Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [190]
MacCurdy (1924b, p. 658) wrote: “Breuil is authority for the statement that conditions favoring the play of natural forces do not exist in certain Pliocene deposits of East Anglia, where J. Reid Moir has found worked flints. . . . Can the same be said of the chipped flints from Upper Miocene deposits near Aurillac (Cantal)? Sollas and Capitan have both recently answered in the affirmative. Capitan finds not only flint chips that suggest utilization but true types of instruments which would be considered as characteristic of certain Palaeolithic horizons. These not only occur but reoccur: punches, bulbed flakes, carefully retouched to form points and scrapers of the Mousterian type, disks with borders retouched in a regular manner, scratchers of various forms, and, finally, picks. He concludes that there is a complete similitude between many of the chipped flints from Cantal and the classic specimens from the best-known Palaeolithic sites.” William Sollas held the Chair of Geology at Oxford, and Louis Capitan, a highly respected French anthropologist, was professor at the College of France.
4.4 Discoveries By A. Rutot In Belgium (Oligocene)
From France, let us now proceed to Belgium, where A. Rutot, conservator of the Royal Museum of Natural History in Brussels, made a series of discoveries that brought the question of anomalous stone tool industries into new prominence during the early twentieth century. Most of the industries identified by Rutot dated to the Early Pleistocene. The oldest of his Pleistocene industries, the Reutelian, was named after the small village of Reutel, east of Ypres. Then came the Mafflian and Mesvinian, named after the villages of Maffle and Mesvin. Last in the series was the more highly developed Strepyan industry, named after the town of Strépy. Rutot regarded the Strepyan as marking the transition to the true Paleolithic industries of the later Pleistocene (Obermaier 1924, p. 8).
But in 1907, Rutot’s ongoing research resulted in much more startling finds, this time in the Oligocene, from 25 to 38 million years ago. Georg Schweinfurth gave an initial report in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, using the term eolith in its broadest sense to describe the new finds. But on the basis of Rutot’s later published descriptions, we have classified the tools as crude paleoliths.
Schweinfurth (1907, pp. 958–959) stated: “The continuing search for eoliths in the high plateau of the Ardennes led to this discovery. . . . As Rutot searched a sand pit near Boncelles, 8 kilometers [5 miles] south from Lüttich, he found an eolith-bearing stone bed under the sands at a depth of 15 meters [49 feet]. The sand is generally regarded as Oligocene, but there were no fossils in it, and therefore the age of the bed is not certain. But in the course of further research Dr. Rutot found in another sand pit a well-developed marine fauna of the Late Oligocene, and at the bottom of this sand there was also a stone bed containing eoliths. Among them were choppers, anvil stones, knives, scrapers, borers, and throwing stones, all displaying clear signs of intentional work that produced forms exquisitely adapted for use by the human hand. Rutot has now brought together a complete series of these artifacts and is preparing for publication a comprehensive report, with illustrations, for the bulletin of the Geological Society of Belgium. On September 30, the fortunate discoverer had the pleasure to show the sites to
34 Belgian geologists and students of prehistory. They all agreed that there could be no doubt about the position of the finds.”
Schweinfurth (1907, p. 959) then reproduced this preliminary statement by Rutot about the geology