowly buried in the clay over a long period. Geologists who examined the bed placed it in the mid-Pliocene—about three and a half million years ago, the same period as Lucy and the First Family.
In 1883, Professor Giuseppe Sergi, an anatomist from the University of Rome, visited the site, and decided that the various bones and skull fragments represented a man, woman and two children. The trench dug in 1880 was still there, and Sergi could clearly see the strata, all clear and separate. He agreed that there was not the slightest chance that the bones could have been washed down from above, because the red clay was quite distinctive. As to burial, the female skeleton was in an overturned position that made it clear that this was unlikely.
So it looked as if undeniable proof that
Homo sapiens
existed in the Pliocene had now been established.
But there was to be a complication. In 1889, another skeleton was found at Castenodolo. This one lay on its back in the oyster beds, and looked as if it had been buried. Sergi came again, with a fellow professor named Arthur Issel. Both agreed that this skeleton had been buried, and that therefore it was probably more recent. But when Issel wrote about it, he concluded that this demonstrated that the
earlier
skeletons had also been recent burials, perhaps disturbed by agricultural work. (Since it had nothing to do with the earlier skeletons, it demonstrated nothing of the sort.) He added that Sergi agreed with him. So as far as geology was concerned, the Castenodolo skeletons could all be dismissed as Quaternary.
But Sergi did
not
agree with him, as he made clear later. He saw no reason whatever to change his opinion that the earlier skeletons were Pliocene.
Michael Cremo goes on to quote an archaeologist, Professor R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1921, who begins by admitting that Ragazzoni and Sergi were men of considerable reputation, and that their opinion must therefore be taken seriously—then goes on to add that ‘there must be something wrong somewhere’. Pliocene bones of
Homo sapiens
implied a ‘long standstill for evolution’, so whatever the evidence, the earlier Castenodolo skeletons had to be disallowed. This, Cremo points out reasonably, is applying preconceptions to the evidence. If
Homo sapiens
—or something like him—existed in the Pliocene, then man has not evolved much in the past four million years, and this is contrary to Darwin’s theory of evolution. In that case, the shark also contradicts the theory of evolution, for it has remained unchanged in 150 million years.