Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [265]
But Sinclair (1908, pp. 115–116) objected: “If this degree of association with the gravel is to be accepted as proof of antiquity, we would be justified in supposing that any object of recent manufacture acquired under similar circumstances was as old as the gravels.”
Of course, if one were convinced that an object was “of recent manufacture,” then no circumstance of acquisition whatsoever—even the most perfect—would compel one to suppose it was as old as the gravels. But if the object provided no clear evidence for its date of manufacture, then circumstances of acquisition like those encountered in the case of the marble bead would argue strongly in favor of an age equivalent to that of the Tertiary gravels.
So here we have a typical example of the unfair treatment of anomalous evidence. Sinclair attempted to raise unreasonable doubt and suspicion about the origin of the white marble bead, even though the initial report that it came from Tertiary gold-bearing deposits was credible. But in the cases of many accepted discoveries, the circumstances of discovery are similar to that of the marble bead.
For example, at Border Cave in South Africa, Homo sapiens sapiens fossils were taken from piles of rock excavated from mines years earlier. The fossils were then assigned dates of about 100,000 years, principally because of their association with certain kinds of rock. The scientists who assigned the dates wrote: “Border Cave 1 and 2 comprise an adult male cranial vault and a partial adult female mandible respectively. These fragments were all displaced from their original contexts in 1940 during the removal of ‘fertilizer’ from Horton’s Pit. . . . Cooke et al. claimed that the character of the soil adhesions in small interstices of the skull was only matched by a distinctive ‘chocolate coloured layer’ corresponding to the base of our [layer] IGBS.LR” (Beaumont et al. 1978, p. 414).
The Heidelberg jaw was discovered by workmen in a gravel pit, with no scientist present, and was assigned a Middle Pleistocene date. Furthermore, most African hominid fossils, including those of Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), were discovered on the surface and were assigned specific dates because of their loose association with certain exposed strata. In Java, also, most of the Homo erectus discoveries occurred on the surface, and, in addition, they were found by paid native collectors, who shipped the fossils in crates to distant scientists for study.
If Sinclair’s strict standards were to be applied to these finds, they also should have to be rejected as evidence for hominids of any particular antiquity. In other words, most of the evidence upon which the current picture of human evolution is based would have to be thrown out.
And this takes us back to the central theme of this book. We are not promoting any particular discovery or set of discoveries. Rather, we are looking at the entire body of evidence relating to human origins and antiquity and asking for consistent application of standards for acceptance and rejection of evidence. Our historical survey has led us to conclude that up to now scientists have not impartially applied such standards. This raises some legitimate doubts about the trustworthiness of the evolutionary lineages that have been erected upon such a shaky evidential foundation.
Indeed, we find that when all the available evidence is considered impartially, an evolutionary picture of human origins fails to emerge. On the one hand, if we apply the tactic of extreme skepticism equally to all available evidence, we wind up with such an insufficiency of facts that it becomes next to impossible to say anything at all about human origins. On the other hand, if we take a more liberal, yet evenhanded, approach to the totality of evidence, we are confronted with facts