Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [126]
In order to be effective, the measurement had to be applied not to a single specimen, but to a large sample of specimens from the industry in question. Barnes (1939, p. 111) stated that a sample “may be considered of human origin if not more than 25% of the angles platform-scar are obtuse (90 degrees and over).” Having established this, Barnes (1939, p. 111) delivered a devastating conclusion: “None of the eoliths examined by the author . . . (Pre-Crag Suffolk, Kent, Puy Courny, Belgium, etc.) . . . comply with the criterion and therefore they cannot be considered to be of human origin.”
Interestingly enough, it appears that Moir himself was aware of the Barnes criterion and believed his specimens were within the required range. In 1935, four years before Barnes came out with his report, Moir analyzed his own specimens in terms of angles. He first noted that flint implements “are all, of necessity, made upon the same general plan,” utilizing “a more or less flat striking-platform in the production of the implements” (Moir 1935, p. 355). He then decided to examine “the angle of the secondary edge-flaking exhibited by a series of pre-Crag implements, a factor largely under the control of the flint flaker” (Moir 1935, p. 355).
The term “secondary edge-flaking” appears to refer to flakes removed from the edge of a selected piece of naturally broken flint in order to fashion it into an implement. Although one cannot say so with absolute certainty, the angle of this secondary edge flaking apparently corresponds to the “angle platform-scar” of Barnes. Moir (1935, p. 355) noted “Professor A. S. Barnes was the first to draw attention to the significance of such measurements of flint implements.”
Moir (1935, pp. 355–356) then gave the results of his study: “A quantity of pre-Crag implements to the number of 181, composed of 55 specimens of Group No. 1, 55 specimens of Group No. 2, 13 specimens of Group No. 3, 55 specimens of Group No. 4, and 3 specimens of Group No. 5, were measured with the following results. It was found that the average angle of edge-flaking of Group No.1 was 88½ degrees, of Group No. 2, 75½ degrees, of Group No. 3, 82 degrees, of Group No. 4, 79 degrees and of Group No. 5, 69 degrees.”
From these average figures alone we cannot verify that Moir’s samples met Barnes’s statistical requirement that at most 25 percent of the measured angles in each group exceed 90 degrees. But the angles Moir measured clearly tended to be acute, and he believed his tools satisfied Barnes’s requirement.
Nevertheless, Barnes believed he had demolished, in his brief 1939 report, every anomalously old stone tool industry found by scientists over the previous 75 years. For Barnes, and almost everyone else in the scientific community, the controversy was over. But factually speaking, Barnes was beating a dead horse, because the controversy about the eoliths and other Tertiary stone tool industries had long since ceased to be a burning issue. With the discoveries of Java man and Peking man, the scientific community had become increasingly convinced that the key transition from apelike precursors to toolmaking humans (or protohumans) had taken place in the Early to Middle Pleistocene, thus making the lithic evidence for Tertiary humans a sideshow topic of little serious concern. Barnes, however, could be seen as performing the valuable, if menial task, of sweeping away some useless remnants of irrelevant evidence. Thereafter, whenever the topic of very old stone tool industries happened to come up, as it still does from time to time, scientists could conveniently cite Barnes’s report. Even today scientists studying stone tools apply the Barnes method.
Barnes’s 1939 paper is typical of the definitive debunking report,