Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [289]
The age of the skeleton thus depends on the age of the boulder clay. Over the years, the age of the boulder clay in East Anglia has, however, been a matter of controversy. During the 1920s, Moir proposed that there were two glacial boulder clays in East Anglia, one laid down during the Mindel glaciation, and the other during the subsequent Riss glaciation (Keith 1928, pp. 302–303). If this scheme is accepted, the boulder clay that covered the Ipswich skeleton would belong to the Riss glaciation. We note, however, that the Riss glacial period extended from about 125,000 to over 300,000 years ago, which would still give a considerable antiquity to the Ipswich skeleton.
But it appears that Moir was wrong about there being evidence for a Riss glaciation at Ipswich. The English glaciation equivalent to the European Mindel glaciation is the Anglian. The Anglian was followed by the Hoxnian interglacial. The next English glacial period, corresponding to the European Riss glaciation, used to be called the Gippingian, following Moir’s interpretation of the glacial deposits by the Gipping River near Ipswich. But according a modern English authority, D. Q. Bowen (1980, p. 420), geologists have “shown that the Gipping Till of Essex was Anglian in age.”
The “necessary replacement” (Bowen 1980, p. 420) for the Gippingian glaciation was the Wolstonian. The clearest evidence for the Riss-equivalent Wolstonian glaciation is in the region of Birmingham, quite far from Ipswich, but there are some rather unclear signs of the Wolstonian in Mildenhall, about
40 miles to the northwest of Ipswich (Bowen 1980, p. 420). There is no sign of the Wolstonian at Ipswich itself. The final English glaciation, corresponding to the Würm glaciation of continental Europe, was the Devensian, which did not come down as far as Ipswich (Bowen 1980, p. 421; Nilsson 1983, p. 113). A modern authority on the Pleistocene geology of England stated: “nowhere in East Anglia is it possible to demonstrate post-Hoxnian and pre-Devensian glaciation on stratigraphic grounds” (Bowen 1980, p. 420).
In other words, there was, in the opinion of modern authorities, no Rissequivalent glaciation (the Wolstonian) at Ipswich. Neither did the subsequent Devensian ice sheet reach Ipswich. What this means is that the boulder clay at Ipswich can only be referred to the Anglian glaciation. Therefore the glacial sands in which the Ipswich skeleton was found must have been laid down between the onset of the Anglian glaciation, about 400,000 years ago, and onset of the Hoxnian interglacial, about 330,000 years ago. It would thus appear that the Ipswich skeleton is between 330,000 and 400,000 years old. Some authorities (Gowlett 1984, p. 87) put the onset of the Mindel glaciation (equivalent to the Anglian) at about 600,000 years, which would give the Ipswich skeleton an age potentially that great. Yet human beings of modern type are not thought to have appeared in Western Europe before 30,000 years ago (Gowlett 1984, p. 118).
From the story of the Ipswich skeleton, we learn that discoverers of anomalies, such as Moir, can be the victims of prejudices as strong as those of their opponents. For mavericks and establishment figures alike, evolutionary preconceptions block proper evaluation of paleoanthropological evidence. On the one hand, we find ideas about the recent evolution of the modern human form prevented certain scientists from believing that the Ipswich skeleton might be truly ancient. And on the other hand, ideas about the progressive evolution of stone tools influenced Moir to revise downward the age of his own discovery.
6.1.4 Possible Early Man Sites With No Skeletal Remains
If anatomically modern humans were present during the Middle and Early Pleistocene in Europe and elsewhere, why, one might ask, are scientists no longer finding any evidence of this? Instead,