Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [206]
In reply Minshall (1989, p. 90) observed: “The specimens were abraded on all sides, top and bottom, ventral and dorsal surfaces equally. That is extremely unlikely for windblown dust to achieve on heavy stone tools lying in heavy gravel but expectable on objects subjected to surf or heavy stream action. Having examined thousands of stone tools on desert surfaces, I can testify that all-over wind abrasion is rare under any circumstances, is only present on specimens lying in loose sand, and never appears on heavy gravel inclusions.”
Minshall (1989, p. 91) also noted that the tools were covered with a thick mineral coating of “desert varnish.” This varnish, which takes a long time to accumulate, was thicker than that on tools found on lower, and hence more recent, terraces in the same region.
The cumulative evidence appears to rule out the suggestion that the implements discovered by Renaud were blanks dropped fairly recently on the high desert floodplain terraces. But Minshall (1989, p. 87) noted: “The reaction of American scientists to Renaud’s interpretation of the Black’s Fork collections as evidences of great antiquity was, and has continued to be for over half a century, one of general skepticism and disbelief, even though probably not one in a thousand archaeologists has visited the site nor seen the artifacts.”
According to Minshall, the tools found by Renaud were the work of Homo erectus, who may have entered North America during a time of lowered sea levels in the Middle Pleistocene. Minshall believed this was also true of stone tools found at other locations of similar age, such as Calico, and his own excavation at Buchanan Canyon, both in southern California.
Minshall was, however, skeptical of another Middle Pleistocene site. In January 1990, Minshall told one of us (Thompson) that he was not inclined to accept as genuine the technologically advanced stone tools found at Hueyatlaco in Mexico (Section 5.4.4). Hueyatlaco was determined to be about 250,000 years old—roughly contemporary with Black’s Fork, Calico, and other sites with primitive stone tools that Minshall was prepared to accept. But the advanced stone tools found at Hueyatlaco were characteristic of Homo sapiens sapiens, and were thus not easy to attribute to Homo erectus. Minshall’s response to Hueyatlaco was to suggest, without supporting evidence, that the stratigraphy had been misinterpreted and that the animal bones used to date the site, as well as the sophisticated stone artifacts, had been “washed onto the site from different sources” (Minshall 1989, p. 93). This shows that researchers who accept some anomalies may rule out others using the double standard method.
Advanced Paleoliths and Neoliths
Having reviewed the crudest of the anomalously old stone tools (the eoliths) and then the crude paleoliths, we shall now proceed to examine advanced paleoliths and neoliths. Here once more we face difficulties in classification, as many of the discoveries we shall be considering involve implements of various levels of sophistication. The deciding factor for including a group of implements in the category of advanced paleoliths is that a number of specimens represent a clear technical advance over the crude paleoliths discussed in the last chapter. For example, the stone tool industries discovered by Florentino and Carlos Ameghino in Argentina include many implements that might be classed among the eoliths or crude paleoliths; nevertheless, they also include implements of a higher order, such as presumed projectile points and bolas. In this chapter, we shall first discuss the discoveries of Florentino Ameghino, as well as the attacks upon them by A. Hrdlicka and W. H. Holmes. Next we shall consider the finds of Carlos Ameghino, which provide some of the most solid and convincing evidence for a fully