Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [151]
Manos and metates are grinding tools. Plano-convex tools are flat on one side and rounded, or convex, on the other. (2) The period of 30,000 to 55,000 years ago, with large, crude, percussively flaked, ovate knives, tending to be unifacial. (3) The period of 15,000 years to 30,000 ago with small, slender, leaf-shaped, double-convex knives, broad-stemmed knives, and abundant fine plano-convex tools. (4) Then came the recent San Dieguito and Yuman cultures.
According to standard views, practically all of the variegated lithic forms in this list would have to be either (1) incorrectly dated, or (2) products of human imagination applied to naturally broken stone. The manos and metates are especially interesting, since these grinding tools are generally associated with Neolithic, or very late Stone Age, culture. The oldest accepted examples, from Egypt, are thought to be only 17,000 years old (Gowlett 1984, p. 152).
3.8.3 Louis Leakey and the Calico Site in California (Middle Pleistocene)
As we have several times seen in previous chapters (and will see again in later chapters), some famous scientists have occasionally nurtured heretical ideas, despite the personal risks involved in opposing prevailing academic views. One example is Louis Leakey, world renowned for his discoveries in Africa. He began to have radical ideas about the antiquity of humans in America at a time when the entry date for the Siberian hunters was thought to be no greater than some 5,000 years ago. Eventually, Leakey journeyed to America and discovered a crude stone tool industry, of Eolithic type, at Calico, in southern California. The site was dated at over 200,000 years.
Leakey recalled: “Back in 1929–1930 when I was teaching students at the University of Cambridge, I began to look into the question of the antiquity of man in the Americas. Although there was no concrete evidence to indicate a remote age, I was so impressed by the circumstantial evidence that I began to tell my students that man must have been in the New World at least 15,000 years. I shall never forget when Ales Hrdlicka, that great man from the Smithsonian Institution, happened to be at Cambridge, and he was told by my professor (I was only a student supervisor) that Dr. Leakey was telling students that man must have been in America 15,000 or more years ago. He burst into my rooms—he didn’t even wait to shake hands—and said, ‘Leakey, what’s this I hear? Are you preaching heresy?”’ Leakey said, “No, Sir!” Hrdlicka replied, “You are! You are telling students that man was in America 15,000 years ago. What evidence have you?” Leakey replied, “No positive evidence. Purely circumstantial evidence. But with man from Alaska to Cape Horn, with many different languages and at least two civilizations, it is not possible that he was present only the few thousands of years that you at present allow” (L. Leakey 1979, p. 91).
Leakey continued to harbor unorthodox views on this matter, and in 1964 he made an effort to collect some definite evidence by initiating an excavation at a site known as Calico in the Mojave Desert of California. This site is situated near the shore of now-vanished Pleistocene Lake Manix, on the eroded remains of an alluvial fan of sediments washed down from the nearby Calico mountains. Over a period of eighteen years of excavation, some 11,400 artifacts were recovered from a number of levels. The oldest artifact-bearing level has been dated by the uranium series method to about 200,000 years b.p. (Budinger 1983).
There is general agreement among geologists about the great age of the Calico site, and ages as great as 500,000 years have been seriously proposed. However, as happened with Texas Street, mainstream archeologists