Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [112]
In addition to the handaxe, a good many other flaked flint objects were recovered from the Stone Bed at Whitlingham, England. In regard to these discoveries, Breuil said (1922, pp. 228–229): “Mr. Reid Moir was able to retrieve some pieces in a stratigraphic position at the base of a cliff. That the enormous flakes found there were made by very violent human percussion cannot be doubted.”
Coles (1968, p. 24) stated: “Many of these Thorpe flakes were believed to exhibit deliberate flaking. The flakes include irregular forms with even retouch along one or two edges.” The presence of these other flaked implements “in a stratigraphic position” at the base of the cliff at Whitlingham tends to confirm the Stone Bed as the source of the handaxe.
The Whitlingham handaxe, if from the glacial gravels that make up the Cromer Till, would be not much more than .4 million years old. But if, as is most likely, the handaxe is from the Stone Bed underlying the Early Pleistocene Norwich Crag, it would be about 2 million years old (Table 2.1, p. 78).
Coles (1968, p. 29) said that his last test specimen (Figure 3.19) “was found at the base of the Red Crag at Bramford in Suffolk and its stratigraphical horizon is not in doubt.” He added: “It lay in the Detritus Bed in London Clay and was sealed by Crag sands. It is reminiscent of Chellean axes with triangular sections, but is considerably rolled; although it bears some 25 flake scars, and has lost all its cortex, the irregular nature of the object itself is not convincing.”
In another description of the same piece, Coles (1968, p. 24) stated that it was “superficially of handaxe form, with thirteen flake scars upon one face, and twelve upon the other.” He added: “These scars appear to have been directed from a multiplicity of positions on the edges, and are sufficiently elongated to overlap at the center of one face, producing thereby a triangular sectioned ‘tool’” (Coles 1968, p. 24).
The position of this specimen in the detritus bed beneath the Red Crag means that it is at least Pliocene in age (2–5 million years old). But because the detritus bed contains materials from land surfaces dating back as far as the Eocene, the handaxe could be as much as 55 million years old.
Figure 3.19. Handaxe from below the Red Crag at Bramford, England (Moir 1935, p. 364). It could be anywhere from 2 million to 55 million years old.
All in all, Coles, in spite of his negative conclusions, can be commended for his willingness to discuss Moir’s discoveries. At the end of his review, he stated: “A fair comment on the East Anglian material would, I think, be concerned to point out that the typology of the claimed implements was not necessarily outside the range of variation known from humanly worked industries in Europe and Africa, but that we have very little information about the natural flaking processes available in East Anglia in early Pleistocene times, some of which might well have been capable of producing flaked flints including bifacially-worked ‘handaxes’; no natural sources are known today which could do this under observation. Our greatly augmented evidence about the chronology of early tool-making in other parts of the world continues, however, to suggest how extraordinary it would be if the East Anglian Crag industries were of human manufacture” (Coles 1968, p. 30). This is an incredible line of reasoning. No natural forces known to today’s scientists can account for the production of the handaxes and other flaked implements. Nevertheless, Coles hesitates to