Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [291]
However, the authors of the Time-Life study were not so inhibited. They wrote: “What sort of man visited this cove on the coast of Europe 400,000 years ago? Who was he? Although he came each spring for many years, the fossils he left behind him included no human bones—only a single human footprint in the hard sand. . . . He was the first man. He is known, in the scheme of evolution, as Homo erectus, or upright man. He was the direct descendant of Australopithecus, a creature considered the missing link between the apes and man” (Time-Life
1973, pp. 11–12). Judging from the available reports, the footprint is not different from that of a modern human being. The Time-Life book’s assertion that Homo erectus was the inhabitant of Terra Amata is therefore unjustified.
At the Torralba, Spain, site, estimated to be about 300,000 years old, stone tools have been found in connection with fossil bones of elephants. Some scientists have interpreted Torralba as a Homo erectus kill-site. But as in the case of Terra Amata, no hominid fossils were found there. Only preconceived ideas about human evolution allowed scientists to attribute the Torralba tools and elephant bones to Homo erectus.
One skeptical researcher, Lewis Binford, even disagreed that Torralba was a kill-site. During the Middle Pleistocene, the area was a boggy marsh. Binford (1981, p. 16) pointed out that elephant fossils are generally found by water margins, because that is where they tend to die. Furthermore, the sediments at Torralba, according to F. Clark Howell, were deposited over many tens of thousands of years (Binford 1981, p. 16). Over this time, 115 elephants died. Assuming the sediments were deposited in just one 10,000-year period, Binford calculated that one elephant died every 87 years. Natural deaths, by disease, old age, or predators, he said, could very well account for the accumulation of elephant bodies at that rate. During the same 10,000 years, 611 stone tools accumulated at the site. This again, is not very many, considering the time involved
—about 6 tools per century. So the association of stone tools and elephant bones could be purely accidental.
Reacting to the standard view of what happened at Torralba, Binford (1981, pp. 17–18) stated: “Man killed the animals while executing game drives —possibly aided by fire—butchered them, and carried the meat away—truly extraordinary. . . . This is a truly remarkable set of conclusions to draw from the Torralba data. . . . Given an aggregation of stone tools—evidence of hominid behavior—it is assumed that all other remains associated with the stone tools are also a by-product of human behavior. The researchers of Torralba have certainly made this assumption. Pleistocene archaeologists need to abandon such an approach.”
Examples such as Torralba and Terra Amata could be multiplied, for at most paleoanthropological sites, no hominid bones are found. The artifacts at these sites are attributed to Homo habilis, Homo erectus, the Neanderthals, or Homo sapiens on the basis of their presumed age or their level of workmanship. But this practice, strictly speaking, is not justifiable. Therefore, many Early and Middle Pleistocene sites currently identified with Homo erectus, for example, could just as well be identified with anatomically modern Homo sapiens.
6.1.5 A Human Skull from The Early Pleistocene at Buenos Aires
In 1896, workers excavating a dry dock in Buenos Aires found a human skull (Figure 6.1). They took it from the rudder pit at the bottom of the excavation, after breaking through a layer of a hard, limestonelike substance called tosca. The level at which the skull was found was 11 meters (36 feet) below the bed of the river La Plata (Hrdlicka 1912, p. 318).