Michael Cremo - Human Devolution - A Vedic Alternative To Darwin's Theory

Advanced Paleoliths

Whereas the eoliths and crude paleoliths could be either the work of anatomically modern humans or the work of human precursors such as Homo erectus or Homo habilis, advanced paleoliths are unquestionably the work of anatomically modern humans.

Florentino Ameghino, a respected Argentine paleontologist, found advanced stone tools, signs of fire, broken mammal bones, and a human vertebra in a Pliocene formation at Monte Hermoso, Argentina. Ameghino made numerous similar discoveries in Argentina, attracting the attention of scientists around the world.

In 1912, Ales Hrdlicˇ ka, of the Smithsonian Institution, published a lengthy, but not very reasonable, attack on Ameghino’s work. Hrdlicˇ ka asserted that all of Ameghino’s finds were from recent Indian settlements. In response, Carlos Ameghino, brother of Florentino Ameghino, carried out new investigations at Miramar, on the Argentine coast south of Buenos Aires. There he found a series of stone implements, including bolas, and signs of fire in the Chapadmalalan formation, which modern geologists say is 3–5 million years old. Carlos Ameghino also found at Miramar a stone arrowhead firmly embedded in the femur of a Pliocene species of Toxodon, an extinct South American mammal.

Ethnographer Eric Boman disputed Carlos Ameghino’s discoveries but also unintentionally helped confirm them. In 1913, Carlos Ameghino’s collector, Lorenzo Parodi, found a stone implement in the Pliocene seaside barranca (cliff) at Miramar and left it in place. Boman was one of several scientists invited by Ameghino to witness the implement’s extraction. After the implement (a bola stone) was photographed and removed, another discovery was made. “At my direction,” wrote Boman (1921, p. 344), “Parodi continued to attack the barranca with a pick at the same point where the bola stone was discovered, when suddenly and unexpectedly, there appeared a second stone ball. . . . It is more like a grinding stone than a bola.” Boman found yet another implement 200 yards away. Confounded, Boman could only hint in his written report that the implements had been planted by Parodi. In any case, Boman produced no evidence whatsoever that Parodi, a longtime employee of the Buenos Aires Museum of Natural History, had ever behaved fraudulently.

The kinds of implements found by Carlos Ameghino at Miramar (arrowheads and bolas) are usually considered the work of Homo sapiens sapiens. Taken at face value, the Miramar finds therefore demonstrate the presence of anatomically modern humans in South America over 3 million years ago. Interestingly enough, in 1921 M. A. Vignati discovered in the Late Pliocene Chapadmalalan formation at Miramar a fully human fossil jaw fragment.

In the early 1950s, Thomas E. Lee of the National Museum of Canada found advanced stone tools in glacial deposits at Sheguiandah, on Manitoulin Island in northern Lake Huron. Geologist John Sanford (1971) of Wayne State University argued that the oldest Sheguiandah tools were at least 65,000 years old and might be as much as 125,000 years old. For those adhering to standard views on North American prehistory, such ages were unacceptable.

Thomas E. Lee (1966, pp. 18–19) complained: “The site’s discoverer [Lee] was hounded from his Civil Service position into prolonged unemployment; publication outlets were cut off; the evidence was misrepresented by several prominent authors . . . ; the tons of artifacts vanished into storage bins of the National Museum of Canada; for refusing to fire the discoverer, the Director of the National Museum, who had proposed having a monograph on the site published, was himself fired and driven into exile; official positions of prestige and power were exercised in an effort to gain control over just six Sheguiandah specimens that had not gone under cover; and the site has been turned into a tourist resort. . . . Sheguiandah would have forced embarrassing admissions that the Brahmins did not know everything. It would have forced the rewriting of almost every book in the business. It had to be killed. It was killed.”

The treatment received by Lee is not an isolated case. In the early

1970s, anthropologists uncovered advanced stone tools at Hueyatlaco, Mexico. Geologist Virginia Steen-McIntyre and other members of a U. S. Geological Survey team obtained an age of about 250,000 years for the site’s implement-bearing layers. This challenged not only standard views of New World anthropology but also the whole standard picture of human origins. Humans capable of making the kind of tools found at Hueyatlaco are not thought to have come into existence until around

100,000 years ago in Africa.

Virginia Steen-McIntyre experienced difficulty in getting her dating study on Hueyatlaco published. “The problem as I see it is much bigger than Hueyatlaco,” she wrote to Estella Leopold, associate editor of Quaternary Research. “It concerns the manipulation of scientific thought through the suppression of ‘Enigmatic Data,’ data that challenges the prevailing mode of thinking. Hueyatlaco certainly does that! Not being an anthropologist, I didn’t realize the full significance of our dates back in 1973, nor how deeply woven into our thought the current theory of human evolution has become. Our work at Hueyatlaco has been rejected by most archaeologists because it contradicts that theory, period.”

This pattern of data suppression has been going on for a long time. In 1880, J. D. Whitney (1880), the state geologist of California, published a lengthy review of advanced stone tools found in California gold mines. The implements, including spear points and stone mortars and pestles, were found deep in mine shafts, underneath thick, undisturbed layers of lava, in formations ranging from 9 million to over 55 million years old. W. H. Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution, one of the most vocal critics of the California finds, wrote (1899, p. 424): “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 [that humans existed in very ancient times in North America], notwithstanding the imposing array of testimony with which he was confronted.” In other words, if the facts do not agree with the favored theory, then such facts, even an imposing array of them, must be discarded.

evidence for Advanced Culture in Distant Ages

Up to this point, most of the evidence I have mentioned gives the impression that even if humans did exist in the distant past, they remained at a somewhat primitive level. But artifacts suggestive of more developed cultural and technological achievement have also been found. Not only are some of the objects decidedly more advanced than stone tools, but many also occur in geological contexts far older than we have thus far considered.

The reports of this extraordinary evidence emanate from both scientific and nonscientific sources. In some cases, the artifacts themselves, not having been preserved in standard natural history museums, are impossible to locate. But for the sake of completeness and to encourage further study I will give some examples.

In his book mineralogy, Count Bournon recorded an intriguing discovery made by French workmen in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The workmen, who were quarrying limestone near Aix-en-Provence, had gone through eleven layers of limestone separated by layers of sediments. Then, in the clayey sand above the twelfth layer “they found stumps of columns and fragments of stone half wrought, and the stone was exactly similar to that of the quarry: they found moreover coins, handles of hammers, and other tools or fragments of tools in wood.” The wood artifacts were petrified. These passages appeared in the American Journal of Science and Arts in 1820 (v. 2, pp. 145–146); today, however, it is unlikely such a report would be found in the pages of a scientific journal. Scientists simply do not take such discoveries seriously. The limestones of Aixen Provence are from the Oligocene (Pomerol 1980, pp.