Bones tend to accumulate fluorine from ground water. The Castenedolo bones had a fluorine content that Oakley (1980, p. 42) considered relatively high for bones he thought were recent. Oakley explained this discrepancy by positing higher past levels of fluorine in the Castenedolo groundwater. But this was simply guesswork. The Castenedolo bones also had an unexpected high concentration of uranium, consistent with great age.
A carbon 14 test yielded an age of 958 years for some of the Castenedolo bones. But, as in the case of Galley Hill, the methods employed are now considered unreliable. And the bones themselves, which had been mouldering in a museum for almost 90 years, were very likely contaminated with recent carbon, causing the test to yield a falsely young age.
The case of Castenedolo demonstrates the shortcomings of the methodology employed by paleoanthropologists. The initial attribution of a Pliocene age to the discoveries of 1860 and 1880 appears justified. The finds were made by a trained geologist, G. Ragazzoni, who carefully observed the stratigraphy at the site. He especially searched for signs of intrusive burial, and observed none. Ragazzoni duly reported his findings to his fellow scientists in scientific journals. But because the remains were modern in morphology they came under intense negative scrutiny. As Macalister put it, there had to be something wrong.
The account of human origins now dominant in the scientific community is the product of attitudes such as Macalister’s. For the last century, the idea of progressive evolution of the human type from more apelike ancestors has guided the acceptance and rejection of evidence. Evidence that contradicts the idea of human evolution is carefully screened out. Therefore, when one reads textbooks about human evolution, one may think, “Well, the idea of human evolution must be true because all the evidence supports it.” But such textbook presentations are misleading, for it is the unquestioned belief that humans did in fact evolve from apelike ancestors that has determined what evidence should be included and how it should be interpreted.
We now turn our attention to another Pliocene find, made at Savona, a town on the Italian Riviera, about 30 miles west of Genoa. In the
1850s, while constructing a church, workmen discovered an anatomically modern human skeleton at the bottom of a trench 3 meters (10 feet) deep. The layer containing the skeleton was 3–4 million years old.
Arthur Issel (1868) communicated details of the Savona find to the members of the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archeology at Paris in 1867. He declared that the Savona human “was contemporary with the strata in which he was found” (de Mortillet 1883, p. 70).
Some suggested the skeleton was buried in the place where it was found. But a report given at the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archeology at Bologna in 1871 said: “Had it been a burial we would expect to find the upper layers mixed with the lower. The upper layers contain white quartzite sands. The result of mixing would have been the definite lightening of a closely circumscribed region of the Pliocene clay sufficient to cause some doubts in the spectators that it was genuinely ancient, as they affirmed. The biggest and smallest cavities of the human bones are filled with compacted Pliocene clay. This could only have happened when the clay was in a muddy consistency, during Pliocene times” (Deo Gratias 1873, pp. 419–420). Deo Gratias pointed out that the clay was now hard and dry. Also, the skeleton was found at a depth of 3 meters (10 feet), rather deep for a burial.
In the 1880s, Florentino Ameghino announced the discovery of flint tools and signs of intentional use of fire at Monte Hermoso in Argentina. Now we will consider the human bone found there—an atlas, the topmost bone of the spinal column. It was collected by Santiago Pozzi, an employee of the Museum of La Plata, from the Early Pliocene Montehermosan formation during the 1880s. It did not attract much notice until years later. At that time, it was still covered by the characteristic yellowish-brown loess of the Montehermosan formation, which is 3–5 million years old. After the Pliocene loess was removed, scientists carefully studied the bone. Florentino Ameghino, accepting that it was truly Pliocene, assigned the atlas to an apelike human ancestor. In his description of the bone, he identified features he thought were primitive.
But Ales Hrdlicˇ ka convincingly demonstrated that the bone was actually modern in form. Like Ameghino, Hrdlicˇ ka believed the human form should, as we proceed back in time, become more and more primitive. If the bone was of the fully modern human type, then no matter what layer it was found in, it had to be of recent origin. Such a bone’s presence in an ancient stratum always could be, indeed had to be, explained as some kind of intrusion. But there is another possible explanation: human beings of the modern physiological type were living over 3 million years ago in Argentina. This is supported by the fact that the atlas showed signs of having been thoroughly embedded in sediments from the Montehermosan formation.
All in all, Hrdlicˇ ka (1912, p. 384) felt that the Monte Hermoso atlas was worthy of being “dropped of necessity into obscurity.” That is exactly what happened. Today there are many who will insist that the Monte Hermoso atlas remain in the obscurity into which it was of necessity dropped. Evidence for a fully human presence 3 million or more years ago, in Argentina of all places, is still not welcome in mainstream paleoanthropology.
In 1921, M. A. Vignati reported that a human lower jaw, with two molars, was discovered in the Late Pliocene Chapadmalalan formation at Miramar, Argentina. The jaw would thus be about 2–3 million years old. Previously, stone tools and a mammalian bone with an arrow head embedded in it had been discovered at this site. Ethnographer E. Boman, however, was skeptical. He stated: “The newspapers published bombastic articles about ‘the most ancient human remains in the world.’ But all who examined the molars found them to be identical to the corresponding molars of modern human beings” (Boman 1921, pp. 341–342). Boman took it for granted that the fully human nature of the Miramar jaw fragment unequivocally insured its recent date. But nothing Boman said excludes the possibility that the Miramar fossil demonstrates a fully human presence in the Pliocene of Argentina.
We have already discussed the numerous stone implements discovered in the auriferous gravels of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. Human bones were also found in these gravels, which range from 9 million to 55 million years old.
In February 1866, Mr. Mattison, the principal owner of the mine on Bald Hill, near Angels Creek in Calaveras County, removed a skull from a layer of gravel 130 feet below the surface. The gravel in which the skull was found was older than the Pliocene, perhaps much older. On July 16,
1866, Whitney presented to the California Academy of Sciences a report on the Calaveras skull, affirming that it was found in Pliocene strata. The skull caused a great sensation in America. According to Whitney (1880, p. 270), “The religious press in this country took the matter up. . . and were quite unanimous in declaring the Calaveras skull to be a ‘hoax.’” Whitney noted that the hoax stories did not arise until after his discovery was publicized widely in newspapers.
Some of the hoax stories were propagated not by newspaper writers but by scientists such as William H. Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution. During a visit to Calaveras County, he gathered testimony suggesting the skull examined by Whitney was not a genuine Tertiary fossil. But there is a problem with the hoax hypothesis—there are many versions. Some say religious miners planted the skull to deceive the scientist Whitney. Some say the miners planted a skull to deceive another miner. Some say a genuine skull was found by Mattison and later a different skull was given to Whitney. Some say Mattison’s friends from a nearby town planted the skull as a practical joke. This contradictory testimony casts doubt on the hoax idea.