In 1855, a human jaw was discovered at Foxhall, England, by workers digging in a quarry. Robert H. Collyer, an American physician then residing in London acquired the fossil. He noted that the bed from which the jaw was said to have been taken was 16 feet below the surface. The condition of the jaw, thoroughly infiltrated with iron oxide, was consistent with incorporation in this bed. The 16-foot level at Foxhall is the same from which J. Reid Moir (1924, p. 647) later recovered stone tools and signs of fire. Anything found at this level would be at least 2.5 million years old.
Aware that he was in the possession of a fossil of great significance, Collyer showed it to various English scientists, including Charles Lyell, George Busk, Richard Owen, Sir John Prestwich, and Thomas Huxley. All were skeptical of its antiquity. American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (1921, p. 568), writing in the 1920s, wondered why the above-mentioned scientists did not take the trouble to visit the site. They disbelieved, said Osborn, “probably because the shape of the jaw was not primitive.”
Late in the summer of 1860, Professor Giuseppe Ragazzoni, a geologist at the Technical Institute of Brescia, traveled to Castenedolo, about
6 miles southeast of Brescia, to gather fossil shells in the Pliocene strata exposed in a pit at the base of a low hill, the Colle de Vento. There he found some human bones. Ragazzoni took the bones to the geologists A. Stoppani and G. Curioni, who said they were probably from a recent burial. Accepting their decision, Ragazzoni discarded the bones.
In December of 1879, a landowner at Castenedolo noticed some human bones in an excavation. Ragazzoni recovered the bones, which included pieces of the skull, some teeth, and parts of the backbone, ribs, arms, legs, and feet. More bones were found over the next few weeks. On February 16, a complete skeleton was discovered. Ragazzoni journeyed to the site and supervised the excavation. The skeleton, enveloped in a mass of blue green clay, turned out to be that of an anatomically modern human female.
“The complete skeleton,” said Ragazzoni (1880, p. 123), “was found in the middle of the layer of blue clay. . . . The stratum of blue clay, which is over 1 meter [3 feet] thick, has preserved its uniform stratification, and does not show any sign of disturbance.” He added, “The skeleton was very likely deposited in a kind of marine mud and not buried at a later time, for in this case one would have been able to detect traces of the overlying yellow sand and the iron-red clay called ferretto.”
In short, any burial would have certainly produced a noticeable mixing of different colored materials in the otherwise undisturbed blue clay layer, and Ragazzoni, a geologist, testified that there was no sign of such mixing. Also, the blue clay had its own stratification, which was intact. The same was true of the bones discovered earlier. “The fossil remains discovered on January 2 and January 25 lay at a depth of approximately 2 meters. The bones were situated at the boundary between the bank of shells and coral and the overlying blue clay. They were dispersed, as if scattered by the waves of the sea among the shells. The way they were situated allows one to entirely exclude any later mixing or disturbance of the strata” (Ragazonni 1880, p. 126). Modern geologists place the blue clays at Castenedolo in the Astian stage of the Middle Pliocene, which would give the discoveries from Castenedolo an age of about 3–4 million years.
Italian anatomist Giuseppe Sergi was convinced that the Castenedolo skeletons were the remains of humans who lived during the Pliocene period of the Tertiary. About the negative opinions of others, he said: “The tendency to reject, by reason of theoretical preconceptions, any discoveries that can demonstrate a human presence in the Tertiary is, I believe, a kind of scientific prejudice. Natural science should be stripped of this prejudice” (Sergi 1884, p. 309). This prejudice was, however, not overcome, and it persists today. Sergi wrote (1884, p. 310): “By means of a despotic scientific prejudice, call it what you will, every discovery of human remains in the Pliocene has been discredited.”
But Sergi was not alone in his acceptance of Ragazzoni’s discoveries at Castenedolo. Armand de Quatrefages also accepted them. Concerning the female skeleton uncovered at Castenedolo, he said in his book Races Humaines: “There exists no serious reason for doubting the discovery of M. Ragazzoni, . . . Nothing, therefore, can be opposed to it but theoretical a priori objections” (Laing 1893, p. 119).
A good example of the unfair treatment given to the Castenedolo finds may be found in Professor R. A. S. Macalister’s Textbook of european Archaeology, written in 1921. Macalister (1921, p. 183) admitted that the Castenedolo finds “whatever we may think of them, have to be treated seriously.” He noted that they were “unearthed by a competent geologist, Ragazzoni . . . and examined by a competent anatomist, Sergi.” Still he could not accept their Pliocene age. Faced with the uncomfortable facts, Macalister (1921, p. 183) claimed “there must be something wrong somewhere.” First of all the bones were anatomically modern. “Now, if they really belonged to the stratum in which they were found,” wrote Macalister (1921, p. 184), “this would imply an extraordinarily long standstill for evolution. It is much more likely that there is something amiss with the observations.” Macalister (1921, p. 185) also said: “The acceptance of a Pliocene date for the Castenedolo skeletons would create so many insoluble problems that we can hardly hesitate in choosing between the alternatives of adopting or rejecting their authenticity.” Here once more we find a scientist’s preconceived ideas about evolution influencing him to reject skeletal evidence that would otherwise be considered of good quality.
Scientists have employed chemical and radiometric tests to deny a Pliocene age to the Castenedolo bones. Fresh bones contain a certain amount of nitrogen in their protein, and this tends to decrease with time. In a 1980 report, K. P. Oakley (1980, p. 40) found the Castenedolo bones had a nitrogen content similar to that of bones from Late Pleistocene and Holocene Italian sites and thus concluded the Castenedolo bones were recent. But the degree of nitrogen preservation in bone can vary widely from site to site, making such comparisons unreliable as age indicators. The Castenedolo bones were found in clay, a substance known to preserve nitrogen-containing bone proteins.