Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

Haeckel was one of the first to compose the familiar phylogenetic tree, showing different groups of living beings related to each other like branches and limbs coming from a central trunk. At the top of Haeckel’s tree is found Homo sapiens. His immediate predecessor was Homo stupidus, “true but ignorant man.” And before him came Pithecanthropus alalus, the “apeman without speech”—the missing link. Haeckel scored another first by commissioning a highly realistic painting of Pithecanthropus alalus, thus starting the longstanding tradition of presenting hypothetical human ancestors to the general public through the medium of lifelike pictures and statues.

Haeckel published his view of human evolution in 1866, in General Morphology of Organisms, and in 1868, in Natural History of Creation. These books appeared several years before Darwin came out with Descent of Man, in which Darwin acknowledged Haeckel’s work. Haeckel believed humans had arisen from a primate ancestor in south Asia or Africa: “considering the extraordinary resemblance between the lowest woolly-haired men, and the highest man-like apes . . . it requires but a slight imagination to conceive an intermediate form connecting the two” (Spencer 1984, p. 9).

1.4 The search Begins

In his book The Antiquity of Man, first published in 1863, Charles Lyell, like Huxley and Haeckel, expressed the belief that fossils of a creature intermediate between the apes and humans would someday be found. The most likely places were “the countries of the anthropomorphous apes . . . the tropical regions of Africa and the islands of Borneo and Sumatra” (Lyell 1863, p. 498).

Of course, it should be kept in mind that the missing link was not expected to connect modern humans with modern monkeys, but instead with the fossil apes. The first human ancestor, it was thought, must have branched off from the old World monkeys sometime before the Miocene period. As Darwin himself stated (1871, p. 520): “We are far from knowing how long ago it was when man first diverged from the Catarrhine [Old World monkey] stock; but it may have occurred at an epoch as remote as the Eocene period; for that higher apes had diverged from the lower apes as early as the upper Miocene period is shown by the existence of Dryopithecus.”

Dryopithecus is still recognized as an early precursor of the anthropoid or humanlike apes, which include gorillas, chimpanzees, gibbons, and orangutans. As previously noted, Dryopithecus was discovered by Alfred Fontan, near Sansan in the Pyrenees region of southern France. In 1856, the find was reported to the scientific world by Edouard Lartet, who also gave it its name, which means “forest ape.” in 1868, Louis Lartet, the son of Edouard Lartet, reported on fossils of the earliest fully modern humans, discovered near Cro-Magnon in southwestern France. Recently, Cro-Magnon man has been assigned a date of 30,000–40,000 years. At the time, no fossils intermediate between Dryopithecus and Cro-Magnon man, except the Neanderthal man bones from Germany and Gibraltar, had been found (or so it appears from today’s accounts).

In general, Lyell wanted to see the presence of anatomically modern humans pushed far back in time—but not too far. There were limits: “we cannot expect to meet with human bones in the Miocene formations, where all the species and nearly all the genera of mammalia belong to types widely differing from those now living; and had some other rational being, representing man, then flourished, some signs of his existence could hardly have escaped unnoticed, in the shape of implements of stone or metal” (Lyell 1863, p. 399).