Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [433]
In practice, morphological dating has worked like this. During the 1930s, many fossil skull fragments were found lying on the surface at various locations in Java. The formations in the region have since been dated by the potassiumargon method to the Middle Pleistocene. The potassium-argon method, it may be recalled, is used to date volcanic materials, not the bones themselves. Ideally, for a bone to be assigned a Middle Pleistocene date using this method, it should have been found lying beneath an undisturbed layer of volcanic material. But in Java this was not the case, for almost without exception the fossils labeled Homo erectus were found lying on the surface or in unspecified locations. Scientists have simply assumed that the bones eroded from Middle Pleistocene formations, in which they had supposedly been deposited hundreds of thousands of years ago. The reason scientists feel comfortable in making this assumption is that they are certain that hominids with erectus morphology have been extinct since the Middle Pleistocene. But perhaps not. Heuvelmans stated in his letter of January 20, 1986: “small hairy hominoids, with long straight hair on the head, the Nittaewo, were exterminated at the end of the 18th century in Sri Lanka. According to British leading primatologist Osman Hill (1945), these dwarfs could be modern representatives of Homo erectus.”
Such evidence makes possible another explanation for erectus-like fossils found on the surface of Middle Pleistocene formations, in Java and elsewhere. As far as Java is concerned, perhaps as little as 10,000 years ago, a Sedapalike creature died by a stream bed or lake shore, and its bones became fossilized in the sediments. In very recent times, a piece of the fragmented skull reappeared on the surface, where it was discovered by native collectors, who turned it over to a paleoanthropologist. Upon seeing its primitive erectus-like morphology, the paleoanthropologist assigned it to the Middle Pleistocene, giving it a date of 800,000 years or more. The fossil was then described in textbooks and cited as more proof for the hypothesis that modern human beings evolved over the past several hundred thousand years from more apelike ancestors. But the fossil may not actually belong to the Middle Pleistocene. It could in fact be much more recent.
Whether the Java Homo erectus fossils are recent or ancient, the existence of living erectus-like creatures (or recently living ones) in Java shows the coexistence of such creatures with humans in modern times. And, as we have seen in previous chapters, there is much evidence such creatures coexisted with humans in the distant past. This throws the accepted pattern of human evolution into complete confusion.
Paleoanthropologists, in the face of such evidence, or in ignorance of it, will insist that human beings of modern type could not have existed any earlier than one hundred thousand years ago, and certainly not in the Early Pleistocene, the Pliocene, or the Miocene.
But if there is uncertainty about what kinds of hominids may be around today, how can we be so sure about what kinds of hominids may or may not have been around in the distant past?
Empiric investigation of the fossil record may not be a sure guide. As Heuvelmans stated in a letter (April 15, 1986) to our researcher Stephen Bernath: “do not overestimate the importance of the fossil record. Fossilization is a very rare, exceptional phenomenon, and the fossil record cannot thus give us an exact image of life on earth during the past geological periods. The fossil record of primates is particularly poor because very intelligent and cautious animals can avoid more easily the very conditions of fossilization—such as sinking in mud or peat, for instance.”
The empiric method undoubtedly has its limitations, and the fossil record is incomplete and imperfect. But when all the fossil evidence, including that for very ancient humans and living ape-men, is objectively evaluated, the pattern that emerges is one of coexistence rather