Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [103]
To answer these questions, the commission visited the principal sites where Moir had collected his specimens, including locations at Ipswich, Thorington Hall, Bramford, and Foxhall Road. They also examined the collection at the Ipswich Museum, the personal collection of Moir, and Warren’s collection of pressureflaked flints from the Bullhead Eocene beds. Also visited were the collections at the Cambridge Museum and the British Museum at South Kensington, as well as the collection of Mr. Westlake at Fordingbridge near Salisbury, which included his enormous collection of flints from Puy Courny and Puy de Boudieu near Aurillac, France (Lohest et al. 1923, p. 54).
The geologists Max Lohest and Paul Fourmarier reported on the stratigraphy of Moir’s discoveries. Lohest and Fourmarier stated: “The purpose of our mission to Ipswich was to verify whether flints showing indisputable signs of intentional work are in fact encountered in undisturbed Tertiary strata” (Lohest et al. 1923, p. 54). These two experts confirmed, at Thorington Hall, that the Red Crag lies upon the Eocene London Clay, and that at the bottom of the Red Crag there is a “detritus bed,” which contains flints (not rolled), flint pebbles, phosphate nodules, fossil remains of deer, and also flints showing signs of intentional work.
Lohest and Fourmarier reported: “After minute examination, we believe we can affirm that the Red Crag, because of its cross-bedded stratification and numerous fossils at the pit at Thorington Hall, constitutes incontestably a primary deposit in place, not reformed, and that the deposit is Pliocene and formed in the immediate vicinity of the seashore. If the flints of this deposit are really the work of an intelligent being, then there is no doubt, according to us, that this being existed in England before the great marine invasion of Trophon antiquum, considered by all geologists as dating to the late Tertiary epoch” (Lohest et al.1923, pp. 55–56).
J. Hamal-Nandrin and Charles Fraipont also reported on the geological considerations: “The detritus bed from which the flints are recovered is surmounted by several meters of Red Crag deposits containing Pliocene shells. The Red Crag is apparently an ancient shore, and the shells accumulated in the sand on the actual shore. There are very delicate shells, such as bivalves; many are found whole, and the least pressure, the least touch, causes them to break. A deposit of this type is primary, not composite or resorted (remanié). It is in the underlying detritus bed that the flints are found. At Thorington Hall the detritus bed lacks many rocks. It contains coprolites, phosphate nodules, and only some small flint pebbles. The superimposed Red Crag is also almost without rocks” (Lohest et al. 1923, p. 57).
Hamal-Nandrin and Fraipont then stated: “The rarity of rocks does not permit us to suppose that the flints may have been retouched by shocks or pressure in situ. It had to be done, either naturally or artificially, before their incorporation into the beds. Below the detritus bed is the London clay, from which some rolled blocks have been incorporated into the detritus bed. The detritus bed contains, along with bones of whales, fossils of terrestrial mammals certainly characteristic of the Pliocene. This gives evidence that it was upon an ancient land surface that the sea of the Late Pliocene deposited the Red Crag, a shoreline formation at this point. If the flints from below the Red Crag at Thorington Hall, in undisturbed strata, give signs of intelligent work, the being that used them is Pliocene” (Lohest et al.