Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

11 ALWAYS SOMETHING NEW OUT OF AFRICA

11.1 Reck’s skeleton

11.1.1 The Discovery

11.1.2 Leakey’s conversion

11.1.3 Cooper and Watson launch their Attack

11.1.4 Reck and Leakey change their Minds

11.1.5 The Radiocarbon Dating of Reck’s skeleton

11.1.6 Probable Date Range of Reck’s skeleton

11.2 The Kanjera Skulls and Kanam Jaw

11.2.1 Discovery of the kanjera skulls

11.2.2 Discovery of the kanam jaw

11.2.3 A commission of scientists Decides on kanam and kanjera

11.2.4 Boswell strikes Again

11.2.5 Leakey Responds

11.2.6 Kanam and Kanjera after Boswell

11.2.7 Morphology of the kanam jaw

11.2.8 Chemical Testing Of the Kanam And Kanjera Fossils

11.3 The Birth of Australopithecus

11.3.1 The Taung Child

11.3.2 Dart Retreats

11.3.3 Broom and Australopithecus

11.4 Leakey and His Luck

11.4.1 Zinjanthropus

11.4.2 Homo Habilis

11.4.3 Leakey’s Views on human evolution

11.4.4 Evidence for Bone smashing in the Middle Miocene

11.5 A Tale of Two Humeri

11.5.1 The Kanapoi Humerus

11.5.2 The Gombore Humerus

11.6 Richard, Son of Leakey

11.6.1 Skull Er 1470

 11.6.2 Evolutionary Significance of the ER 1470 Skull

11.6.3 Humanlike Femurs From Koobi Fora

11.6.4 The ER 813 Talus

11.6.5 The Age of The KBS Tuff

11.6.5.2 The Potassium-Argon Dating of the KBS Tuff

11.7 Oh 62: Will The Real Homo Habilis Please Stand Up?

11.7.1 Implications for the eR 1481 and eR 1472 Femurs

11.7.2 The Leap From Oh 62 to Knm-Wt 15000

11.7.3 Conflicting Assessments of Other Homo Habilis Fossils

11.7.3.1 The OH 8 Foot

11.7.3.2 The OH 7 Hand

11.7.4 Cultural Level of Homo Habilis

11.7.5 Does Homo Habilis Deserve To Exist?

11.8 Oxnard’s Critique of Australopithecus

11.8.1 A Different Picture of Australopithecus

11.9 Lucy in the Sand with Diatribes

11.9.1 The Hadar Knee (Al 129)

11.9.2 Alemayehu’s jaws

11.9.3 Lucy

11.9.4 The First Family

11.9.5 Two Hominids at Hadar?

11.9.6 Johanson and White Decide On a Single Hadar Species

11.9.7 A. Afarensis: Overly Humanized?

11.10 The Laetoli Footprints

11.11 Black Skull, Black Thoughts

Foreword

I perceive in Forbidden Archeology an important work of thoroughgoing scholarship and intellectual adventure. Forbidden Archeology ascends and descends into the realms of the human construction of scientific “fact” and theory: postmodern territories that historians, philosophers, and sociologists of scientific knowledge are investigating with increasing frequency.

Recent studies of the emergence of Western scientific knowledge accentuate that “credible” knowledge is situated at an intersection between physical locales and social distinctions. Historical, sociological, and ethnomethodological studies of science by scholars such as Harry Collins, Michael Mulkay, Steven Shapin, Thomas Kuhn, Harold Garfinkel, Michael Lynch, Steve Woolgar, Andrew Pickering, Bruno Latour, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Donna Haraway, Allucquere Stone, and Malcolm Ashmore all point to the observation that scientific disciplines, be they paleoanthropology or astronomy, “manufacture knowledge” through locally constructed representational systems and practical devices for making their discovered phenomenon visible, accountable, and consensual to a larger disciplinary body of tradition. As Michael Lynch reminds us, “scientists construct and use instruments, modify specimen materials, write articles, make pictures and build organizations.”

With exacting research into the history of anthropological discovery, Cremo and Thompson zoom in on the epistemological crisis of the human fossil record, the process of disciplinary suppression, and the situated scientific handling of “anomalous evidence” to build persuasive theory and local institutions of knowledge and power.

In Cremo and Thompson’s words, archeological and paleoanthropological “‘facts’ turn out to be networks of arguments and observational claims” that assemble a discipline’s “truth” regardless, at times, of whether there is any agreed upon connection to the physical evidence or to the actual work done at the physical site of discovery. This perspective, albeit radical, accords with what I see as the best of the new work being done in studies of scientific knowledge.

Forbidden Archeology does not conceal its own positioning on a relativist spectrum of knowledge production. The authors admit to their own sense of place in a knowledge universe with contours derived from personal experience with Vedic philosophy, religious perception, and Indian cosmology. Their intriguing discourse on the “Evidence for Advanced Culture in Distant Ages” is light-years from “normal” Western science, and yet provokes a cohesion of probative thought.