Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [387]
Aigner (1981, p. 128) offered this conclusion: “Weidenreich’s reconstruction of the practices associated—murder, severing the head, and removing the brain, dissecting the long-bones and depositing just those parts in the cave—is difficult indeed to understand in light of the strong evidence (hearths) that the cave was a habitation site and not simply a dump.” However, we have already seen, according to one modern opinion (Binford and Ho 1985), that there is no real evidence for hearths at Choukoutien. It is hard to attribute the huge masses of ash found there to campfires. Furthermore, the distribution of Sinanthropus remains is rather indicative of a dump. As noted by Weidenreich (1943, p. 186): “The distribution of Sinanthropus bones both horizontally and vertically throughout the deposit is an accidental one as is that of the animal bones.”
Binford and Ho (1985, p. 428), as mentioned previously, proposed that carnivores had brought the hominid bones into the caves. But Weidenreich (1935, p. 453) said: “transportation by . . . beasts of prey is impossible. . . . traces of biting and gnawing ought to have been visible on the human bones, which is not the case. Therefore, the only possibility is that man himself brought the bones into the cave, by preference brain cases and jaws.”
As evidence of cannibalism, Weidenreich pointed out that the Sinanthropus remains were predominantly those of children and females, the easiest to kill. Weidenreich (1935, p. 456) then cited several examples of cannibalism from Europe, stating: “Matiegka . . . has reviewed rather completely human skeletal material of prehistoric times of all Europe giving testimony about cannibalism. In many of these cultural places bones have been found which were broken to pieces and mingled with those of animals, with charcoal, ashes, and stone tools or splinters of them. Very frequently there were among the human bones skulls, isolated jaws, or fragments of them. . . . In some finding places the remains of children, adolescents and sometimes also of women were prevailing. The resemblance to the conditions existing in Choukoutien is obvious.”
But Marcellin Boule, director of the Institute de Paleontologie Humaine in France, suggested another possibility—namely, that Sinanthropus had been hunted by a more intelligent type of hominid. Boule believed that the small cranial capacity of Sinanthropus implied that this hominid was not sufficiently intelligent to have created the stone and bone implements that were discovered in the cave.
In his description of the stone tool industry, Boule said: “It is important to note that this industry is not primitive, since M. Breuil himself acknowledges that ‘many of (its) features are not found in France until the Upper Palaeolithic’. . . . Accompanying a being like Sinanthropus one would have expected to find an eolithic industry, and not true gravers and scrapers and other tools ‘sometimes of fine workmanship’” (Boule and Vallois 1957, p. 145). Hence Boule concluded that the Choukoutien implements and fires were created by a “true man,” Homo sapiens, who preyed upon Sinanthropus. Professor Boule did not believe that Sinanthropus necessarily represented an intermediate link in the chain of evolution from ape to Homo sapiens. He believed instead that Sinanthropus was simply an apelike being who was hunted for food by Homo sapiens.
Boule stated his position quite clearly: “We may therefore ask ourselves whether it is not over-bold to consider Sinanthropus the monarch of Choukoutien, when he appears in its deposit only in the guise