Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

The American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (1921, p. 573) came out strongly in favor of the implements having been manufactured by human beings and argued for a Pliocene date: “Proofs which have rested hitherto on the doubtful testimony of irregular eoliths generally considered by archaeologists as not of human manufacture, now rest on the firm foundation of the Foxhall flints in which human handiwork cannot be challenged; these proofs have convinced the most learned and most conservative expert in flint industry in Europe today, namely Abbe Henri Breuil of the Institut de Paleontologie Humaine.” According to Osborn (1921, p. 573), the Foxhall specimens included borers, arrowheadlike pointed implements (some hafted), scrapers, and side scrapers very much like early Mousterian racloirs.

Osborn (1921, p. 566) concluded: “This discovery of man in Pliocene time delights the present writer for a personal reason, namely, because it tends to render somewhat more probable his prophecy made in April 1921, before the National Academy of Sciences at Washington that one of the great surprises in store for us in science is the future discovery of Pliocene man with a large brain.” This sort of talk would not go down very well today.

Osborn (1921, p. 565) backed not only the Foxhall flints but the rest of Moir’s work as well: “The discoveries of J. Reid Moir of evidences of the existence of Pliocene man in East Anglia open a new epoch in archaeology. . . . they bring indubitable evidence of the existence of man in southeast Britain, man of sufficient intelligence to fashion flints and to build a fire, before the close of the Pliocene time and before the advent of the First Glaciation.”

But whether one accepts Osborn’s Pliocene date or Moir’s Early Pleistocene estimate, neither is to be expected if one accepts the standard version of hominid evolution in an African homeland. This is especially true if, as the Foxhall jaw indicates, the maker of the Foxhall flint tools was fully human. The first Homo sapiens are thought to have come into existence only a couple of hundred thousand years ago at most, and the standard textbook version is that fully modern Homo sapiens sapiens is only about 100,000 years old.

Another scientist won over by the Foxhall finds was Hugo Obermaier, previously a consistent and vocal opponent of Eolithic discoveries. Obermaier was one of those scientists who believed that eoliths were produced by natural forces similar to the forces operating in cement and chalk mills (Section 3.5). But Obermaier (1924, p. 41) wrote: “Very recently a large bed of flints with evidences of fire has been found on the eastern coast of England near Norwich and beneath the Late Pliocene deposits known as the

‘Red Crag’ and the ‘Norwich Crag.’ The authenticity of the flints as of human origins is disputed by some archaeologists, but is accepted by others, including Louis Capitan, the veteran archaeologist of France, and Henri Breuil, who is frequently quoted in these pages. This discovery of Foxhall is the first evidence we have of the existence of Tertiary man.”

Someone might have asked Obermaier if, having accepted the Foxhall flint tools as proof of human existence in the Tertiary, he might reevaluate any of the Tertiary Eolithic industries he had once rejected.

Figure 3.9. Pointed tool from the Cromer Forest Bed, East Runton, England (Moir 1927, p. 45). It could be from about .8 million to 1.75 million years old, depending upon how one dates the Cromer Forest Bed.

 

3.3.5 Cromer Forest Bed (Middle or Early Pleistocene)

Thus far we have considered Moir’s discoveries in the Tertiary bone bed below the Late Pliocene Red Crag and his finds in the Red Crag itself at Foxhall. We shall now turn to some discoveries in the more recent Cromer Forest Bed of Norfolk. As we have seen (Section 2.19; Table 2.1, p. 78), the Cromer Forest Bed dates from about .4 million years to about .8 million years ago, or perhaps even as much as 1.75 million years ago. During this period, according to Moir, the delta of the Rhine extended to East Anglia.