M. K. Jessup, an astronomer, recorded the following wall-in-coalmine story: “It is . . . reported that James Parsons, and his two sons, exhumed a slate wall in a coal mine at Hammondville, Ohio, in 1868. It was a large, smooth wall, disclosed when a great mass of coal fell away from it, and on its surface, carved in bold relief, were several lines of hieroglyphics” (Jessup 1973, p. 65).
The foregoing sampling of discoveries indicating a relatively high level of civilization in very distant ages was compiled from reports published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but similar reports continue up to the present day. We shall now review some of them.
In 1968, William J. Meister, a draftsman and amateur trilobite collector, reported finding a shoe print in the Wheeler Shale near Antelope Springs, Utah. This shoelike indentation and its cast were revealed when Meister split open a block of shale. Clearly visible within the imprint were the remains of trilobites, extinct marine arthropods. The shale holding the print and the trilobite fossils is from the Cambrian, and would thus be 505 to 590 million years old.
Meister (1968, p. 99) described the ancient shoelike impression in an article that appeared in the Creation Research Society Quarterly: “The heel print was indented in the rock about an eighth of an inch more than the sole. The footprint was clearly that of the right foot because the sandal was well worn on the right side of the heel in characteristic fashion.” In
1984, Richard L. Thompson visited Meister in Utah. His close inspection of the print revealed no obvious reason why it could not be accepted as genuine. The shape of the Meister print, as shown by Thompson’s visual inspection and computer analysis, closely matches that of a modern shoe print.
Over the past several decades, South African miners have found hundreds of metallic spheres with up to three parallel grooves running around their equators. Roelf Marx, curator of the museum of Klerksdorp, South Africa, where some of the spheres are housed, said: “The spheres are a complete mystery. They look man-made, yet at the time in Earth’s history when they came to rest in this rock no intelligent life existed. They’re nothing like I have ever seen before.”
My research assistant wrote to Roelf Marx for further information about the spheres. He replied in a letter dated September 12, 1984: “There is nothing scientific published about the globes, but the facts are: They are found in pyrophyllite, which is mined near the little town of Ottosdal in the Western Transvaal. This pyrophyllite is a quite soft secondary mineral. . . . formed by sedimentation about 2.8 billion years ago. On the other hand the globes, which have a fibrous structure on the inside with a shell around it, are very hard and cannot be scratched, even by steel.” In the absence of a satisfactory natural explanation, the evidence is somewhat mysterious, leaving open the possibility that the South African grooved spheres—found in a mineral deposit 2.8 billion years old—were made by intelligent beings.
extremely old Human Fossils
As we have seen, there are lots of stone tools and other artifacts showing a human presence going back millions of years. But are there also any human fossils to further support this conclusion? The answer is yes. Of course, one should keep in mind that fossilization is a rare event. Richard Leakey once said that the key fossils related to human evolution could fit on a billiard table. And one of the comments often heard at conferences on human evolution is “we need more fossils.” Given the rarity of such fossils, the examples we are about to discuss assume considerable importance.
One good example comes from the original Java Homo erectus discoveries of Eugene Dubois at Trinil. As we have seen, modern scientists have shown that the femur found along with the Java man skull is unlike Homo erectus femurs and resembles exactly modern human femurs. They have thus concluded that the femur does not belong with the skull. But what then do we make of the femur? It would appear that we have good evidence for anatomically modern humans in Java at about 800,000 years ago, which is the age previously attributed to the skull and femur. According to modern theory, anatomically modern humans did not come into existence until about 100,000 years ago.
We have also seen that Homo habilis, as pictured before the OH-62 discovery in 1987, is probably a composite of fossils from several species. Donald Johanson has in fact suggested that many bones previously attributed to Homo habilis must now be reassigned. Among these bones is the ER 1481 femur, found at Lake Turkana, Kenya by John Harris. Richard Leakey described this femur as indistinguishable from that of a modern human being. So if it no longer belongs to Homo habilis, perhaps it should be assigned to an anatomically modern human living in Africa about 2 million years ago.
During the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, several discoveries of human skeletal remains were made in Middle Pleistocene formations in Europe. These discoveries include those made at Galley Hill, Moulin Quignon, Clichy, La Denise, and Ipswich. The presence of these skeletons in Middle Pleistocene strata could be attributed to recent intrusive burial, mistakes in reporting, or fraud. Nonetheless, there are reasons for thinking that the skeletons might in fact be of Middle Pleistocene age.
In 1888, workmen removing deposits at Galley Hill, near London, England, exposed a bed of chalk. One workman, Jack Allsop, informed Robert Elliott, a collector of prehistoric items, that he had discovered a human skeleton firmly embedded in these deposits about 8 feet below the surface and about 2 feet above the chalk bed (Keith 1928, pp. 250–
266). Elliott stated: “We carefully looked for any signs of the section being disturbed, but failed: the stratification being unbroken.” A schoolmaster named M. H. Heys also observed the bones embedded in undisturbed deposits. Heys said: “This undisturbed state of the stratum was so palpable to the workman that he said, ‘The man or animal was not buried by anybody’” (Keith 1928, p. 255). Numerous stone tools were also recovered from the Galley Hill site.
According to modern opinion, the Galley Hill site belongs to the Holstein interglacial period, which occurred about 330,000 years ago. Anatomically, the Galley Hill skeleton was judged to be of the modern human type. Most scientists now think that anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) originated in Africa around 100,000 years ago. They say that Homo sapiens sapiens eventually entered Western Europe in the form of Cro-Magnon man approximately 30,000 or 40,000 years ago, replacing the Neandertals.
Despite the testimony by Heys and Elliott that the Galley Hill skeleton was found in undisturbed strata, K. P. Oakley and M. F. A. Montagu (1949) later concluded that the skeleton must have been recently buried in the Middle Pleistocene deposits. This is also the opinion of almost all anthropologists today.