Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [435]
However, some scientists with solid reputations, such as Krantz, Napier, Shackley, Porshnev, and others, have found in the available evidence enough reason to conclude that wildmen do in fact exist, or, at least, that the question of their existence is worthy of serious study.
Myra Shackley wrote to our researcher Steve Bernath on December 4, 1984: “As you know, this whole question is highly topical, and there has been an awful lot of correspondence and publication flying around on the scene. Opinions vary, but I guess that the commonest would be that there is indeed sufficient evidence to suggest at least the possibility of the existence of various unclassified manlike creatures, but that in the present state of our knowledge it is impossible to comment on their significance in any more detail. The position is further complicated by misquotes, hoaxing, and lunatic fringe activities, but a surprising number of hardcore anthropologists seem to be of the opinion that the matter is very worthwhile investigating.”
So there is some scientific recognition of the wildman evidence, but it seems to be largely a matter of privately expressed views, with little or no official recognition.
Always Something New Out of Africa
Always something new out of Africa. –Pliny the Elder (a.d. 27–79)
The controversies surrounding Java man and Beijing man, what to speak of Castenedolo man and the European eoliths, have long since subsided. As for the disputing scientists, most of them are in their graves, their bones on the way to disintegration or fossilization. But today Africa, the land of Australopithecus and Homo habilis, remains an active battlefield, with scientists skirmishing to establish their views on human origins.
Only in the later decades of the twentieth century did paleoanthropologists shift the main focus of their discipline from Europe and Asia to Africa. But the importance of Africa was foreseen by Darwin (1871, p. 199), who wrote in The Descent of Man: “In each great region of the world the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It is, therefore, probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are man’s nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.”
In this chapter, we survey the history of paleoanthropological discoveries in Africa. The finds from the early part of the twentieth century, such as Reck’s skeleton (Section 11.1) and the Kanjera skulls and Kanam jaw (Section 11.2), were controversial. According to their discoverers, these fossils represented evidence for anatomically modern humans in the Early Pleistocene. Anomalous finds continued to occur even in the latter part of the twentieth century. Among these we may number the Kanapoi humerus (Section 11.5.1), the ER 1481 femur from Lake Turkana (Section 11.6.3), and the Laetoli footprints (Section 11.10). Scientists have said all of them are morphologically within the modern human range. But instead of taking these fossils as evidence for anatomically modern humans in unexpectedly ancient times, scientists have generally said they show that protohuman creatures such as Australopithecus and Homo habilis had skeletal features resembling those of modern humans. Indeed, most scientists have consistently depicted Australopithecus and Homo habilis as essentially human below their apelike heads. They also say that these creatures were exclusively terrestrial and bipedal in the human fashion. But there is much evidence