Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [202]
Thus far we have been going along with Freudenberg’s assumption that the humanlike partial footprints from the Scaldisian of Belgium were made by a small primitive hominid. But there is another possibility. There are today, in Africa and the Phillipines, pygmy tribes, with adult males standing less than five feet tall and females even shorter. The proposal that a pygmy human being rather than an australopithecine made the footprints found by Freudenberg has the advantage of being consistent with the whole spectrum of evidence—stone tools, incised bones, isolated signs of fire, and artificially opened shells. Australopithecines are not known to have manufactured stone tools or used fire. And, as we shall see in Section 11.10, the toes of australopithecines are noticeably longer than those of modern Homo sapiens, while the little toe of the Belgian hominid is similar in length to that of modern humans.
Freudenberg’s principal reason for concluding that the being that left the footprints was quite small had to do with certain measurements he made. He ascertained that the radius of curvature of the imprint of the ball of a foot excavated at Hol was similar to that of a human child 4 years of age (Freudenberg 1919, pp. 10 –11). The radius of curvature is the radius of a circle that would fit a section of the curve of the print.
Another feature of the same imprint led Freudenberg to conclude that the creature, despite its short stature, was an adult. In the fossil imprint of the ball of a foot, he found 2 dermal ridges per millimeter. Human adults have 2–3 ridges per millimeter in this part of the foot whereas human children have about 4 ridges per millimeter. Freudenberg therefore believed that the creature must have been an adult, although the radius of curvature of the ball of the foot indicated it was only about 1 meter tall—the height of a human 4-year-old.
But other measurements reported by Freudenberg suggest the adult forms were taller. One of the toe impressions from the Scaldisian was about the same size as that of a human 4-year-old, indicating the creature stood about 1 meter high. On this impression Freudenberg (1919, p. 14) counted 3.0–3.5 ridges per millimeter. The toe impressions of human children have the same number of ridges in that location (Freudenberg 1919, p. 14). This suggests that the creature that made this print was not an adult but a child. Thus when it grew to adult size, it would have been somewhat taller than 1 meter.
To a modern reader, Freudenberg’s reports are bound to seem somewhat idiosyncratic. Nevertheless, Freudenberg does provide yet another example of a professional scientist reporting in a scientific journal finds that today would not be given a moment’s serious consideration.
4.6 Central Italy (Late Pliocene)
In 1871, Professor G. Ponzi (1873, p. 53) presented to the meeting in Bologna of the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archeology the following report about evidence for Tertiary humans in central Italy: “The very ancient rocks of subappenine Italy that contain human vestiges are breccias which, reposing on the Pliocene yellow sands, can be referred to the end of the Pliocene or beginning of the Quaternary. These vestiges consist of one flint evidently worked into a triangular pointed shape, extracted from the breccia of the ‘Acquatraversa sur la Voie Cassienne,’ by the geologists de Verneuil and Mantovani, and several other flints, of almost the same type, collected by Rossi and Nicolucci in the breccia of Janicule.” A breccia is a deposit composed of rock fragments in a fine-grained matrix of hardened sand or clay.
The Acquatraversan erosional phase, during which the breccia was laid down on the yellow sand, can still be regarded as Pliocene.