Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [214]
Holmes directly revealed his prejudice: “The writer finds it more logical to begin with the known populations of the region whose culture is familiar to us and which furnishes lithic artifacts ranging in form from the simplest fractured stone to the well-made and polished implement, and prefers to interpret the finds made, unless sufficient evidence is offered to the contrary, in the illuminating light of known conditions and of well-ascertained facts rather than to refer them to hypothetic races haled up from the distant past” (Hrdlicka 1912, p. 150). Scientists are certainly entitled to their predispositions, which play a covert but substantial role in their supposedly objective evaluation of evidence. In this case, however, Holmes’s overt preferences appear to have played too exclusive and dominant a role. To be sure, Holmes offered the condition that Ameghino’s stone implements must be attributed to modern Indians unless “sufficient evidence is offered to the contrary.” But what is sufficient contrary evidence? For someone with a strong negative bias, no contrary evidence will prove sufficient.
Holmes stated in his report: “Nothing short of perfectly authenticated finds of objects of art in undisturbed formations of fully established geologic age will justify science in accepting the theory of Quaternary or Tertiary occupants for Argentina” (Hrdlicka 1912, p. 149). Ameghino, of course, fully believed he had satisfied these criteria. Paleontological truth, it would appear, is, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. Furthermore, as we have documented previously, objects of human industry have elsewhere been discovered by professional scientists in undisturbed formations of great antiquity, and yet reasons were still found to reject them. For example, we have Ribeiro’s testimony that he extracted flint implements from within the interior of Miocene limestone formations in Portugal (Section 4.1), and yet opponents nevertheless found ample reason to disagree with his interpretation of their age. It seems clear that Holmes was selectively requiring an impossibly stringent standard of proof for evidence that challenged his preferred views.
5.1.5 Other Finds by F. Ameghino
What do modern authorities have to say about Florentino Ameghino? Not much, because most modern authorities will not even have heard of Ameghino or his discoveries—both buried many decades ago. But if we go back to the 1950s, we can find some references to Ameghino by one of the scientists who did the burying—Marcellin Boule, author of the classic text Fossil Men. After pointing out that Ameghino, like his contemporaries in Europe, had discovered stone implements and other evidence for a human presence in the Pliocene and Miocene, Boule added: “Ameghino also recorded facts of the same kind from much more ancient deposits dating, according to him, from the Oligocene and even from the Eocene. He claimed that they were rudimentary implements manufactured and used by the small apes of these remote periods, the supposed ancestors of the human kind. These statements are not even worthy of discussion” (Boule and Vallois 1957, p. 491). Boule may be commended for his candor, which demonstrates the parochialism sometimes manifest in the scientific mentality. In all fairness, why should not evidence presented by a professional scientist at least be considered and discussed, even if it does completely contradict accepted views?
Of course, this does not mean that one should uncritically accept everything Ameghino said. For example, Ameghino wanted to attribute some of his older stone tools to primitive apelike precursors of modern humans. But as we have several