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By Root 1163 0

to answer one question, the nature of cut marks on bones, we have stumbled upon another, the question of how to recognize human workmanship on flints and other stone objects. This latter question shall be fully treated in the next chapter. For now we shall simply note that judgements about what constitutes a stone tool are a matter of considerable controversy even to this day. It is, therefore, quite definitely possible to find reasons to question de Mortillet’s rejection of the flints found by Bourgeois. Certainly, the bare observation that some of the flints collected by Bourgeois did not, in de Mortillet’s opinion, show signs of human work does not change the fact that others, however few, did in fact show such signs. And the presence of stone tools at St. Prest would satisfy a key demand for the verification of intentional cuts on fossil bones found there.

The famous American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (1910, p. 399) made these interesting remarks in connection with the presence of stone tools at St. Prest: “the earliest traces of man in beds of this age [Early Pleistocene by his estimation] were the incised bones discovered by Desnoyers at St. Prest near Chartres in 1863. Doubt as to the artificial character of these incisions has been removed by the recent explorations of Laville and Rutot, which resulted in the discovery of eolithic flints, fully confirming the discoveries of the Abbé Bourgeois in these deposits in 1867.”

So as far as the discoveries at St. Prest are concerned, it should now be apparent that we are dealing with paleontological problems that cannot be quickly or easily resolved. Certainly there is not sufficient reason to categorically reject these bones as evidence for a human presence in the Pliocene. This might lead one to wonder why the St. Prest fossils, and others like them, are almost never mentioned in textbooks on human evolution, except in rare cases of brief mocking footnotes of dismissal. Is it really because the evidence is clearly inadmissible?

Or is, perhaps, the omission or summary rejection more related to the fact that the potential Late Pliocene antiquity of the objects is so much at odds with the standard account of human origins? In theory, scientists proclaim themselves ready to follow the facts wherever they might lead. But in practice, the social mechanisms of the scientific community set limits beyond which its members in good standing may cross only at their peril. When eminent authorities announce their rejection of certain categories of evidence, others hesitate to mention similar evidence out of fear of ridicule. Thus anomalous evidence gradually slides from disrepute into complete oblivion.

Along these lines, Armand de Quatrefages, a member of the French Academy of Sciences and a professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, wrote in his book Hommes Fossiles et Hommes Sauvages (1884, p. 90): “The objections made to the existence of humans in the Pliocene and Miocene periods seem to habitually be more related to theoretical considerations than to direct observation.” De Quatrefages (1884, p. 91) further stated: “The existence of man in the Secondary epoch is not at all contrary to the principles of science, and the same is true of Tertiary man.”

This is quite a shocking statement, considering that the most recent Secondary period is the Cretaceous, which ended approximately 65 million years ago. Supposedly, only very small and primitive mammals existed in the Cretaceous, dodging the last of the dinosaurs. Evidence for human beings in the Cretaceous would most certainly cast a great thundering cloud of doubt over Darwin’s seemingly invincible hypothesis. But for now, our focus is on the more recent Tertiary epoch. Even if anatomically modern human beings were found to have existed in the latest Pliocene, at a mere 2 million years ago, that would still call into question the evolutionary picture of human origins.

In Hommes Fossiles et Hommes Sauvages, de Quatrefages gave a summary of the evidence for his assertions about humans existing in the very