Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [176]
4.2.3 Who Made the Flints of Thenay?
So the question remains: who made the flint implements of Thenay? Even if one assumes the presence of some primitive ape-man, how can one rule out the presence of human beings of the modern type in the same period? If you can bring Homo habilis or Homo erectus back to the Miocene, why not Homo sapiens?
Laing (1894, p. 370) said of the flints of Thenay: “their type continues, with no change except that of slight successive improvements, through the Pliocene, Quaternary, and even down to the present day. The scraper of the Esquimaux and the Andaman islanders is but an enlarged and improved edition of the Miocene scraper.” If humans make such scrapers today, it is certainly possible, if not probable, that identical beings made similar scrapers back in the Miocene period. And, as we shall see in coming chapters, scientists did in fact uncover skeletal remains of human beings indistinguishable from Homo sapiens in Tertiary strata.
It thus becomes clearer why we no longer hear of the flints of Thenay. At one point in the history of paleoanthropology, several scientists who believed in evolution actually accepted the Thenay Miocene tools, but attributed them to a precursor of the human type. Evolutionary theory convinced them such a precursor existed, but no fossils had been found. When the expected fossils were found in 1891, in Java, they occurred in a formation now regarded as Middle Pleistocene. That certainly placed any supporters of Miocene ape-men in a dilemma. The human precursor, the creature transitional between fossil apes and modern humans, had been found not in the Early Miocene, 20 million years ago by current estimate, but in the Middle Pleistocene, less than 1 million years ago (Nilsson 1983, pp. 329–330). Therefore, the flints of Thenay, and all the other evidences for the existence of Tertiary humans (or toolmaking Tertiary ape-men), were quietly, and apparently quite thoroughly, removed from active consideration and then forgotten.
The alternative to burying the evidence from Thenay and elsewhere was uncomfortable—perhaps anatomatically modern humans had coexisted with dryopithecine apes. This would have meant discarding the emerging evolutionary picture of human origins or revising it to such an extent as to make it appear far less credible. What to speak of anatomically modern humans, any kind of toolmaking hominids would have been, after the discovery of Java man, quite out of place in the Early Miocene of France.
Of course, this scenario about the treatment of evidence is somewhat hypothetical, but it would appear that something like this actually did occur within the scientific community, over the course of several decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The extensive evidence for the presence of toolmaking hominids in the Tertiary was in fact buried, and the stability of the entire edifice of modern paleoanthropology depends upon it remaining buried. If even one single piece of evidence for the existence of toolmakers in the Miocene or Early Pliocene were to be accepted, the whole picture of human evolution, built up so carefully in this century, would begin to disintegrate. Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene tools found outside Africa also present difficulties. According to currently dominant ideas, Homo erectus was the first hominid to leave Africa and did so about one million years ago.
4.3 Implements From the Late Miocene of Aurillac, France
4.3.1 A Find by Tardy
Further discoveries of Tertiary stone tools were made at two principal sites (Puy Courny and Puy de Boudieu) near the town of Aurillac in the department of Cantal in south central France. In 1870, Anatole Roujou reported that Charles Tardy, a geologist well known for his Quaternary research, had removed a flint knife [Figure 4.14] from the exposed surface of a Late Miocene conglomerate at Aurillac. To describe the removal, Roujou (1870) used