Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [77]
So strictly speaking, the preglacial period in southern England might be said to begin in the Middle Pleistocene. Interpreted in this light, Prestwich’s statement that the implements found in the summit drifts were preglacial could thus mean they were as recent as the early Middle Pleistocene. But, as we have seen, Edmunds (1954, p. 47) has proposed that the summit drifts, the ferruginous sands, are in fact Pliocene in age.
Hugo Obermaier (1924, p. 8), a leading paleoanthropologist of the early twentieth century, stated that the flint implements collected by Harrison from the Kent Plateau “belong to the Middle Pliocene.” J. Reid Moir, a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, also referred Harrison’s discoveries to the Tertiary (Section 3.3.1).
A Late or Middle Pliocene date for the implements of the Kent Plateau would give them an age of 2–4 million years. Modern paleoanthropologists attribute the Paleolithic implements of the Somme region of France to Homo erectus, and date them at just .5–.7 million years ago. The oldest currently recognized implements in England are about .4 million years old (Nilsson 1983, p. 111). So the Paleolithic implements of the Kent Plateau pose a number of difficulties for modern paleoanthropology.
3.2.3 Eoliths
Among the Paleolithic implements collected by Benjamin Harrison from the Kent Plateau were some that appeared to belong to an even more primitive level of culture. These were the eoliths, or dawn stones (Figure 3.3). This name eventually came to be used for a wide variety of very crude stone tool industries from England and other countries.
Figure 3.3. An eolith from the Kent Plateau (Moir 1924, p. 639).
The Paleolithic implements discovered by Harrison, although somewhat crude in appearance, had been extensively worked in order to bring them into definite tool and weapon shapes (Figure 3.4). The Eolithic implements, however, were, as defined by Harrison, natural flint flakes displaying only retouching along the edges.
Figure 3.4. These implements from the Kent Chalk Plateau were characterized as paleoliths by Sir John Prestwich (1889, plate 11). Prestwich (1889, p. 294) called the one on the left, from Bower Lane, “a roughly made implement of the spear-head type.”
Such tools are still used today by primitive tribal people in various parts of the world, who pick up a stone flake, chip one of the edges, and then use it for a scraper or cutter.
The question then arises as to how such eoliths could be distinguished from broken pieces of flint unmodified by human action. There were, of course, difficulties in making such distinctions, but even modern experts accept lithic assemblages resembling the eoliths collected by Harrison as genuine human artifacts. We shall consider this subject in greater detail in the course of this chapter, but for now we shall mention as an example the crude cobble and flake tools of the lower levels of Olduvai Gorge (Figure 3.5).
Figure 3.5. Top: Stone implements from Olduvai Gorge (M. Leakey 1971, pp. 45, 113). Bottom: Implements found by Benjamin Harrison on the Kent Plateau, England (Moir 1924, p. 639; E. Harrison 1928, p. 342).
The Olduvai Gorge implements are extremely crude, but to our knowledge, no paleoanthropologists have ever challenged their status as intentionally manufactured objects.
Harrison believed that the Kent eoliths belonged to an older period than that represented by his paleoliths. But in his 1889 report, Sir John Prestwich did not make a distinction between the two forms. Of the eoliths, Sir Edward R. Harrison stated: “Prestwich in his paper made no attempt to claim for them a higher antiquity than that of the Plateau paleoliths, with which they seemed to be associated” (E. Harrison 1928, p. 145). As we have seen, the nature of the drift gravels on the Kent Plateau and the hilltops of the North Downs suggested a Late Pliocene age for the implements.
In the aftermath of Prestwich’s presentation,