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Considering Romero’s farfetched and strained geological reasoning, one would certainly have a right to be cautious in accepting his conclusion about the stratigraphic position of the artifacts in the barranca at Miramar: “Visual inspection demonstrates that the artifacts discovered were interred at a time after the formation of the bed, and that they are in a secondary position in relation to the formation, because of an intrusion resulting from erosion at this place” (Romero 1918, p. 27). Here Romero mockingly reproduced the language of the report by the commission of geologists, who concluded the stone implements of Miramar were found in primary position (Section 5.2.1).

Romero, however, did not provide a great deal of evidence in favor of his point of view. In addition to his sea wave hypothesis, Romero suggested that there had been massive resorting and shifting of the beds in the barranca, making it possible that implements and animals bones from surface layers had become mixed into the lower levels of the cliff. But the only facts that he could bring forward to support this conclusion were two extremely minor dislocations of strata.

Some distance to the left of the spot where the commission of geologists extracted a bola stone from the Chapadmalalan level of the barranca, there is a place where a section of a layer of stones in the formation departs slightly from the horizontal (Romero 1918, p. 28). This dislocation occurs near the place where the barranca is interrupted by a transverse valley. As might be expected, part of the barranca slopes down to the left at this point, but at the place where the bola stone was extracted, the horizontal stratigraphy remained intact. At another place in the barranca, a small portion of a layer of stones departed only 16 degrees from the horizontal (Romero 1918, p. 29).

On the basis of these two relatively inconsequential observations, Romero suggested that all the strata exposed in the barranca had been subjected to extreme dislocations. This would have allowed the intrusion into the lower levels of stone tools from relatively recent Indian settlements that might have existed above the cliffs. Romero (1918, p. 30) asserted: “I have demonstrated . . . that the artifacts had been intrusively buried in the strata called Chapadmalalan, and with this demonstration, which is irrefutable, I have also buried the opinion of the experts.” But from photographs and descriptions of the stratigraphy by many other geologists, including Willis, it appears that the normal sequence of Pampean beds in the barranca at Miramar was intact in locations where discoveries were made.

Romero then continued with another barrage of unsatisfactory objections. He pointed out that some of the stone tools were found at the base of the Chapadmalalan bed and others in the middle, while the toxodon femur with the embedded projectile point was found at the top of the Chapadmalalan. Romero (1918, p. 33) thought the fact that the artifacts were distributed vertically within a limited horizontal space argued against their being in primary position. He would have preferred to see them all distributed in one horizontal plane. Why he thought this is not clear. If, as Carlos Ameghino believed, the place had been continuously inhabited from the Miocene until the recent past, by humans maintaining a constant level of cultural advancement, then one might expect to find just such a distribution of artifacts as was actually discovered.

Romero noted that stone tools resembling those extracted from the barranca are found on the surface, in a valley, slightly inland, that runs parallel to the barranca. He joked with his guide: “Are these Miocene implements?” But even today African tribal people use stone tools as crude as the Olduvai Gorge pebble choppers, which are attributed to human precursors living almost 2 million years ago. In other words, humans and humanlike beings in Africa have been making the same kinds of stone tools for at least 2 million years. It is, therefore, not valid