Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

Nonetheless, reports of incised and broken bones indicating a human presence in the Pliocene and earlier are absent from the currently accepted stock of evidence. This exclusion may not, however, be warranted. From the incomplete evidence now under active consideration, scientists have concluded that humans of the modern type appeared fairly recently. But in light of the evidence covered in this chapter, the soundness of that conclusion is somewhat deceptive.

2.1 St. Prest, France (early Pleistocene or Late Pliocene)

Just above the famous cathedral town of Chartres in northwestern France, at St. Prest, in the valley of the Eure River, there are gravel pits, where, in the early nineteenth century, workmen occasionally turned up fossils. These were first reported to the scientific world in 1848 by Monsieur de Boisvillette, the engineer in charge of the local bridges and causeways. The numerous fossils, including many extinct animals such as Elephas meridionalis, Rhinoceros leptorhinus, Rhinoceros etruscus, Hippopotamus major, and a giant beaver called Trogontherium cuvieri, were judged to be characteristic of the Late Pliocene (de Mortillet1883, pp. 28–29).

A further indication of the fossils’ great antiquity was the fact that the gravels in which they were found lay at an elevation of 25 to 30 meters [82 to 98 feet] above the present level of the Eure, where an ancient river once ran in a different bed. The geological reasoning is as follows. When rivers cut valleys into a plain, the most recent gravels will normally be found near the bottom of the valley. Gravels found further up on the sides of the valley were deposited earlier by the same river, or other rivers, before the valley reached its present depth. The higher the gravels, the greater their age.

In April of 1863, Monsieur J. Desnoyers, of the French National Museum, came to St. Prest to gather fossils. From the sandy gravels he recovered part of a rhinoceros tibia, upon which he noticed a series of narrow grooves, longer and deeper than could have resulted from minor fracturing or weathering. To Desnoyers, some of the grooves appeared to have been produced by a sharp knife or blade of flint. He also observed small circular marks that could well have been made by a pointed implement (de Mortillet 1883, p. 43). Later, upon examining collections of St. Prest fossils at the museums of Chartres and the School of Mines in Paris, Desnoyers recognized upon a diverse assortment of bones the same types of marks. He then reported his findings to the French Academy of Sciences, maintaining that while some of the marks could possibly be attributed to glacial action others were definitely the work of humans.

If Desnoyers concluded correctly that the marks on many of the bones had been made by flint implements, then it would appear that human beings had been present in France before the end of the Pliocene period. One might ask, “What’s wrong with that?” In terms of our modern understanding of paleoanthropology, quite a bit is wrong. The presence at that time in Europe of beings using stone tools in a sophisticated manner would seem almost impossible. It is believed that at the end of the Pliocene, about 2 million years ago, the modern human species had not yet come into being. Only in Africa should one find primitive human ancestors, and these were limited to Australopithecus and Homo habilis, considered the first toolmaker.

At this point, some will inevitably question whether the nineteenth-century scientists were correct in assigning the St. Prest site to the Late Pliocene. The short answer to this question is a qualified yes.

As we mentioned in our discussion of the geological time periods in the previous chapter (Section 1.7), the dating of sites at the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary remains a matter of intense controversy. Since the St. Prest site lies roughly in this period, one might expect various authorities to place it differently. And it turns out that this is in fact the case.

The American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (1910, p. 391) placed St. Prest in the Early Pleistocene. In times closer to our own, Claude Klein (1973, pp. 692–693) reviewed French opinion regarding the age of the St. Prest fauna. In 1927, Charles Deperet characterized St. Prest as Late Pliocene. G. Denizot placed St. Prest in the Cromerian interglacial stage of the Middle Pleistocene, a view he consistently maintained into the late 1960s. In 1950, P. Pinchemel referred St. Prest to the Late Pliocene. More recently, F. Boudier, in 1965, placed St. Prest in the Waalian temperate stage of the late Early Pleistocene, with a quantitative date of about 1 million years (Klein 1973, p. 736).