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By Root 1546 0

however, it is a flake industry with which we are dealing. . . . It would appear that these chipped specimens were made by men who lived at a time when the earlier beds of the Cromer Forest series were being laid down, for a few undoubted artifacts have been discovered in them, and the horizon at which they occur probably represents the ancient land surface on which these makers of the Cromerian industries wandered, collecting the raw material for their tools from exposures of the stone bed below. Actually most of the Cromer Forest Bed is now also masked by talus.”

Burkitt (1956, p. 112) then delivered a striking conclusion about the implements discovered in and below the Red Crag: “the eoliths themselves are mostly much older than the late pliocene deposits in which they were found. Some of them might actually date back to pre-pliocene times.” In other words, he was prepared to accept the existence of intelligent toolmaking hominids in England over 5 million years ago. Because there is much evidence, including skeletal remains (as we shall show in our coming chapters), that humans of the fully modern type existed in pre-Pliocene times, there is no reason to rule out the possibility that Moir’s implements from the below the Crag formations were made by Homo sapiens over 5 million years ago.

Another supporter of Moir’s finds was Louis Leakey (1960d, pp. 66, 68), who wrote: “It is more than likely that primitive humans were present in Europe during the Lower Pleistocene, just as they were in Africa, and certainly a proportion of the specimens from the sub-crag deposits appear to be humanly flaked and cannot be regarded merely as the result of natural forces.” Implements from below the Crags would, however, be not Early ( Lower) Pleistocene but at least Late Pliocene in age.

Leakey (1960d, p. 68) then made an important point: “It must be constantly borne in mind that although simple pebble chopping tools without any more elaborate forms are typical of the Kafuan and Oldowan, similar tools continued to be made and used by the makers of much more advanced cultures, just as we ourselves still use candles although we also have electric light.” This observation is essential to understanding lithic remains. There is no reason to suppose that crude stone tools, found in Early Pleistocene or Tertiary beds, must have been made by correspondingly primitive hominids. This is especially true when we consider that examples of much more sophisticated tools, of kinds universally attributed to Homo sapiens, occur in beds of the same Early Pleistocene and Tertiary ages (Chapter 5), as do skeletal remains indistinguishable from those of modern human beings (Chapter 6).

These discoveries are not well known, having been forgotten by science over the course of many decades or in many cases eliminated by a biased process of knowledge filtration. The result is that modern students of paleoanthropology are not in possession of the complete range of scientific evidence concerning human origins and antiquity. Rather most people, including professional scientists, are exposed to only a carefully edited selection of evidence supporting the currently accepted theory that protohuman hominids evolved from apelike predecessors in Africa during the Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene, and that modern humans subsequently evolved from the protohuman hominids in the Late Pleistocene, in Africa or elsewhere. This book is intended to supply those concerned with paleoanthropological studies access to the full range of evidence. Objectively reviewed, the totality of evidence, in the form of incised bones (Chapter 2), stone implements (Chapters 3–5), and human skeletal remains (Chapter 6), suggests that the current theory of an African evolution is erroneous. It appears that toolmaking hominids indistinguishable from Homo sapiens sapiens were present in habitable areas all over the planet far back into the Tertiary epoch. This does not, however, rule out the simultaneous presence of more apelike hominids, some of whom may have manufactured some of the most primitive