Faked Fossils of Primitive Man
Archeological Fakes 1970
Adolf Reith Trans. by Diana Imber v
[34] Prehistorians and particularly museum experts have to be on the watch for forgeries, which sometimes appear in unexpected areas such as anthropology. At the time of Darwin and Haeckel, that is the latter part of the nineteenth century, the origins of man were passionately discussed by anthropologists and students of Prehistory. Two hundred years earlier it was still very dangerous to talk of fossilized man, or pre-Adam man as he-was then called. The French scholar Isaac de la Peyrere, who supported this view, was only able to save himself from the Inquisition by adopting the catholic faith. At the beginning of the nineteenth century another French scholar, Cuvier, had denied the existence of fossilman until a few decades later (about 1843) a customs official produced evidence. This man, Boucher de Perthes. like John Frere and MacErny in England had found flints, in other words man-made tools. together with the bones of extinct animals. proving that the animals must have lived at the same time as the tool-makers. Hence fossil-man must have existed. The only difficulty was to find his bones and Boucher de Perthes was very keen to do so. His professional colleagues and opponents always asked why he produced as evidence only the tools and never a part even of the skeleton of his antediluvian man, and for decades Boucher could not answer this question. Finally he offered a reward of two hundred gold francs to the first one of his workmen to bring him a bone of antediluvian man. Boucher de Perthes was by now seventy-five. Therefore he was all the more overjoyed when in March 1863. a worker in the gravelpit at Moulin-Quignon (near Abbeville) discovered another five flints (Pl. 11) and with them a human tooth. That seemed conclusive at last and Boucher de Perthes hurried down to the quarry to find, in the same place. another flint. and a little later, five metres below the surface. the lower jaw of a man. He sent the lower jaw to the "Academy of Science" and the anthropologist Jean-Louis Armand de Quatrefages declared the piece not only genuine but [35] of considerable importance (Pl. 12). Then doubts were raised and began to pour in from every side. A group of English and French scholars, one of whom was the famous archaeologist John Evan, declared that the flint tools, as well as the lower jaw, were false. Evans sent an English excavator to Moulin-Quignon-at the time excavators and scholars were distinct-to dig on the site with Boucher de Perthes. But since the Frenchman spoke no English and the Englishman no French such communication as there was led nowhere. Meanwhile the lower jaw was analysed by a chemist who declared that there was a large quantity of organic matter in the bone which must therefore be quite modern. The elderly Boucher de Perthes defended his "lower jaw" with as much obstinacy as subjectivity against the English and closed his dissertation with these words: "Gentlemen, man's intellect can lead him far astray. Now prehistoric man has not only political but also ecclesiastical England against him." Boucher de Perthes clung with the obstinacy of old age to the genuineness of the lower jaw and he continued to defend it against all comers. He died four years later, in 1868, still convinced that the find his workers had produced for him in order to claim the reward was genuine. It was unfortunate that he was not alive to hear the oration delivered at the unveiling of his memorial. when one of the speakers described the lower jaw of Moulin-Quignon as one of the finest jewels in the crown of such discoveries!
The news of Boucher de Perthes's discoveries had scarcely reached the
States when, in 1838, an American called Koch found in Missouri obsidian
arrow-heads lying with the bones of a mastodon, but these were proved to
be modern and had clearly been added later by Mr Koch. It was surely not
chance that barely thirty years later in 1866 led to the discovery of a
human skull in a Californian gold mine about forty yards deep in the tertiary
layer? This "primeval" discovery put the Americans far ahead of
Europe. An anthropologist called Wilson was absolutely convinced that this
was the oldest man in the world, tertiary man, discovered in the gold-laden
sand of Calaveras County in California. Lack of proper means of comparison
made such statements feasible at the time. How the skull came to be lying
so deep was never explained. It is, however, certain that it is identical
with the skull of a modern Californian Indian. This was proved not only
by the remains of a modern snake found within the skull, but by a later
test which gave a negative fluorine