Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

The charge that stones randomly chipped in mills resembled crude tools was also made in regard to other Eolithic industries in England and elsewhere in Europe. In 1905, Hugo Obermaier, with A. Laville, M. Boule, and E. Cartailhac, visited a chalk mill at Guerville, near Mantes, close to the Seine. Obermaier (1924, p. 11) wrote: “These mills consist of tanks filled with water, in which lumps of chalk with flint nodules embedded in them are rapidly rotated. In order to separate these nodules from the chalk and to pulverize the latter, chalk-lumps and water are subjected by means of turbines to a centrifugal motion of four meters [thirteen feet] per second. . . . The eoliths produced by the chalk mills, equally with those found in river deposits, showed forms with either partial or entire retouch around the edges, notched edges more or less deeply incurved, specimens that might be classed as scrapers, burins, and even planing tools.”

But a modern expert, Leland W. Patterson, has pointed out a method for distinguishing between random natural chipping on edges of stone and intentional human chipping. Patterson (1983, p. 304) stated: “Lithic objects in nature are generally free to move or are loosely held by surrounding materials. Randomly applied forces under this condition will tend to be very oblique to the edge of the flake. Fractures then occur transversely to flake edges in the direction of least mass resistance.” This kind of random chipping quickly removes sharp edges from flakes of stone. Furthermore, the chip scars tend to be of various sizes, rather than uniform in size, and tend to be oriented in many directions, rather than in a single direction.

Patterson’s own studies of crushed gravel from cement factories demonstrated: “In crushed gravel there are few objects that resemble man-made cores. There are also no long sections of flake edges with uniform, unifacial retouch” (L. Patterson 1983, p. 306). Eoliths and other early stone implements, it may be recalled, are characterized by unifacial retouch—chipping confined to one side of a sharp edge.

It thus seems that a careful student of lithic technology would be able to offer a response to the challenge by Obermaier, who believed running water was a better explanation of eoliths than human action. One might ask if any pieces with sharp edges were found at the chalk mill at Mantes? Obermaier said he saw “sharp edged types, and others in which the edge had been completely worn away.” He observed, “The sharp-edged types resulted after remaining in the mill from eight to ten hours, the others after a longer time in the water” (Obermaier 1924, p. 11). This evidence supports Patterson’s observation that random natural action tends to quickly wear away sharp edges, making it probable that sharp-edged Eolithic specimens with regular unifacial retouch were manufactured by human beings. Rapidly running water does not produce such effects.

Obermaier, however, tried to overcome this difficulty by proposing mechanisms that would result in only brief random percussive action on flints, a few hours over the course of perhaps millions of years. Here, as many times previously, we find a scientist eager to discredit unwelcome discoveries moving into the realm of extremely improbable special explanations. Obermaier referred to a deposit of Quaternary eoliths discovered by P. Wernert and R. R. Schmidt at Steinheim in the valley of the Stuben, near Württemberg, Germany. Wernert and Schmidt stated: “We were able to show at the site itself how the fragments of flint were borne along by the stream in the principal valley and suddenly drawn into whirlpools caused by the inflow of a tributary stream. By this means the flints were subjected to a strong rotary movement which, however, was limited and intermittent in action, and therefore did not result in such continuous wearing away as would transform the flints into rounded pebbles” (Obermaier 1924, pp. 11–12).

Even if the whirlpool explanation is granted, application of Patterson’s method of analyzing edge damage should result in identification of these specimens as the product of random natural forces rather than intentional human work. In fact, Obermaier himself (1924, p. 12), reported that A. Rutot, who discovered a famous series of crude stone implements in Belgium (Section 4.4), visited the German site in 1911 and pronounced the objects found there to be “pseudoeoliths.” Even a supporter of eoliths was apparently not as eager to see a human implement in every piece of broken stone as his opponents might have believed. He was able to distinguish a pseudoeolith produced by natural forces from eoliths of human manufacture.