Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [411]
This ends our review of finds in China. It appears that age determinations of fossil hominids have been distorted by morphological dating. When these ages are adjusted to reflect reasonable faunal date ranges, the total evidence fails to exclusively support an evolutionary hypothesis. Rather, the evidence appears also consistent with the proposal that anatomically modern human beings have coexisted with a variety of humanlike creatures throughout the Pleistocene.
Living Ape-Men?
In examining the fossil hominids of China (Chapter 9), we found signs that humans may have coexisted with more apelike hominids throughout the Pleistocene. In this chapter, we suggest that humans and ape-man-like creatures continue to coexist.
Over the past hundred or so years, researchers have accumulated substantial evidence that creatures resembling Neanderthals, Homo erectus, and the australopithecines even now roam wilderness areas of the world.
The existence of living ape-men, if admitted by scientists, offers new ways to interpret ambiguous paleoanthropological evidence. Hominid fossils once thought to be from the Middle Pleistocene or older periods may in fact be quite recent. The existence of living ape-men also calls into question the reliability of the scientific information processing system in zoology and anthropology.
10.1 Hard Evidence Is Hard To Find
In 1775, Carl Linnaeus, the founder of the modern system of biological classification, listed three existing human species: Homo sapiens, Homo troglodytes (cave man), and Homo ferus (wild man). Although Linnaeus knew the latter two species only from travelers’ reports and other secondary sources of information, he still included them within his Systema Naturae (Shackley 1983, p. 10).
Since 1775, much more evidence for the existence of living apelike wildmen has come to light. Professional scientists have (1) observed wildmen in natural surroundings, (2) observed live captured specimens, (3) observed dead specimens, and (4) collected physical evidence for wildmen, including hundreds of footprints. They have also interviewed nonscientist informants and investigated the vast amount of wildman lore contained in ancient literatures and traditions.
Despite this, no zoo or museum in a civilized nation has in its collection a wildman specimen, alive or dead. Many will say that all the wildman evidence mentioned above exists simply in reports, and that reports alone, even those given by scientists, are not sufficient to establish the existence of wildmen. Hard evidence, available now, to anyone who wants to see it and touch it, is required.
But what is the real status of hard evidence? Can a physical object in and of itself confirm a certain idea about some aspect of human origins? The answer to that question is no. In paleoanthropology, as in many areas of science, evidence exists primarily in the form of reports.
The most important feature of an artifact or a fossil hominid bone, as far as paleoanthropologists are concerned, is its age. As we show in Appendix 1, radiometric and chemical methods are not very reliable age indicators. Therefore the best age indicator is stratigraphic position. Once a bone or artifact is taken out of the ground, evidence of its original stratigraphic position lies principally in the reports of its discovery.
For example, one afternoon in the early 1970s, Donald Johanson, the discoverer of “Lucy” (the most famous specimen of Australopithecus afarensis), found some fossilized bones lying on the surface, near his base camp in the Afar region of Ethiopia. At the very moment his fingers grasped one of those bones, lying upon Pliocene sediments, Johanson was, one might say, in touch with some hard evidence. But Johanson’s discovery of those bones had no real scientific meaning until it was reported to other scientists. And from that time on, the discovery has existed, as far as the world of science is concerned, only in reports.
Were the bones discovered in the exact manner described in the reports? The answer to that question depends upon