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’s views, which, in modified form, remain in force today among the vast majority of scientists concerned with human origins and antiquity, represent a perversion of the scientific method. Hrdlicka and those who shared his methodology were not prepared to impartially consider the facts and construct a theory upon the foundation of all the available evidence. Rather they allowed their theoretical biases to determine what evidence should be considered valid. Modern students of paleoanthropology may justifiably question whether their scientific predecessors have bequeathed to them a body of evidence that accurately reflects the truth, as far as it can be known by empiric methods, about human origins and antiquity. They should carefully consider the fact that the evidence that has come down to them has been selected from a larger body of evidence according to the criteria established by persons such as Hrdlicka. One purpose of this book is to acquaint modern students of paleoanthropology with that larger body of evidence and allow them to make their own decisions about the worth of the portion of it that was rejected.

It is abundantly clear that Hrdlicka harbored a strong prejudice that any reputedly ancient human remains must display primitive features. The Diprothomo skull from the dry dock excavation in the harbor of Buenos Aires did not display such features. Therefore, according to Hrdlicka, it could not possibly be as ancient as the Early Pleistocene stratum in which it was discovered. Willis, in his role as Hrdlicka’s geological assistant, offered some purely speculative alternative explanations about how the skull may have found its way into the formation.

Of course, Ameghino had his own prejudices. Like Hrdlicka, he was committed to evolutionary ideas, but whereas Hrdlicka believed that Homo sapiens had evolved in the Old World and only recently emigrated to the Americas, Ameghino believed man had evolved in South America. Therefore, Ameghino had wanted his Diprothomo to be appropriately primitive for its Early Pliocene age (Early Pleistocene by modern reckoning). Hrdlicka, however, showed the skull was actually not different from that of Homo sapiens sapiens.

Putting aside prejudice and preconception, it seems that the bare facts, as far as we can ascertain them, support the view that human beings physiologically indistinguishable from Homo sapiens sapiens were present in Argentina during the Early Pleistocene. This supposition, although in clear contradiction to presently accepted accounts of human evolution, fits in quite well with the overwhelming mass of evidence detailed in the preceding chapters.

Before moving on, let us consider another South American find with unsettling implications for current thinking about human evolution in general and the populating of the New World in particular.

6.1.6 The Lagoa Santa Calotte

In 1970, Canadian archeologist Alan Lyle Bryan found a highly mineralized calotte (skullcap) with “very thick walls and exceptionally heavy brow ridges” in a paleontological collection from caves in the Lagoa Santa region of Brazil. This skullcap could not be given a date, since the cave excavations had not been stratigraphically controlled, but the fossil’s morphology was reminiscent of Homo erectus. Bryan stated that he left the skullcap in a local museum, but unfortunately it was later lost. When Bryan (1978) showed photographs of the skullcap to several American physical anthropologists, they were unable to believe it could have come from the Americas, and proposed that it was either a fake, a cast, or possibly a skullcap from Europe that had somehow been introduced into the Brazilian collection examined by Bryan.

But Bryan countered that both he and his wife, who also saw the skullcap, had abundant experience with human fossil bones. And they were both quite sure that the skullcap could not have been a fake or a cast—it was a genuine, highly fossilized human skullcap.

That the Lagoa Santa calotte was not a European fossil, accidentally introduced into the Brazilian collection, was