Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [76]
Granting Edmunds’s explanation of the history and age of the iron-stained sands found on the North Downs and Chalk Escarpment, we can consider two hypothetical accounts about how stone implements might have come to be present in them.
The first account involves a Miocene origin for the implements. In the Late Miocene, toolmakers might have left implements on a land surface in the Weald region of southern England, which was later submerged by rising sea levels in the Early Pliocene. The implements were then embedded in marine deposits. Later in the Pliocene, the region again became a land surface, the central portion of which was uplifted (Figure 3.1). Rivers flowing down from the central uplands, in a northerly direction, eroded the ferruginous marine sands. The flint implements and ferruginous sands were deposited in the places where they are now found—as hilltop drifts at very high elevations on the North Downs and as plateau drifts on the Chalk Escarpment (Figure 3.2). During the Pleistocene glacial periods that followed, a different river system carved out valleys and deposited valley drift gravels on terraces below the North Downs hilltops and the Chalk Plateau, with their deposits of sands and gravels from the Pliocene.
Our second account involves a Pliocene origin for the tools. As above, a marine transgression took place in the Early Pliocene, depositing layers of sediment. Later in the Pliocene, the region again became a land surface, drained by rivers.
Figure 3.2. The relationships of gravel deposits (drifts) to generalized Weald landscape.
(1) Plateau drift deposited by rivers flowing north over the Early Pliocene land surface.
(2) Hilltop drifts deposited by a now vanished Late Pliocene river.
(3–5) Progressively younger valley drifts deposited by the present river in the Middle and Late Pleistocene.
People living along the banks of these rivers left stone tools, which were transported by the river to their present locations on the North Downs hilltops and the Chalk Plateau. This took place before the present river systems came into being. Embedded in the gravel deposits for long periods of time, the flint implements acquired their coloration and patina. These implements, their edges worn by transport, could not be any younger than the now-vanished northwardflowing rivers. Any implements more recently dropped into these gravels would have remained unrolled and unworn because no water was flowing at that high level. The new rivers were flowing at much lower levels.
How old were the Paleolithic flint implements on the Kent Plateau and in the hilltop drifts? Prestwich (1889, p. 292) concluded: “physiographical changes and the great height of the old chalk plateau, with its ‘red clay with flints’ and ‘southern drift’ high above the valleys containing the Postglacial deposits, point to the great antiquity—possibly Preglacial—of the palaeolithic implements found in association with these summit drifts.”
According to current opinion, glaciers approached, but did not actually cover the Kent Plateau. The Cromer Till of East Anglia, north of the Kent Plateau, represents the earliest definite geological evidence of glaciation in southern England (Nilsson 1983, pp. 112, 308). A till is a deposit of stones left by retreating glaciers. The Cromer till is .4 million years old. But evidence of an arctic climate occurs somewhat earlier than the