Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [26]
In fact, such evidence has already been found, but it has since been suppressed or conveniently forgotten. Much of it came to light immediately after Darwin published The Origin of Species, before which there had been no notable finds except Neanderthal man. In the first years of Darwinism, there was no clearly established story of human descent to be defended, and professional scientists made and reported many discoveries that now would never make it into the pages of any journal more academically respectable than the National Enquirer. Most of these fossils and artifacts were unearthed before the discovery by Eugene Dubois of Java man, the first protohuman hominid between Dryopithecus and modern humans.
Java man was found in Middle Pleistocene deposits generally given an age of 800,000 years. The discovery became a benchmark. Henceforth, scientists would not expect to find fossils or artifacts of anatomically modern humans in deposits of equal or greater age. If they did, they (or someone wiser) concluded that this was impossible and found some way to discredit the find as a mistake, an illusion, or a hoax. Before Java man, however, reputable nineteenth-century scientists found a number of examples of anatomically modern human skeletal remains in very ancient strata. And they also found large numbers of stone tools of various types, as well as animal bones bearing signs of human action.
1.9 Some Principles of Epistemology
Before beginning our survey of rejected and accepted paleoanthropological evidence, we shall outline a few epistemological rules that we have tried to follow. Epistemology is defined in Webster’s New World Dictionary (1978) as “the study or theory of the origin, nature, methods, and limits of knowledge.” When engaged in the study of scientific evidence, it is important to keep the “nature, methods, and limits of knowledge” in mind; otherwise one is prone to fall into a number of illusions.
One important illusion, sometimes called the illusion of “misplaced concreteness,” is that a scientific study deals directly with facts, and that scientific arguments appealing to the facts can prove statements about reality. For example, one might suppose that an argument involving facts in the form of fossil bones can prove that anatomically modern humans really did arise in Africa 100,000 years ago. Thinking this, one might strongly argue, on the basis of certain facts, that the statement “anatomically modern humans arose in Africa 100,000 years ago” represents the truth. If the facts are part of reality, and the arguments are sound, then surely the conclusion must be true. Or, at least, granting our human fallibility, we can be reasonably confident that it is true.
The problem here is that in the field of paleoanthropology the facts being considered are not directly part of reality. Indeed, if a “fact” is examined closely it is found to resolve into (1) arguments based on further “facts,” or (2) claims that someone has witnessed something at a particular time and place. Thus “facts” turn out to be networks of arguments and observational claims.
To some extent, this is true of the facts discussed in any field of science. But the facts of paleoanthropology have certain key limitations that should be pointed out. First, the observations that go into paleoanthropological facts tend to involve rare discoveries that cannot be duplicated at will. For example, some scientists in this field have built great reputations on the basis of a few famous discoveries, and others, the vast majority, have spent their whole careers without making a