Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [38]
The controversy over the St. Prest finds was noted by S. Laing, a popular British nonfiction author of the late nineteenth century, whose well-researched books on scientific subjects, intended for the general public, reached a wide audience. After discussing the site at St. Prest, Laing (1893, p. 113) stated: “In these older gravels have been found stone implements, and bones of the Elephas Meridionalis with incisions evidently made by a flint knife worked by a human hand. This was disputed as long as possible, but Quatrefages, a very cautious and competent authority, states in his latest work, published in 1887, that it is now established beyond the possibility of doubt.”
2.2 A Modern example: Old Crow River, Canada (Late Pleistocene)
Before moving on to further examples of nineteenth-century discoveries that challenge modern ideas about human origins, let us consider a more recent investigation of intentionally modified bones. One of the most controversial questions confronting New World paleoanthropology is determining the time at which humans entered North America. The standard view is that bands of Asian hunter-gatherers crossed over the Bering land bridge about 12,000 years ago. Some authorities are willing to extend the date to about 30,000 years ago, while an increasing minority are reporting evidence for a human presence in the Americas at far earlier dates in the Pleistocene. We shall examine this question in greater detail in coming chapters (Sections 3.8, 4.8, 5.1, 5.2, 5.4, and 5.5). For now, however, we want only to consider the fossil bones uncovered at Old Crow River in the northern Yukon territory as a contemporary example of the type of evidence dealt with in this chapter.
In the 1970s, Richard E. Morlan of the Archeological Survey of Canada and the Canadian National Museum of Man, conducted studies of modified bones from the Old Crow River sites. Morlan concluded that many bones and antlers exhibited signs of intentional human work executed before the bones had become fossilized. The bones, which had undergone river transport, were recovered from an Early Wisconsin glacial floodplain dated at 80,000 years b.p. (before present).
But R. M. Thorson and R. D. Guthrie (1984) published a taphonomic study showing that the action of river ice could have caused the alterations that suggested human work to Morlan. Thorson and Guthrie performed experiments in which large blocks of ice containing bones frozen within them were dragged behind trucks over various surfaces, reproducing the effect of river ice scraping against rocks and gravels. In a 1986 reappraisal of his previous work, Morlan, considering the taphonomic experiments of Thorson and Guthrie, admitted “the observed effects are impressive for the hazards they might pose to recognition of artificial alterations among redeposited fossils.” He went on to note: “However some critical variables probably were not simulated adequately (e.g., texture and hardness of the substrate, buoyancy of the ice block), and it is noteworthy that many of the experimental bones are more profoundly altered than those recovered from natural environments. Certainly these experiments have not shown that all the altered fossils from Old Crow Basin can be attributed to river icing and breakup” (Morlan 1986, p. 29).
Nevertheless, Morlan did in fact back away, in almost all cases, from his earlier assertions that the bones he had collected had been modified by human agency. He gave alternate explanations, such as the river ice hypothesis, but cautioned: “The alternate interpretations do not prove that humans were not present in Early Wisconsinan time, but they show that such ancient presence of people cannot be demonstrated on the basis of evidence gathered thus far” (Morlan 1986, p. 27). He went on to say: “This conclusion differs from earlier statements, but it is not necessarily