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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,

1.75 million years) and are of the so-called chopper tool or pebble tool type, made by striking a few flakes from the side of a pebble in one or two directions. Such an industry has been associated with Homo habilis and Homo erectus. In Britain such Lower Pleistocene industries have not been found. But early in this century many flints from the Lower Pleistocene Crags were described as being artifacts, such as the flints, some flaked bifacially, in the Red Crag near Ipswich, and the so-called rostrocarinates from the base of the Norwich Crag near Norwich. All are now thought to be natural products. They do not satisfy the requirements for identification as a tool, namely, that