From Atlantis to the Sphinx Read online

  In the following year, on a hillside in Hadar, Johanson and his team found bones of no less than thirteen hominids, which they labelled ‘the First Family’. All proved to be of about the same age as Lucy. They also found stone tools of better workmanship than those of the Olduvai Gorge. When John Harris objected that these tools, found on the surface, might be modern, Johanson undertook more excavations and uncovered stone tools in situ, with an approximate age of 2.5 million years.

  So it looked as if Lucy and the First Family were undoubtedly human, and, moreover, earlier than Leakey’s Homo habilis. At this point, Johanson was inclined to believe that Lucy was an Australopithecus, while the First Family was a type of Homo habilis. Richard Leakey thought that Lucy was probably a ‘late Ramapithecus’—the early ape that is quite probably not a human ancestor. But Johanson was later persuaded by a palaeontologist named Timothy White that the finds were all a type of Australopithecus. At this point, Johanson decided to call the Hadar group Australopithecus afarensis (after the Afar desert).

  This, then, would seem to be the conclusion finally reached by the science of ancient man. Human beings have evolved over the course of three and a half million years, beginning with the ape-like Australopithecus afarensis. A million years later, this had evolved into Australopithecus africanus—‘Dartian man’. Then came Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and finally, Homo sapiens. The scheme certainly seems satisfyingly tidy and complete.

  Yet doubts persist. Australopithecus was not known to be a tool maker, yet tools were found at ‘the First Family’ site. Could it be, after all, that the First Family were a group of Homo habilis, and that Homo habilis co-existed with Australopithecus?

  Another find strengthens the doubt. In 1979, Mary Leakey was at Laetoli, twenty miles south of the Olduvai Gorge. And among fossil footprints of animals set in volcanic ash, her son Philip, and another expedition member, Peter Jones, discovered some hominid footprints, dating (according to potassium-argon dating) to about 3.6 to 3.8 million years ago. Yet they looked typically human, with a ‘raised arch, rounded heel, pronounced ball and forward pointing big toe necessary for walking erect’.

  It would seem that, after nearly 300 years, the problem of Scheuchzer’s ‘old sinner’ is in some ways as obscure as ever.

  7 Forbidden Archaeology

  And what difference does it make whether man is two million years old, or ten, or even more?

  None whatsoever, if we can accept that Australopithecus afarensis could have developed into Homo sapiens in about three and a half million years.

  For this is the problem: time scale.

  Sir Arthur Keith wrote about the Taung skull that it ‘is much too late in the scale of time to have any part in man’s ancestry’. At that point, it was assumed that the Taung skull was about a million years old, and Keith felt that there was simply not time for such an ape-like creature to turn into Homo sapiens in 900,000 years.

  But even if we suppose that Lucy was a much earlier form of human being, the problem remains. In the two million or so years between Lucy and ‘Dart’s baby’, there has been very little change—both might well be apes. Homo erectus, half a million years old, still seems apelike. Then, in a mere 400,000 years—a blink of the eyelid in geological time—we have Homo sapiens, and Neanderthals with a brain far larger than modern man.

  If, on the other hand, Reck and Leakey are right, then Homo sapiens may have been around far longer than two million years, and the time scale becomes altogether more believable. Mary Leakey wrote about the Laetoli footprint: ‘...at least 3,600,000 years ago, in Pliocene times, what I believe to be man’s direct ancestor walked fully upright with a bipedal, free-striding gait... the form of his foot exactly the same as ours.’ And since it is the form of the foot that counts in human evolution—how recently the creature descended from the trees—this is of central importance.

  If a hominid with a human foot existed more than three million years ago, it would certainly add useful support to the argument of this book—that civilisation is thousands of years older than historians believe. At first sight that statement may sound absurd—what difference can a few thousand years make, when we are speaking in millions? But what is really at issue here is the development of the human mind. In Time-scale, Nigel Calder quotes the anthropologist T. Wynn to the effect that tests devised by the psychologist Jean Piaget, carried out on Stone Age tools from Isimila, Tanzania—whose uranium dating shows them to be 330,000 years old—indicate that the makers were as intelligent as modern humans.1

  This is as startling in its way as Mary Leakey’s comment that upright creatures were walking around 3,600,000 years ago. It strikes us as somehow unreasonable. If there were intelligent creatures walking around 330,000 years ago, why did they not do something with their intelligence—invent the bow and arrow, or paint pictures? In fact, the question is unreasonable. Invention tends to be the outcome of challenges. Without challenges, things are inclined to go on much as they did yesterday and the day before. Small groups of hominids, living in widely separated environments, were in the same position as people living in remote villages a few centuries ago. They must have been incredibly parochial; each generation did exactly what its father and grandfathers and great-grandfathers did, because no one had any new ideas. Think of one of those Russian villages in nineteenth-century Russian novels, then multiply the boredom and narrow-mindedness by ten, and you begin to see how man could have remained unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years.

  In other words, highly intelligent men may have gone on making the same kind of crude tools simply because they could see no reason to do anything else. It is true that walking upright confers certain advantages—a man can see further than an ape or a dog, and the fact that his eyes are set side by side, instead of on either side of his head, means that he is a better judge of distance, which is an advantage in hunting. But there is no good reason why an upright creature should not remain unchanged for a million years if no new challenges present themselves.

  And what about the obvious objection—that if there were ‘human’ ancestors walking the earth three or four million years ago, why have we not found their remains? The answer lies in Richard Leakey’s comment (in People of the Lake): ‘If someone went to the trouble of collecting together in one room all the fossil remains so far discovered of our ancestors (and their biological relatives) ... he would need only a couple of large trestle tables on which to spread them out.’ Of the millions of hominids who lived on earth in prehistory, we merely have a few bones.

  Yet even as it is, the trestle tables would contain some interesting evidence—like Reck’s skeleton and Leakey’s Kanam jaw—that seem to suggest that man may have been around rather longer than we suppose.

  In 1976, a young American student of political science named Michael A. Cremo became a member of the Bhaktivedanta Institute in Florida, which teaches a form of Hinduism called Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Cremo’s guru, known as Swami Prabhupada, suggested to him that he should study paleoanthropology, with a view to trying to establish that Homo sapiens may be millions of years older than is generally accepted. (Prabhupada died in the following year, 1977.)

  The thought of a scientific investigation being initiated for religious reasons arouses understandable misgivings—memories of the Scopes ‘monkey trial’ in Tennessee, and of modern born-again Christians who still oppose Darwinism. Yet it would be a mistake to bracket the outlook of Hinduism with that of some of the more dogmatic forms of Christianity, for Hinduism is remarkably free from dogmas. Its most fundamental belief is expressed in the Sanskrit phrase Tat tvam asi, ‘That thou art’—that the essence of the individual soul (Atman) is identical with the essence of God (Brahman). In Christianity, the statement ‘The Kingdom of God is within you’ is generally taken to mean the same thing.

  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.