Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [350]
this table is reproduced from Le Gros clark and campbell (1978, p. 94). calotte, cranium, and calvaria mean skull, mandible means lower jaw, maxilla means upper jaw, and femora means thighbones.
The ages given by Le Gros clark and campbell, derived from the potassiumargon dates discussed in Section 7.5.1, refer only to the age of the volcanic soils, and not to the bones themselves. potassium-argon dates have meaning only if the bones were found securely in place within or beneath the layers of dated volcanic material. But the vast majority of fossils listed in Table 7.2 were surface finds, rendering their assigned potassium-argon dates meaningless.
concerning the age of 1.3–2.0 million years given by Le Gros clark and campbell for the djetis beds of the putjangan formation, we note that this is based on the potassium-argon date of 1.9 million years reported by Jacob and curtis (1971). But Bartstra (1978) obtained a potassium-argon age of less than 1 million years (Section 7.5.1). As we have seen (Section 7.5.1), other researchers have reported that the fauna of the djetis and trinil beds are quite similar and that the bones have similar fluorine-to-phosphate ratios.
Le Gros clark and campbell (1978, p. 92) concluded that “at this early time there existed in Java hominids with a type of femur indistinguishable from that of Homo sapiens, though all the cranial remains so far found emphasize the extraordinarily primitive characters of the skull and dentition.” All in all, the presentation by Le Gros clark and campbell was quite misleading. they left the reader with the impression that cranial remains found in Java can be definitely associated with the femurs when such is not the case. Furthermore, discoveries in china and Africa, as previously noted (Section 7.1.8), have shown that Homo erectus femurs are different from those collected by dubois in Java.
Judging strictly by the hominid fossil evidence from Java, all we can say is the following. As far as the surface finds are concerned, these are all cranial and dental remains, the morphology of which is primarily apelike with some humanlike features. Because their original stratigraphic position is unknown, these fossils simply indicate the presence in Java, at some unknown time in the past, of a creature with a head displaying some apelike and humanlike features.
The original Pithecanthropus skull (t2) and femur (t3) reported by dubois were found in situ, and thus there is at least some basis for saying they are perhaps as old as the early Middle pleistocene trinil beds of the Kabuh formation. the original position of the other femurs is poorly documented, but they are said to have been excavated from the same trinil beds as t2 and t3 (Section 7.1.7). in any case, the original femur (t3), described as fully human, was not found in close connection with the primitive skull and displays anatomical features that distinguish it from the femur of Homo erectus. there is, therefore, no good reason to connect the skull with the t3 femur or any of the other femurs, all of which are described as identical to those of anatomically modern humans. consequently, the t2 skull and t3 femur can be said to indicate the presence of two kinds of hominids in Java during the early Middle pleistocene—one with an apelike head and the other with legs like those of anatomically