Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

Figure 3.16. A pointed implement from below the Red Crag formation, England, thought to be from Late Pliocene to Eocene in age (Lohest et al.1923, p. 65).

 

3.3.9 Continued Opposition

As far as the opposition was concerned, their attempted counterexplanations became more strained; indeed, it seems no proposal was too extreme to win the support of those who for one reason or another could not find room for Moir’s discoveries within the bounds of their paleoanthropological parameters.

Coles (1968, p. 29) informs us: “One of the final statements was made by Warren in 1948 in an address to the geological section of the Southwestern Union of Scientific Societies. . . . He agreed with Moir in considering that, at the present day, wave action was not an effective process in the fracturing of flint in a way comparable to that seen on Moir’s Crag specimens, but tried to find some other natural process that could have flaked the submarine flints exposed by erosion of that Chalk. Warren concluded that during the formation of the Crag deposits, the area must have been subject to the arrival of icebergs from the north. Such ice, grounding near the shores of the Crag sea, might well have caused the pressurecrushing and striation of the flints exposed on the sea bed. These arguments, apart from being practically the last word in the controversy, also neatly disposed of many of the points made by Moir about the differences between sea action fractures and his ‘implements,’ and allowed the exposure and deposition of fragile marine shells amidst the ice-fractured stone beds.”

We do not yet have in our possession a copy of Warren’s 1948 address, but one gets the impression, from Coles’s account, that the iceberg hypothesis was a somewhat desperate exercise in pure speculation. One wonders whether icebergs move onto shorelines in the manner suggested by Warren; and granting that they may, is there at present any hard evidence, anywhere in the Arctic or Antarctic regions, suggesting they have produced implementlike objects in the manner suggested by Warren? To our knowledge, no one has given any proof that icebergs can produce the numerous bulbs of percussion and elaborate retouching reported above by Capitan. Furthermore, as pointed out previously, many of the Red Crag specimens are lying in the middle of sediments and not on hard rock surfaces against which an iceberg might have crushed them. In addition, Coles (1968, p. 29) reported that at Foxhall implements occur in layers of sediment that appear to represent land surfaces and not beach deposits. This would also rule out the iceberg action imagined by Warren.

3.3.10 Silence Ends the Debate

After Warren put forward his iceberg explanation, the controversy faded. Coles (1968, p. 28) wrote: “That . . . the scientific world did not see fit to accept either side without considerable uncertainty must account for the quite remarkable inattention that this East Anglian problem has received since the days of active controversy.” This may be in part true, but there is another possible explanation—that the scientific community decided silence was a better way to bury Moir’s discoveries than active and vocal dissent. By the 1950s, with scientific opinion lining up solidly behind an Early Pleistocene African center for human evolution, there would have been little point, and perhaps some embarrassment and harm, in continually trying to disprove evidence for a theoretically impossible Pliocene habitation of England. That would have kept both sides of the controversy too much alive. The policy of silence, deliberate or not, did in fact prove highly successful in removing Moir’s evidence from view. There was no need to defeat something that was beneath notice, and little to gain from defending or supporting it either.

3.3.11 Recent Negative Evaluations of Moir’s Discoveries

Although most modern authorities do not even mention Moir’s discoveries, a rare notice of dismissal may be found in The Ice Age in Britain, by B. W. Sparks and R. G. West (1972, p. 234): “The beginnings of tool manufacture are shrouded in doubt by the similarity of primitive tools to naturally-occurring flaked pebbles. The earliest dated tools identified are found in Africa (Lower Pleistocene,