Forbidden Archeology of the Paleolithic:
How Pithecanthropus  Influenced the Treatment of Evidence for Extreme Human Antiquity


[Scheduled for publication by British Archaeological Reports (in press), as part of a peer-reviewed volume of papers from the history of archeology section of the European Association of Archaeologists 1999 Annual Meeting in Bournemouth, UK, edited by Ana C. N. Martins]

Michael A. Cremo, Bhaktivedanta Institute

Abstract: Over the past two centuries, researchers in Europe and elsewhere have found anatomically modern human skeletal remains and artifacts in geological contexts extending to the Pliocene and earlier. In the late nineteenth century, these discoveries attained wide circulation among archeologists and researchers in allied fields (geology, paleontology, anthropology). At this early point in the history of archeology, a fixed scheme of human evolution had not yet emerged, and researchers were able to approach the evidence of extreme human antiquity with little theoretical bias. With the discovery of Pithecanthropus (Java man) in the late nineteenth century and the discovery of Australopithecus in the early twentieth century, archeologists and others were finally able to construct a credible and widely accepted theoretical picture of human origins, with the anatomically modern human type arriving rather late on the scene. This caused the earlier evidence for extreme human antiquity to be dropped from active discourse, and eventually forgotten.  In the late twentieth century, finds that could be taken as evidence for extreme human antiquity continue to be made.  But archeologists often interpret them to fit within the now generally accepted scheme of human evolution. It is therefore possible that commitment to a particular evolutionary scheme has resulted in a process of knowledge filtration, whereby a large set of archeological evidence has dropped below the horizon of cognition.  This filtering, although unintentional, has left current researchers with an incomplete data set for building and rebuilding our ideas about human origins.

Key words: history, Pithecanthropus, anomalous evidence, theoretical bias, Tertiary man.

INTRODUCTION

Archeologists are becoming increasingly introspective, exerting almost as much energy in excavating the epistemological, political, ideological, and social foundations of their discipline as in excavating the physical remains of the past. There is growing recognition that epistemological, political, ideological, and social factors have over time greatly influenced the manner in which the excavated physical remains are archived, displayed, and interpreted. For example, an epistemological commitment to evolutionary biology, solidified at an early point in the history of archeology, has influenced the treatment of evidence for extreme human antiquity by archeologists, past and present.

Over the past two centuries, researchers have found many anatomically modern human skeletal remains and artifacts in geological contexts extending to the Pliocene and earlier (Cremo and Thompson 1993).1 This evidence is consistent with accounts of extreme human antiquity found in the Puranas, the historical texts of ancient India. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, reports of such evidence attained wide circulation among archeologists and researchers in allied fields (geology, paleontology, anthropology), engendering significant, although not universal, acceptance of “Tertiary man.” At that early point in the history of archeology, a fixed scheme of human evolution had not yet emerged, and researchers were able to approach evidence for extreme human antiquity with somewhat less theoretical bias than they might today.

Up until the very end of the nineteenth century, the only candidate for an evolutionary ancestor of today’s humans was Neandertal man. But the Neandertal bones were considered by most researchers, even evolutionists, to be from primitive or pathologically deformed members of our own human species (Trinkaus and Shipman, 1992). Only with the discovery of Pithecanthropus erectus, Java man,  in the last years of the nineteenth century were archeologists and others finally able to construct a credible and widely accepted evolutionary picture of human origins, based on actual fossil finds, with the anatomically modern human type arriving rather late on the scene. Java man was generally placed in the Early Pleistocene. This dating, combined with a gradualistic conception of evolutionary processes, located the origin of our species, Homo sapiens, in the latest Pleistocene. Java man was thus influential in causing the accumulated evidence for a human presence in the Early Pleistocene, the Pliocene, and earlier to be gradually dropped from active discourse. The discoveries of Piltdown man, Sinanthropus, and Australopithecus completed the processes, and the evidence for Tertiary (and Early Pleistocene) man was eventually consigned to an oblivion so complete that many archeologists today are unaware of its existence.

Recognition of this process is not new. About the early Tertiary man discoveries and their suppression subsequent to the Java man discoveries, anthropologist Frank Spencer (1984: 13-14) wrote: “From accumulating evidence, it appeared as if the modern human skeleton extended far back in time, an apparent fact which led many workers to either abandon or modify their views on human evolution. One such apostate was Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913). In 1887, Wallace examined the evidence for early man in the New World, and . . . found not only considerable evidence of antiquity for the available specimens, but also a continuity of type through time.” Spencer (1984:14) noted, however, that the case for extreme human antiquity “lost some of its potency as well as a few of its supporters when news began circulating of the discovery of a remarkable hominid fossil in Java.” This was, of course, Pithecanthropus. I differ from Spencer in that I desire to resurrect Tertiary man, who was unfairly sacrificed on the altar of evolutionary preconceptions.

EXAMPLES FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The California Gold Mine Discoveries

As an example of how the Java man discoveries resulted in the suppression of evidence for extreme human antiquity, we can consider a case mentioned by Wallace in his survey of North American evidence—the California gold mine discoveries. Hundreds of stone tools and weapons, including obsidian spear points and stone mortars and pestles, and numerous anatomically modern human skeletal remains (quite apart from the notorious Calaveras skull, widely regarded as a hoax), were discovered by miners in the California gold mining region. Many of the finds occurred in deeply buried, basalt-capped Eocene river gravels, ranging from 33 to 55 million years old, according to modern geological studies (Slemmons 1966). These discoveries from the auriferous gravels were reported to the scientific world by J. D. Whitney (1880), state geologist of California. Whitney considered and ruled out the possibility of recent intrusion.

In his discussion of the reports of Whitney and others, Wallace (1887:679) said: “The proper way to treat evidence as to man’s antiquity is to place it on record, and admit it provisionally wherever it would be held adequate in the case of other animals; not, as is too often now the case, to ignore it as unworthy of acceptance or subject its discoverers to indiscriminate accusations of being impostors or the victims of impostors.”

In Whitney’s case, the influential anthropologist William H. Holmes, of the Smithsonian Institution, chose the latter course. Holmes (1899:424) said of Whitney’s careful report report: “Perhaps if Professor Whitney had fully appreciated the story of human evolution as it is understood today, he would have hesitated to announce the conclusions formulated, notwithstanding the imposing array of testimony with which he was confronted.” In other words, if the facts reported by Whitney violated the emerging picture of human evolution, those facts, even an imposing array of them, had to be set aside.

Holmes’s opposition to the California gold mine discoveries was to a large degree conditioned by his acceptance of Java man. Holmes (1899:470) suggested that Whitney’s evidence should be rejected because “it implies a human race older by at least one half than Pithecanthropus erectus of Dubois, which may be regarded as an incipient form of human only.”

European scientists followed Holmes in using the Java man discoveries to dismiss the California discoveries. According to archeologist Robert Munro, Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, researchers who accepted evidence that human beings of modern anatomy inhabited California during the Tertiary and manufactured a variety of stone tools and weapons of advanced type  were “upholding opinions which, if true, would be absolutely subversive, not only of human evolution, but of the principles upon which modern archaeology has been founded.” (Munro 905:106). He cited as evidence the Pithecanthropus skull, which he assigned to the Plio-Pleistocene boundary. After introducing Holmes’s statement that the California evidence belonged to a period older than that of Pithecanthropus, Munro (1905:106) said, “According to these calculations the cranium of a Californian ‘auriferous gravel man’ would have been of so low a type as to be undistinguishable from that of the Simian progenitor of Homo sapiens [i.e., Pithecanthropus]. But instead of that we have. . . a skull that could have contained the brains of a philosopher of the present day.” Munro was referring to the famous Calaveras skull, surrounded by reports of hoaxing, but Whitney reported several other anatomically modern human skeletons from different locations. In any case, Munro’s point was that according to evolutionary expectations an old skull should be anatomically primitive. Therefore, if a skull were anatomically modern, it could not possibly be old. In particular, it could not be older than  Pithecanthropus, with its prominent brow ridges and shallow cranium. About the artifacts, which included projectile points and mortars and pestles, Munro (1905:108) said that if they were to be accepted “we must, henceforth, delete from archaeological nomenclature such terms as Palaeolithic and Neolithic as having no longer any chronological significance.” In other words, neither anatomically modern human bones or finely worked artifacts could be accepted as genuinely old.

Holmes and Munro of course gave other reasons supporting their dismissals of the California discoveries.2 But their primary consideration appears to have been their absolute conviction that evidence violating their evolutionary convictions had to be wrong.


The Nampa Image

Holmes also raised the specter of Java man to dismiss the Nampa image. This small human figurine came from just below a layer of clay at the 320-foot level of a well boring at Nampa, Idaho (Wright 1912). According to the United States Geological Survey (private communication, February 25, 1985), the clay layer at that depth is “probably of the Glenns Ferry Formation, upper Idaho Group, which is generally considered to be of Plio-Pleistocene age.”3 Among the layers penetrated by the well boring before reaching the clay was an 15-foot thick layer of basalt lava (Wright 1912). Even critics of the find such as Holmes (1919) did not dispute the human manufacture of the tiny clay statuette, representing a female figure. Instead, Holmes (1919:70) wrote: “The formation in which the pump was operating is of late Tertiary or early Quaternary age; and the apparent improbability of the occurrence of a well-modeled human figure in deposits of such great antiquity has led to grave doubts about its authenticity. It is interesting to note that the age of this object, supposing it to be authentic, corresponds with that of the incipient man whose bones were, in 1892, recovered by Dubois from the late Tertiary or Early Quaternary formations of Java.” In other words, Holmes doubted the genuineness of the Nampa image mostly because it was out of synch with the emerging concept of human evolution, founded on acceptance of Pithecanthropus erectus as a culturally and physiologically primitive human ancestor incapable of such refined art work.4

EXAMPLES FROM THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The Schöningen Spears and the Later Discoveries of Boucher de Perthes

In the late twentieth century, finds that could be taken as evidence for extreme human antiquity continue to be made.  But archeologists often interpret them to fit within the now generally accepted scheme of human evolution. For example, Thieme (1997) recently reported the discovery at Schöningen in northern Germany of wooden hunting spears in soft coal deposits over 400,000 years old. Traditionally, archeologists have identified hunting spears exclusively with humans of our type. But according to the current paradigm, anatomically modern humans were not present in Europe, or anywhere else, 400,000 years ago. Thieme therefore chose to attribute the spears to a culturally upgraded Middle Pleistocene hominid (presumably Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis). But perhaps there is another choice.

As an alternative explanation for the Schöningen spears , we could resurrect the nineteenth century discoveries of anatomically modern human remains by Boucher de Perthes at Abbeville, in deposits also roughly 400,000 years old.5 These latter discoveries are not well known among working archeologists today.

In the 1840s Boucher de Perthes discovered stone tools in the Middle Pleistocene high level gravels of the Somme, at Moulin Quignon and other sites in and around Abbeville. At first, the scientific community, particularly in France, was not inclined to accept his discoveries as genuine. Some believed that the tools were manufactured by forgers. Others believed them to be purely natural forms that happened to resemble stone tools. Later, leading British archeologists visited the sites of Boucher de Perthes's discoveries and pronounced them genuine. But the exact nature of the maker of these tools remained unknown. Then in 1863, Boucher de Perthes discovered at Moulin Quignon additional stone tools and an anatomically modern human jaw. The jaw inspired much controversy, and was the subject of a joint English-French commission (Falconer et al. 1863, Delesse 1863). The English members of the commission thought the recently discovered stone tools were forgeries that had been artificially introduced into the Moulin Quignon strata. They thought the same of the jaw. To settle the matter, the commission paid a surprise visit to the site. Five flint implements were found in the presence of the scientists. The commission approved by majority vote a resolution in favor of the authenticity of the recently discovered stone tools. In addition to confirming the authenticity of the stone tools from Moulin Quignon, the commission also concluded that there was no evidence that the jaw had been fraudulently introduced into the Moulin Quignon gravel deposits (Falconer et al. 1863: 452). The English skeptics, including John Evans, who was not able to join the commission in France, were left with finding further proof of fraudulent behavior among the workmen at Moulin Quignon as their best weapon against the jaw. Evans sent his trusted assistant Henry Keeping to France, where he claimed to have obtained proof that the French workmen were introducing tools into the deposits at Moulin Quignon. But careful study of Keeping's reports reveals little to support these allegations. Nevertheless, a report by Evans (1863), based on Keeping's account, was published in an English periodical and swayed many scientists to the opinion that Boucher des Perthes was, despite the favorable conclusions of the scientific commission, the victim of an archeological fraud in regard to the Moulin Quignon jaw.

Boucher des Perthes (1864), stung by accusations of deception, carried out a new set of excavations, which resulted in the recovery of more anatomically modern human skeletal remains, amounting to over one hundred bones and teeth. These later discoveries are hardly mentioned in standard histories, which dwell upon the controversy surrounding the famous Moulin Quignon jaw. Boucher de Perthes carried out his new investigations so as to effectively rule out the possibility of deception by workmen. First of all, they were carried out during a period when the quarry at Moulin Quignon was shut down and the usual workmen were not there (1864:219). Boucher de Perthes himself supervised the excavations, and in almost all cases witnesses with scientific or medical training were present. In some cases, these witnesses organized their own careful excavations to independently confirm the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes. Armand de Quatrefages (1864), a prominent French anthropologist, reported favorably on Boucher de Perthes's later discoveries at Moulin Quignon to the French Academy of Sciences. These later discoveries tend to validate the original Moulin Quignon jaw and, combined with the recent discoveries of the Schoningen spears, offer good evidence of an anatomically modern human population in northern Europe during the Middle Pleistocene, about 400,000 years ago.

The Laetoli Footprints and the Castenedolo Skeletons

Another case in which rigid commitment to an evolutionary consensus has prevented recognition of possible evidence for extreme human antiquity may be found in the Laetoli footprints, discovered by Mary Leakey in Tanzania in 1979. The prints occurred in layers of solidified volcanic ash 3.7 million years old . Leakey herself (1979:453) said the prints were exactly like anatomically modern human footprints, a judgement shared by other physical anthropologists (Tuttle 1981:91, 1987:517). Tim White said, “Make no mistake about it. They are like modern human footprints” (Johanson and Edey 1981:250).

Attempts to account for the humanlike nature of the prints has varied. Some have suggested that late Pliocene hominids such as Australopithecus afarensis could have made the prints. But such proposals are not supported by skeletal evidence in the form of a complete Australopithecus foot. White and Suwa (1987) attempted to put together such a foot (using bones from three different hominids of different genera), but such an exercise was, of course, quite speculative.6

In 1995, Clarke and Tobias reported the discovery of a partial Australopithecus foot from Sterkfontein (Bower 1995), and in 1998 announced the discovery of a fairly complete australopithecine skeleton, to which the foot bones had originally been attached. The four foot bones reported in 1995 made up a left instep. The big toe was long and divergent, like that of a chimpanzee, with features indicating it was capable of grasping. Like White and Suwa, Tobias and Clarke used bones from East African hominids to reconstruct a complete foot, which Tobias said matched the Laetoli prints (Bower 1995). Physical anthropologist Michael Day at the British Museum asserted that the Sterkfontein foot could not have made the Laetoli footprints and questioned the accuracy of a reconstruction that made use of bones of hominids from different parts of Africa (Bower 1995).

In January 1999, at the World Archeological Congress in Cape Town, South Africa, I saw Clarke attempt to justify how the chimpanzeelike Sterkfontein foot could have made the humanlike Laetoli prints. He explained that chimpanzees sometimes walk with their normally divergent big toes pressed inward so as to align with the other toes. These other toes, although longer than human toes, would have been curled under. But it is highly unlikely that the three individuals who made the trails of prints at Laetoli would have all been walking like that. A similar proposal had earlier been made by Stern and Susman (1983). But others (Tuttle 1985:132, White and Suwa 1987:495) pointed out that the prints showed no knuckle marks, and that surely, in the case of so many prints, representing three individuals, some of the prints would have shown the extended toes. Clarke also appealed to a recent study by Deloison (1997), who claimed, in opposition to almost all previous reporting, that the Laetoli prints displayed distinctly primate (chimpanzoid) features. Others (Tuttle et al. 1998) answered, demonstrating that Deloison’s observations were “false interpretations based on artifactual taphonomic features, reliance on a partial sample of the . . . first generation casts of the Laetoli prints, and her not accounting for  the orientation of the prints on the trackway.”

So it would appear reasonable to propose that anatomically modern humans made the Laetoli prints in the late Pliocene. This proposal becomes even more reasonable in the context of other discoveries of evidence for anatomically modern humans in the Pliocene. Fairly complete anatomically modern human skeletons were discovered in Middle Pliocene clays at Castenedolo by the geologist Ragazzoni (1880), who testified that the overlying layers were undisturbed. European archeologists later rejected the discoveries on theoretical grounds. For example, Macalister (1921:183) said, “There must be something wrong somewhere.” Considering the anatomically modern character of the skeletons, he proposed (1921:184), “Now, if they really belonged to the stratum in which they were found, this would imply an extraordinarily long standstill for evolution. It is much more likely that there is something amiss with the observations.”7

CONCLUSION

So what does this all add up to? It appears that commitment to an evolutionary picture of human origins, put into place with the discovery of Pithecanthropus,  has resulted in a process of knowledge filtration, whereby a large set of archeological evidence has dropped below the horizon of cognition.8  This filtering has left current researchers with an incomplete data set for building and rebuilding our ideas about human origins.


NOTES

1. Incised and carved mammal bones are reported from the Pliocene (Desnoyers 1863, Laussedat 1868, Capellini 1877) and Miocene (Garrigou and Filhol 1868, von Dücker 1873). Additional reports of incised bones from the Pliocene and Miocene may be found an extensive review by the overly skeptical de Mortillet (1883). Scientists have also reported pierced shark teeth from the Pliocene (Charlesworth 1873), artistically carved bone from the Miocene (Calvert 1874) and artistically carved shell from the Pliocene (Stopes 1881).  Carved mammal bones reported by Moir (1917) could be as old as the Eocene. Very crude stone tools occur in the Middle Pliocene (Prestwich 1892) and from perhaps as far back as the Eocene (Moir 1927, Breuil 1910:402). One will note that most of these discoveries are from the nineteenth century. But such artifacts are still being found. Crude stone tools have recently be reported from the Pliocene of Pakistan (Bunney 1987), Siberia (Daniloff and Kopf 1986), and India (Sankhyan 1981), what to speak of a pebble tool from the Miocene of India (Prasad 1982). More advanced stone tools occur in the Oligocene of Europe (Rutot 1907), the Miocene of Europe (Ribeiro 1873, Bourgeois 1873, Verworn 1905), the Miocene of Asia (Noetling 1894), and the Pliocene of South America (F. Ameghino 1908, C. Ameghino 1915). In North America, advanced stone tools occur in California deposits ranging from Pliocene to Miocene in age (Whitney 1880), and Wright (1912:262-269) reported a Pliocene clay statuette. An interesting slingstone, at least Pliocene and perhaps Eocene in age, comes from England (Moir 1929: 63). Humanlike footprints have been found in the Pliocene of Africa (M. Leakey 1979). Human skeletal remains described as anatomically modern occur in the Middle Pleistocene of Europe (Newton 1895, Bertrand 1868, de Mortillet 1883). These cases are favorably reviewed by Keith (1928). Other anatomically modern human skeletal remains occur in the Early and Middle Pleistocene of Africa (Reck 1914, L. Leakey 1960, Zuckerman 1954:310; Patterson and Howells 1967, Senut 1981, R. Leakey 1973), the Early Middle Pleistocene of Java (Day and Molleson 1973), the Early Pleistocene of South America (Hrdlicka 1912:319-44),  the Pliocene of South America (Hrdlicka 1912:346; Boman 1921:341-42)),  the Pliocene of England (Osborn 1921:567-69), the Pliocene of Italy (Ragazzoni 1880, Issel 1868). the Miocene of France and the Eocene of Switzerland (de Mortillet 1883:72), and even the Carboniferous of North America (The Geologist 1862). Several discoveries from California gold mines range from Pliocene to Eocene (Whitney 1880). Some of the above mentioned human skeletal remains have been subjected to chemical and radiometric tests that have yielded ages younger than suggested by their stratigraphic position. But when the unreliabilities of the testing procedures are measured against the very compelling stratigraphic observations of the discoverers, it is not at all clear that the original age attributions should be discarded.
2. They pointed out the resemblance of the bones and artifacts to those of recent history and hinted at various ways they could have been introduced into the Tertiary auriferous gravels.
3. My research assistant Stephen Bernath sent to the United States Geological Survey a copy of the drilling record from the well boring, and a geologist replied with the estimated age of the clay layer that yielded the Nampa image.
4. Influenced by this conviction, Holmes (1919:70) was reduced to suggesting that the image “could have descended from the surface through some crevice or water course penetrating the lava beds and have been carried through deposits of creeping quicksand aided by underground waters to the spot tapped by the drill.”
5. In a recent synoptic table of European Pleistocene sites, Carbonell and Rodriguez (1994:306) put Abbeville at around 430,000 years, and I think we can take that as a current consensus.
6. White and Suwa used the partial OH 8 foot from Olduvai Gorge, usually attributed to Homo habilis, along with Australopithecus afarensis toe bones from Lucy and the more robust AL 333-115. The OH 8 and AL 333-115 bones were rescaled to fit those of Lucy.
7. Oakley (1980:40) said the Castenedolo bones had a nitrogen content similar to that of human bones from Late Pleistocene and Holocene Italian sites, and judged them recent. But nitrogen preservation can vary widely from site to site, making such comparisons of little value. Oakley (1980:42) reported a high fluorine content for the bones. Low measures of  fluorine in the groundwater indicated a potentially great age for the bones, but Oakley explained this away by positing higher levels of fluorine in the past! The Castenedolo bones also had an unexpectedly high concentration of uranium. A radiocarbon date of less than one thousand years was obtained in 1969 (Barker et al. 1971), but the methods employed are now regarded as not adequate to prevent falsely young dates from contamination with recent carbon, a distinct possibility in the case of bones that have lain exposed in a museum for a century. The most certain age estimate comes from the original stratigraphic observations of Ragazzoni.
8. The original Pithecanthropus erectus discovery was based on associating a femur with a skullcap. Considering the historical impact of Pithecanthropus on evidence for extreme human antiquity, it is interesting that modern researchers no longer consider the association valid. A reexamination of the femur by Day and Molleson (1973) showed it to be indistinguishable from  anatomically modern human femurs and distinct from other erectus femurs.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the trustees of the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust for their grants in support of my work and to Lori Erbs for her research assistance.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Michael A. Cremo is a research associate in history and philosophy of science for the Bhaktivedanta Institute, the science studies branch of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. His most recent publication is “Puranic Time and the Archeological Record,” originally presented as a paper at the World Archeological Congress 3, New Delhi, 1994, and included in the WAC3 proceedings volume Time and Archaeology, edited by Tim Murray, and published by Routledge (1999). Another paper, “The Later Discoveries of Boucher de Perthes at Moulin Quignon and Their Bearing on the Moulin Quignon Jaw Controversy,” has been selected for publication in the proceedings of the XXth International Congress of History of Science, held in Liège, Belgium, July 19-26, 1997. His most recent book is Forbidden Archeology’s Impact (1998). It documents the varied responses to his controversial book Forbidden Archeology (1993).

Address:  9701 Venice Blvd. #5, Los Angeles, CA 90034, USA. [email: mcremo@compuserve.com]

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