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Ingalls thought the prints were made by some as yet unknown kind of amphibian. “Science has no proof that these tracks were not made by one or more of these animals — one with which it is not yet familiar—for it does not know everything. Professor W. G. Burroughs, Berea College, Kentucky, geologist, champions this theory, supported by the paleontologist Charles W. Gilmore at the United States Museum” (Ingalls 1940, p. 14). Here Ingalls appears to have put his own interpretation on Burroughs’s ambiguous testimony, bringing the wayward researcher firmly back within the bounds of scientific sanity.

We should note that scientists do not really take the amphibian theory seriously. Human-sized Carboniferous bipedal amphibians do not fit into the accepted scheme of evolution much better than Carboniferous human beings— they wreak havoc with our ideas of early amphibians, requiring a host of evolutionary developments we now know nothing about.

Ingalls (1940, p. 14) wrote: “What science does know is that, anyway, unless 2 and 2 are 7, and unless the Sumerians had airplanes and radios and listened to Amos and Andy, these prints were not made by any Carboniferous Period man.”

6.3.3 A Central Asian Footprint (Jurassic)

The Moscow News (1983, no. 24, p. 10) gave a brief but intriguing report on what appeared to be a human footprint in 150-million-year-old Jurassic rock next to a giant three-toed dinosaur footprint. The discovery occurred in the Turkmen Republic in what was then the southeastern USSR. Professor Amanniyazov, corresponding member of the Turkmen SSR Academy of Sciences, said that although the print resembled a human footprint, there was no conclusive proof that it was made by a human being. This discovery has not received much attention, but then, given the current mindset of the scientific community, such neglect is to be expected. We only know of a few cases of such extremely anomalous discoveries, but considering that many such discoveries probably go unreported we wonder how many there actually might be.

6.4 Conclusion

The evidence reviewed in Chapters 2–6 suggests the existence of anatomically modern humans as far back as the early Tertiary. None of this evidence tends to be reported in modern textbooks on anthropology. Should it be reported? We leave it to the reader to decide. If taken seriously, this evidence would certainly challenge the currently dominant understanding of human origins and antiquity, but perhaps this topic is not as thoroughly understood as some believe. The cultural evidence we have considered, in the form of stone tools and incised bones, suggests a relatively primitive level of advancement. There is, however, evidence that suggests a higher level of cultural achievement. But unlike the evidence considered in Chapters 2–6, much of this evidence was never reported by scientists. For a review of this controversial evidence see Appendix 2.

Part II

Accepted evidence

Java Man

In the preceding chapters, we have reviewed three categories of anomalous evidence relating to human origins and antiquity—human skeletal remains, incised bones, and stone implements of various kinds. At the end of the nineteenth century, on the basis of such evidence, a consensus was building within an influential portion of the scientific community that human beings of the modern type had existed as far back as the Pliocene and Miocene periods—and perhaps even earlier.

Anthropologist Frank Spencer (1984, pp. 13–14) stated: “From accumulating skeletal evidence it appeared as if the modern human skeleton extended far back in time, an apparent fact which led many workers to either abandon or modify their views on human evolution. One such apostate was Alfred Russell Wallace (1823–1913). in 1887, Wallace examined the evidence for early man in the new World, and . . . found not only considerable evidence of antiquity for the available specimens, but also a continuity of type through time. in an effort to explain this, Wallace suggested that . . . man, through culture, had been essentially partitioned