Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [296]
Also, it was similar to other skulls found in the Sumidouro cave in the Lagoa Santa region during the 1930s. Bryan (1978) reported that pieces of similar skulls were found more recently in the same cave and were being studied by Marilia Carvalho de Mello e Alvim at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro.
What is the significance of the Lagoa Santa calotte? The presence of hominids with Homo erectus features in Brazil at any time in the past is highly anomalous. Paleoanthropologists holding standard views say that only anatomically modern humans ever came to the Americas. The methodology of science allows for views to change, but the kind of change inherent in accepting the presence of Homo erectus in the New World would be revolutionary.
Of course, there are now a few paleoanthropologists who propose that Homo erectus was responsible for the crude stone tools at sites such as Toca da Esperança in Brazil (Section 3.8.4) and Calico in California (Section 3.8.3). If the view that Homo erectus was responsible for tools at certain very ancient sites in the Americas were to be become more widely accepted, this might have the beneficial effect of encouraging the far more radical changes in view that would be required to accommodate the evidence for the presence of anatomically modern humans in the early Quaternary and Tertiary.
Finally, we wonder how such an important fossil as the Lagoa Santa skullcap could have been lost in the museum where it was being kept. A similar thing happened to the postcranial portion of the skeleton discovered by H. Reck at Olduvai Gorge (Section 11.1.5). In the case of Bryan’s and Reck’s discoveries, we at least had a chance to hear about them before they disappeared. But we suspect that other fossils have escaped our attention because they were misplaced in museums or were perhaps intentionally discarded—without report.
6.2 Fossil Human Remains from Tertiary Formations
Having reviewed human skeletal remains from the Middle and Early Pleistocene, we shall now consider discoveries from the Tertiary. Of course, modern authorities, almost without exception, are convinced there were no humans in the Tertiary. In Fossil Men, Boule and Vallois (1957, p. 108), in predicting what sort of fossils might turn up to fill the gaps in the record of human ancestry, said: “Even in the Pliocene, what we shall meet will no longer be— or rather, will not yet be—true Hominids. They will be the ancestors of the Prehominians, the ancestors of the Australopithecines— or even these Australopithecines themselves—all of them forms so apelike that to call them human would be to give this term an extension that would deprive it of all logical meaning.” Here we have yet another example of evolutionary preconceptions dictating what kind of evidence is safely discoverable.
6.2.1 The Foxhall Jaw (late Pliocene)
We have already discussed J. Reid Moir’s reports about stone implements and hearths discovered at Foxhall, England, in the Late Pliocene Red Crag formation (Section 3.3.4). Earlier, in 1855, a human jaw was discovered at Foxhall by workers digging for coprolites (phosphate-rich nodules) in a quarry on Mr. Law’s farm.
John Taylor, the town druggist, purchased the Foxhall jaw (Figure 6.2) from a workman who wanted a glass of beer, and Taylor called it to the attention of Robert H. Collyer, an American physician then residing in London. Collyer, having acquired the fossil, visited the quarry on Mr. Law’s farm and noted that the coprolite bed, from which the jaw was said to have been taken, was 16 feet below the surface. The condition of the jaw, thoroughly infiltrated with iron oxide, was consistent with incorporation in the coprolite bed. Collyer said that the Foxhall jaw was “the oldest relic of the human animal in existence” (Osborn 1921, p. 567). The 16-foot level at Foxhall is the same from which Moir (1924, p. 647) later recovered stone tools and signs of fire. Anything found at this level, considered