Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [178]
In conclusion, Laing (1894, pp. 358–359) repeated another very important point that was made by de Quatrefages: “The chipped flints from Puy Courny also afford another very conclusive proof of intelligent design. The gravelly deposit in which they are found contains five different varieties of flints, and of these all that look like human implements are confined to one particular variety, which from its nature is peculiarly adapted for human use. As Quatrefages says, no torrents or other natural causes could have exercised such a discrimination, which could only have been made by an intelligent being, selecting the stones best adapted for his tools and weapons.”
Leland W. Patterson (1983, pp. 305–306), a modern expert on lithic technology, has written: “The selective occurrence of certain types of raw material can be useful in identifying human activity at a specific location. The lack of a local source for a raw material is an argument in favor of transport by humans to a site. Another consideration is the selective occurrence of only certain types of raw materials for specimens proposed to be man-made. Man would tend to be selective in use of lithic raw materials, while nature would tend to fracture a wide variety of stone types in a random manner.”
But Marcellin Boule gave a geological explanation for the fact that the objects thought to be tools were formed from only one of the many kinds of flint present at Puy Courny. As noted by Rames, the various kinds of flint all came from different layers of the underlying Oligocene formation. In 1889, Boule suggested that during the Late Miocene, only the layer containing the particular type of flint in question had been eroded. According to Verworn (1905, p. 10), that meant only this particular type of flint, lying loose on the surface, was available for toolmaking by intelligent beings in the Late Miocene.
But Boule completely rejected the idea that the flint objects of Aurillac were manufactured by humans or human evolutionary ancestors. His analysis of the erosion of flint at Aurillac was intended to demonstrate that in the Late Miocene, only a certain type of flint had been subjected to purely natural forces tending to create toollike forms.
Boule’s account of the successive erosion of the various flint-bearing Oligocene layers may not, however, have been correct. Perhaps several layers eroded simultaneously. If so, this would preserve the point Rames made about intelligent selection of one kind of flint from among many for the purpose of toolmaking. But even if we do accept the sequence of geological events outlined by Boule, this still would not allow one to conclude that the chipped flint objects from the Late Miocene of Puy Courny were produced by purely natural forces. It would seem that all the other kinds of flint that later eroded from layers below the one described above should also have been shaped by natural forces into forms resembling tools. Considered in this way, Boule’s explanation tends to explicitly confirm human rather than natural action.
Furthermore, Boule’s geological explanation, if correct, merely accounts for the selection of a particular kind of flint. It does not explain the special character of the chipping on the flints. As previously mentioned, the chipping on the flints, confined to one side of one edge, with the chips removed consecutively and in parallel, was not of the type one would expect from random natural battering or geological pressures. In fact, the flint objects were, according to many authorities, identical to accepted unifacially flaked flint tools from the Late Pleistocene.
4.3.3 Verworn’s Expedition to Aurillac
In the first part of the twentieth century, some professional scientists continued to recognize specimens from the sites near Aurillac as the work of human beings in the Late