Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [230]
About the fossil remains from the barranca, Romero (1918, p. 24) said: “All the evidence relevant to this investigation demonstrates quite well that the bones are not from animals that died in situ, but are instead from skeletons of animals transported great distances, fractured, and dispersed by water.” Then what about the almost complete rear leg and foot of a toxodon found by Carlos Ameghino? It hardly seems likely that flowing water brought together the several bones comprising the leg and foot and deposited them in their natural connection.
In this regard, Romero (1918, p. 24) said: “The discovery of bones more or less complete, and part of one skeleton, signifies that the bones were brought to their final resting place in that condition and not that the animal perished there.” In this case, one would have to suppose that a detached rear leg of a toxodon, still covered with flesh was transported by water and somehow deposited in the lower levels at the Miramar site. But all this shows is that the animal died shortly before its leg wound up in the bed where it was found.
Romero implied that both the bones and the bed were recent. But according to Carlos Ameghino, the toxodon bones were from a Pliocene species of toxodon. Furthermore, modern authorities (Savage and Russell 1983, p. 365) still list the Chapadmalalan at Miramar as a Pliocene formation containing a distinct Pliocene fauna.
Romero (1918, p. 24), however, insisted: “If you find the fossils of distinct epochs in different levels of the barranca, that does not signify a succession of epochs there, because water may have elsewhere eroded very ancient fossilbearing deposits of previous epochs, depositing the older fossils at the base of the barranca. I mention a case demonstrating this fact: the sea brings up fossil molluscs onto the beach, and my daughter found the foot bone of a great edentate, rolled up on the beach by the waves.” The Edentata are an order of New World mammals that includes the sloths and armadillos. Romero was trying to build a case that the formations identified as Chapadmalalan and Ensenadan at Miramar were not really ancient, even though they contained fossils characteristic of the Late Pliocene and Middle Pleistocene, respectively. In making his case, Romero attributed remarkable capabilities to the action of sea waves and rivers. If Romero is to be taken at his word, he seems to have been implying that the random movements of water could selectively deposit fossils of certain periods in a definite sequence so as to mimic actual geological formations of those periods.
But Romero’s speculative proposal appears incapable of accounting for the arrangement of fossils and sediments in such a way as to reproduce a series of actual geological formations, even in a relatively confined area. And here we are talking about a section of cliff extending for several hundred meters. Significantly, these same formations at Miramar had been extensively studied on several occasions by different professional geologists and paleontologists, none of whom viewed them in the manner suggested by Romero. Modern authorities also disagree with Romero.
In his attack on Carlos Ameghino, Romero sought to demonstrate that the implement-bearing beds of ancient Chapadmalalan loess at Miramar were fairly recent marine deposits. As evidence he cited the particular nature of the rounded stones that marked the boundary between the Chapadmalalan and the overlying Ensenadan. Romero (1918, p. 28) believed that their pattern of distribution, in an almost unbroken band along the entire formation, indicated they were pebbles formed by the action of waves and deposited on a beach. The large undulations now observed in the layer of stones were, according to Romero, caused by the action of later mountain-building forces in the region.
But Bailey Willis, no friend of Tertiary humans in Argentina, had earlier given a different interpretation of the undulating layer of stones in the barranca at Miramar. Willis, who had investigated several other