Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [44]
2.7 Colline de Sansan, France ( Middle Miocene)
The report of the rhinoceros jaw of Billy led to the opening, at the meeting of the French Academy of Sciences on April 20, 1868, of a sealed packet deposited at the Academy on May 16, 1864 by the researchers F. Garrigou and H. Filhol. These gentlemen wrote on that date: “We now have sufficient evidence to permit us to suppose that the contemporaneity of human beings and Miocene mammals is demonstrated” (Garrigou and Filhol 1868, p. 819). This evidence was a collection of bones, apparently intentionally broken, from Sansan (Gers), France. Especially noteworthy were broken bones of the small deer Dicrocerus elegans. The bone beds of Sansan were judged to be of Middle Miocene age (Mayencian). One may consider the devastating effect that the presence of human beings about
15 million years ago would have on current evolutionary doctrines.
Were the nineteenth-century scientists correct in their determination of the age of the site? Once more, the answer to this question is yes. Modern authorities (Romer 1966, p. 334) still place Sansan in the Middle Miocene, and Dicrocerus elegans is assigned to the Helvetian land mammal stage, which is considered Middle Miocene (Klein 1973, p. 566; Romer 1966, p. 334).
According to de Mortillet, Edouard Lartet, who also excavated fossils from Sansan and himself sent to Garrigou some of the bones on which Garrigou and Filhol founded their assertions, did not believe in human action on the bones. There were many broken bones at Sansan, and de Mortillet (1883, pp. 64 –65), in his usual fashion, said that some were broken at the time of fossilization, perhaps by dessication, and others afterward by movement of the strata.
Garrigou, however, maintained his conviction that the bones of Sansan had been broken by humans, in the course of extracting marrow. He made his case in 1871 at the meeting in Bologna, Italy, of the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archeology. Garrigou (1873) first presented to the Congress a series of recent bones with undisputed marks of butchering and breaking. For comparison, he then presented bones of the small deer (Dicrocerus elegans) collected from Sansan. Among them was a humerus (the long bone of the upper forelimb) with a set of breaks exactly resembling those on a cow humerus from the Neolithic age. On its inner surface, the deer bone bore a profound incision, filled up with material from the stratum in which it was found.
Garrigou also displayed a radius (one of the bones of the lower forelimb) presenting a longitudinal fracture terminating at a right angle to the end of the bone. The fracture had the same patina as the rest of the bone, indicating the break was made when the bone was fresh, and the broken part had a surface so clean and sharp that it was impossible to see it as a natural geological effect. Subterranean pressure and shifting, if it had occurred, would have almost certainly damaged the perfectly intact edges and joint surfaces of the fractured long bone. In making these observations, Garrigou showed a good grasp of taphonomic principles. He also pointed out that the longitudinal fracture on the specimen he showed was identical to those encountered on hundreds of similar bones at Sansan.
Here we may note that longitudinal fracturing is characteristic of breaking bone for the purpose of obtaining marrow. Binford (1981, p. 162) stated: “Marrow is primarily contained in the medullary cavity of the body or shaft of long bones. This shaft is shaped like a cylinder, so access to the medullary cavity and hence the marrow is facilitated by collapsing or fracturing the cylinder longitudinally. Transversal fractures in the center of long-bone shafts do not provide ready access to the marrow.”
Garrigou also showed that many of the bone fragments had very fine and delicate striations such as found on broken bones of the Late Pleistocene. The