Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [177]
in age by a characteristic fauna, including Dinotherium giganteum and Machairodus latidens ( de Mortillet 1883, p. 97). De Mortillet, who thought the signs of intentional work on the flint were incontestable, declared that the object resembled undoubted Quaternary tools. Yet de Mortillet (1883, p. 97) believed Tardy’s flint tool had only recently been cemented onto the surface of the Late Miocene conglomerate and therefore chose to assign it a Quaternary date.
Figure 4.14. The first stone tool found at Aurillac, France (Verworn 1905, p. 9).
4.3.2 Further Discoveries by Rames
The French geologist J. B. Rames was doubtful that the object found by Tardy was actually of human manufacture, but in 1877 Rames made his own discoveries of flint implements in the same region, at Puy Courny. De Mortillet stated that the flints collected by Rames were found in beds of white quartzite sand and whitish clay containing fossils of Hipparion, Mastodon angustidens, and other species of Late Miocene (Tortonian) age. Instead of being split by the action of fire, like the flints of Thenay, the specimens from Puy Courny were obviously chipped by percussion (de Mortillet 1883, p. 97).
S. Laing (1894, p. 357) provides a good review of the positive case for the implements found by Rames at Puy Courny: “The first question is as to the geological age of the deposits in which these chipped implements have been found. In the case of Puy Courny this is beyond dispute. In the central region of Auvergne there have been two series of volcanic eruptions, the latest towards the close of the Pliocene or commencement of the Quaternary period, and an older one, which from its position and fossils, is clearly of the Upper Miocene. The gravels in which the chipped flints were discovered by M. Rames, a very competent geologist, were interstratified with tuffs and lavas of these older volcanoes, and no doubt as to their geological age was raised by the Congress of French archaeologists to whom they were submitted. The whole question turns therefore on the sufficiency of the proofs of human origin, as to which the same Congress expressed themselves as fully satisfied.”
Modern geologists still refer the fossiliferous sands of Puy Courny to the Miocene (Peterlongo 1972, pp. 134–135). The fauna (Dinotherium giganteum, Mastodon longirostris, Rhinoceros schleiermacheri, Hipparion gracile, etc.) is said to be reminiscent of that of Pikermi, Greece, and is judged to be characteristic of the end of the Pontian (Peterlongo 1972, p. 135). In the past, the Pontian was equated with the Early Pliocene, but Nilsson (1983, p. 19) stated that modern radiometric dating methods indicate that “the whole Pontian stage should be assigned to the latest Miocene time.” According to French authorities also, the Pontian marks the end of the Miocene, and can be given a quantitative date of about 7–9 million years (Klein 1973, table 6).
Laing (1894, p. 358) then gave a detailed description of the signs of human manufacture that Rames had observed on the flints: “The specimens consist of several well-known palaeolithic types, celts, scrapers, arrow-heads, and flakes, only ruder and smaller than those of later periods. They were found at three different localities in the same stratum of gravel, and comply with all the tests by which the genuineness of Quaternary implements is ascertained, such as bulbs of percussion, conchoidal fractures, and above all, intentional chipping in a determinate direction. It is evident that a series of small parallel chips or trimmings, often confined to one side only of the flint and which have the effect of bringing it into a shape which is known from Quaternary and recent implements to be adapted for human use, imply intelligent design, and could not have been produced by the casual collisions of pebbles rolled down by an impetuous torrent.”
According to Laing, de Quatrefages noted fine parallel scratches on