Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

But the New Scientist stated: “Such doubts do not apply in the case of the stone pieces from the Soan Valley southeast of Rawalpindi, argues Robin Dennell, the field director of the Paleolithic Project of the British Archaeological Mission and the University of Sheffield. He and his colleague Helen Rendell, a geologist at the University of Sussex, report that the stone pieces, all of quartzite, were so firmly embedded in a deposit of conglomerate and gritstone called the Upper Siwalik series, that they had to chisel them out” (Bunney 1987, p. 36). According to the New Scientist, the dating was accomplished using a combination of paleomagnetic and stratigraphic studies.

The New York Times News Service article left the reader with the strong impression that the objects in question were quite probably formed by random concussion in stream beds, and it did not mention any of the evidence in favor of their human manufacture. However, the New Scientist gave its readers with a more balanced treatment: “Of the pieces that they extracted, eight, Dennell believes are ‘definite artefacts.’In Dennell’s view, the least equivocal artefact is a piece of quartzite that a hominid individual supposedly struck in three directions with a hammer stone, removing seven flakes from it [Figure 3.27]. This multifaceted flaking together with the fresh appearance of the scars left on the remaining ‘core’ make a ‘very convincing’ case for human involvement, Dennell told New Scientist” (Bunney 1987, p. 36). So what is going on with the find in Pakistan? It appears we may have a recent example of scientists being unable to objectively evaluate evidence that contradicts their preconceptions about the progress of human evolution.

Figure 3.27. A stone tool discovered in the Upper Siwalik formation in Pakistan (Bunney1987, p. 36). British scientists estimated its age at about 2 million years.

In this case, we find that scientists holding the view that Homo erectus was the first representative of the Homo line to leave Africa, and did so about a million years ago, were apparently quite determined to discredit stone tools found in Pakistan, about 2 million years old, rather than modify their ideas. We can just imagine how such scientists would react to stone tools found in Miocene contexts.

3.6.4 Siberia and India (Early Pleistocene to Late Pliocene)

Many other discoveries of stone implements around 2 million years old have been made at other Asian sites, in Siberia and northwestern India. Turning first to Siberia, let us consider what A. P. Okladinov and L. A. Ragozin called the riddle of Ulalinka. These two scientists reported in 1984: “Quite recently it was thought that the Siberia Paleolithic was not more than 20–25,000 years ago. Everything changed after a Paleolithic site, bearing no similarities with any site known before, was discovered in 1961 on the slopes of the steep bank of the Ulalinka River, at the edge of the city of Gorno-Altaisk, the capital of the autonomous oblast. Stone tools of primeval man were found here in the form of cobble stones only partially worked over by a coarse chipping. Half or even two-thirds of such a stone retained its original pebbly surface, a kind of scale, which had been removed only at the working end of the tool, at its cutting edge. A person not acquainted with the technology of those remote times would have tossed this stone away, seeing nothing striking in it. But the stone from Ulalinka can tell an archaeologist, a specialist in such things, a great deal” (Okladinov and Ragozin 1984, p. 5). Six hundred such tools were found at Ulalinka.