Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [276]
S. Laing agreed with Becker about the unlikelihood of deception. Laing (1894, p. 387) wrote: “A conspiracy has been imagined of many hundreds of ignorant miners, living hundreds of miles apart, to hoax scientists, or make a trade of forging implements, which is about as probable as the theory that the paleolithic remains of the Old World were all forged by the devil, and buried in Quaternary strata in order to discredit the Mosaic account of creation.” Regarding forgery, it is significant that no money was ever asked for any one of the artifacts.
Having closely examined the arguments put forward by Sinclair and Holmes, we find it apparent that their positions were based more on prejudice than on sound scientific reasoning. One might ask why Holmes and Sinclair were so determined to discredit Whitney’s evidence for the existence of Tertiary humans. The following statement by Holmes (1899, p. 424) provides an essential clue: “If these forms are really of Tertiary origin, we have here one of the greatest marvels yet encountered by science; and perhaps if Professor Whitney had fully appreciated the story of human evolution as it is understood to-day, he would have hesitated to announce the conclusions formulated, notwithstanding the imposing array of testimony with which he was confronted.” In other words, if the facts do not fit the favored theory, the facts, even an imposing array of them, must go. A more reasonable attitude was taken by Becker (1891, p. 190), who wrote of the implements found in the prevolcanic auriferous gravels of California: “If such an association of remains actually occurs, theories must be modified to fit the fact.”
In his reports about the Tertiary discoveries in California, Whitney mentioned evidence from other parts of the world indicating the existence of culturally advanced humans in the Pliocene and Miocene periods. In 1871, according to Whitney (1880, p. 282), Portuguese geologist Carlos Ribeiro published a report (Section 4.1) that “cut flints, evidently the work of human hands, have been found in abundance in the Pliocene and Miocene even, of Portugal.” Whitney faulted Charles Lyell for not mentioning Ribeiro’s report in his authoritative survey, The Antiquity of Man. This is a valid criticism, demonstrating that right from the beginning of the scientific study of human evolution, uncomfortable evidence was simply ignored.
Alfred Russell Wallace, who shares with Darwin the credit for formulating the theory of evolution by natural selection, expressed dismay that evidence for anatomically modern humans existing in the Tertiary tended to be “attacked with all the weapons of doubt, accusation, and ridicule” (1887, p. 667).
In a detailed survey of the evidence for the great antiquity of humans in North America, Wallace gave considerable weight to Whitney’s record of the discoveries in California of human fossils and stone artifacts from the Tertiary. In light of the incredulity with which the auriferous gravel finds and others like them were received in certain quarters, Wallace (1887, p. 679) advised that “the proper way to treat evidence as to man’s antiquity is to place it on record, and admit it provisionally wherever it would be held adequate in the case of other animals; not, as is too often now the case, to ignore it as unworthy of acceptance or subject its discoverers to indiscriminate accusations of being impostors or the victims of impostors.”
Wallace, an evolutionist, charged scientists who automatically rejected evidence for the extreme antiquity of anatomically modern humans with playing “into the hands of those who can adduce his recent origin and unchangeability as an argument against the descent of man from the lower animals” (Wallace 1887, p. 679). But, humanity’s extreme antiquity, as demonstrated by the evidence cited by