Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

3.3.1 Moir and Harrison

J. Reid Moir, a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and president of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, was acquainted with Benjamin Harrison’s eoliths. Moir (1927, p. 17) believed the gravels on the Kent Plateau, from which Harrison had recovered his eoliths, were the remnants of an old Tertiary land surface, perhaps as old as the Eocene. But, as we have seen, some authorities would assign the gravels of the Kent Plateau to the Pliocene (Sections 3.2.2,

3.2.4). Moir wrote: “It is probable that these flints were shaped by a race of apelike people who lived on a land surface which existed at one time over what is now the Weald of Kent, which was then enjoying a tropical climate. . . . They were probably small, squat men, with very ape-like skulls and projecting jaws, and in many ways more like animals than men” (1927, pp. 17–18, 19).

Moir was an evolutionist. He believed that the degree of primitiveness shown by a very old stone tool industry was indicative of the correspondingly primitive physiological character of the toolmaker. But even today tribal people, physiologically identical to MIT computer scientists, make implements just like the crudest ever found in ancient strata. Furthermore, skeletal remains of fully human character have been found in strata dating back to the Pliocene and even further (Sections 6.2, 6.3). It is therefore possible that the eoliths discovered by Harrison were made by human beings of the type Homo sapiens sapiens.

Harrison found many eoliths during excavations sponsored by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. But he found most on the surface and although geologist Sir John Prestwich argued strongly for their Tertiary age, stubborn critics remained doubtful. The geological position of Moir’s finds was more secure, for most of them were found in situ, deep below the land surface in various locations in East Anglia.

3.3.2 The Age of the Crag Formations

The Red Crag formation (Table 2.1, p. 78), in which Moir made some of his most significant discoveries, is composed of the shelly sands of a sea that once washed the shores of East Anglia. At some places beneath the Red Crag is found a similar formation called the Coralline Crag. Some authorities have placed the Red Crag wholly within the Early Pleistocene. For example, J. M. Coles (1968, p. 19) proposed that the boundary between the Red and Coralline Crags represents the boundary between the Pleistocene and the Pliocene. Others have said that the Red Crag spans the Pleistocene-Pliocene boundary. W. H. Zaguin (1974), for example, placed the lower part of the Red Crag in the Pliocene (Nilsson 1983, p. 108). And still others, such as A. S. Romer (1966, p. 334), put the Red Crag entirely within the Pliocene. Claude Klein (1973, table 6) also placed the Red Crag in the Pliocene and gave it a date of 2.5– 4.0 million years.

Tage Nilsson (1983) called attention to potassium-argon dates for Icelandic formations that some experts correlate with those of East Anglia. Nilsson (1983, p. 106) stated: “If the correlation of the uppermost Tjörnes Beds with the Butley Red Crag is justified, this would imply a probable age of 2.5–3.0 million years for the youngest Red Crag in Britain.” According to Nilsson, this view is supported by paleomagnetic data, which suggest a date of over 2.5 million years for the Red Crag. Paleomagnetic dating relies on the fact that the magnetic field of the earth periodically reverses. Signs of this can be detected in various formations, which are thus labeled normal and reversed in terms of their magnetic polarity. Nilsson (1983, p. 106) stated: “the Red Crag in East Anglia is normally magnetized and probably referable to the later part of the Gauss Normal Epoch, and [is] thus more than 2.5 million years old.”

After studying the range of geological opinion, we have arrived at a conservative age estimate of at least 2.0–2.5 million years for the Red Crag. The range of dates assigned to the Red Crag raises an important question. The conventionally accepted evidence for human evolution comes from sites representing only the last 2 or 3 million years of the earth’s history. Much depends upon being able to arrange fossils from these sites in an accurate temporal sequence. But if the quantitative age determinations of fairly recent formations can vary by hundreds of thousands of years, or even a million or more years, then the integrity of proposed evolutionary sequences, at least insofar as they are founded on stratigraphic evidence, becomes problematic.

Below the Crags of East Anglia are found detritus beds, sometimes called bone beds, composed of a mixture of loose materials—sands, gravels, shells, and bones derived from a variety of older formations. According to Moir, the detritus beds also contain stone implements.