Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [280]
In our discussion of twentieth-century African discoveries (Chapter 11), we shall review three additional finds. These are the human skeleton recovered by H. Reck from an Early Pleistocene formation at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania (Section 11.2), the human jaw discovered by Louis Leakey in an Early Pleistocene formation at Kanam, Kenya (Section 11.3), and the human skull fragments discovered by Louis Leakey in a Middle Pleistocene formation at Kanjera, Kenya (Section 11.3). We have chosen to discuss these three anomalous cases in Chapter 11 rather than here because they are closely connected to the accounts of conventionally accepted African finds.
6.1.1 The Trenton Human Bones (Middle Pleistocene)
On December 1, 1899, Ernest Volk, a collector working for the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, discovered a human femur in a railroad cut south of Hancock Avenue within the city limits of Trenton, New Jersey. The femur was found lying on a small ledge, 91 inches beneath the surface. Volk (1911, p. 115) stated: “About four inches over or above the bone . . . was a place about the length of the bone where it evidently had fallen out of.” This impression was overlain by the following strata:
7 inches of surface black soil, 16 –20 inches of yellow loam with water-worn pebbles, 44 inches of coarse gravel cemented together with red clay, and 21 inches of clean sand with red bands lying close together (Volk 1911, p. 116).
The human femur was found towards the bottom of the clean sand stratum, and it was photographed in that spot by Volk, who declared that the overlying strata immediately above and for some distance on either side of the find were undisturbed.
The fossil femur from Trenton was examined by two famous anthropologists, F. W. Putnam of the Peabody Natural History Museum at Harvard University and A. Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian Institution. Both of them declared the bone to be human. According to Hrdlicka (1907, p. 46), Putnam reported on the femur to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Volk (1911, p. 117) wrote: “It was found to be part of the left femur of a human being, that had been cut off square at one end; the cellular structure had been gouged out to enlarge the opening and it had been perforated in two places; it had apparently been the handle of some implement.” Volk said that the femur was thoroughly fossilized.
On December 7, 1899, Volk returned to the railway cut. About 24 feet west of the spot where he found the fossilized femur, and in the same layer, Volk recovered two fragments of a human skull (part of the parietal). The strata immediately overhead and for some distance on either side were said to be undisturbed.
Volk (1911, p. 118) stated: “That these human bones did not come from the upper deposits is made more probable by the fact that wherever . . . human skeletons have been found they have invariably been stained by the deposit in which they had been lying, but these fragments were nearly white and chalky.” The upper deposits were reddish and yellowish.
Hrdlicka (1907, p. 46) stated that the stratum in which the Trenton femur was found lay underneath a deposit of glacial gravel. This would put the Trenton femur well back into the Pleistocene period. We have already discussed the views of Hrdlicka (Section 5.1.2), who labored hard to prove that human beings entered North America and South America only quite recently, during the Holocene. Since the Trenton femur was like that of modern humans, Hrdlicka suspected it was of recent age. He expected that a genuinely ancient human femur should display primitive features. Hrdlicka (1907, p. 46) therefore said about the Trenton femur: “The antiquity of this specimen must rest on the geological evidence alone.”
Hrdlicka, however, was apparently unable to point out anything strikingly wrong with the geological evidence. The femur had been found in undisturbed Pleistocene interglacial deposits by a reputable collector for a prestigious university. Consequently, Hrdlicka did not directly