Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

In response, Desnoyers (1863) protested that his careful scientific presentation had been attacked by means of a brief rumorlike report, submitted without any credible evidence. To his accusers, Desnoyers went on to reply, in a paper published in the proceedings of the French Academy of Sciences, that the bones of St. Prest, found in sand, did not require metal instruments in order to be cleaned. Furthermore, the grooves and other markings were visible on bones that had not needed any kind of cleaning whatsoever. Perhaps the professor of paleontology at the School of Mines, Dr. Bayle, truly had been sufficiently clumsy to have extensively damaged the valuable bones under his care. But Desnoyers did not believe anyone could say the same of the many capable and careful collectors who also had specimens of fossil bones from St. Prest bearing the exact same striations and incisions. In the words of Desnoyers (1863, p. 1201): “Let us admit, against all probability, that the memoir of the preparator and conservator of the collection is true, and all the bones of St. Prest in his possession have been subjected to the kind of alteration to which he pleads guilty. Very well. That assertion itself serves to demonstrate the action of the hand of man on all the other bones from the same locality, which, fortunately, have been preserved in other collections, from dangerous influences. The marks on them are incontestably primitive, and are completely identical to those produced by the chisels and burins of the functionary of the School of Mines.”

Desnoyers (1863, p. 1201) was further annoyed that persons who had never even seen the bones claimed that the impressions on them were made by the tools of the workmen in the St. Prest sand pits. He pointed out that this supposition is clearly disproved by the fact that the grooves were covered with the same magnesium deposits and dendrites found on other sections of the bone. Dendrites are crystalline mineral deposits that form branching treelike patterns. If the cuts on the fossil bones had been made by the tools of modern excavators or museum employees, the dendrites would have been scraped away. In some cases, the grooves and marks were still tightly filled with compacted sand from the deposits in which they were discovered.

Desnoyers (1863, p. 1201) suggested that doubters examine the actual specimens: “One would see that the incisions, which furrow the bones across their width and cut their edges, are frequently crossed by the longitudinal cracks resulting from dessication. These cracks were unquestionably produced after the marks made when the bone was fresh; they were produced during the course of fossilization. The distinct characteristics of these two kinds of markings are proof that the one is older than the other.”

Recent tool marks probably would have cut through the dessication markings in recognizable fashion, erasing the lighter and shallower cracks. Desnoyers’s careful analysis foreshadows the modern discipline of taphonomy, the scientific study of the changes undergone by bone and other objects in the course of entombment and fossilization.

About one of his finds, Desnoyers (1863, p. 1201) noted, “One would see on the horn of a giant deer a large incision at the base, an incision difficult to distinguish from those found on the horns of deer from caverns of later geological eras.” In other words, the incision on the deer horn was placed appropriately for a human cut mark.

The prominent British geologist Charles Lyell agreed that the St. Prest gravel beds were of Pliocene age. He observed, however, that among the fauna was the large extinct beaver, Trogontherium, and asked how one could be certain it was not the teeth of this animal that produced the marks on the fossil bones (Lyell 1863, appendix p. 4). Gabriel de Mortillet, professor of prehistoric anthropology at the École d’Anthropologie in Paris, stated in his book Le Préhistorique (1883, p. 45) that Lyell’s supposition was inadmissible because the marks on the bones of St. Prest were not at all of the character of those of a rodent’s teeth. In particular, they were too narrow to have been made by the strong and powerful incisors of Trogontherium.

De Mortillet had his own ideas about the cause of the marks on the fossil bones of St. Prest. Some authorities had suggested glaciers had been responsible for the markings. But de Mortillet said that glaciers had not reached that particular region of France. Modern authorities (Nilsson 1983, p. 169) agree on this point—the extreme southern limit of the North European glaciation passed through the Netherlands and Central Germany. De Mortillet also rejected human action as the cause of the marks on the bones.