From Atlantis to the Sphinx (26 page)

But Boucher de Perthes was now digging in earnest in Picardy, and found many ancient animal bones, as well as hand axes, scrapers and awls that had obviously been made by man. When he showed these to the professors of geology, they explained patronisingly that they were not man-made tools, but pieces of hardened silica that merely looked like tools. But Boucher was saved from discouragement by a visit from Charles Lyell, who had no doubt that his hand axes were made by man.

It was a slap in the face for Cuvier’s disciples; the most eminent of all modern geologists had declared that some form of ‘fossil man’
had
existed for tens of thousands of years, at the time of the mammoth, the sabre-toothed tiger and the cave bear. This was Lyell’s second major claim to an important place in the history of science. The cautious Englishman who had advised Darwin not to make too much of the descent of man now gave a decisive impetus to the science of ancient man.

Boucher’s problem was a certain happy-go-lucky lack of precision, which had made him an easy target for Cuvier’s followers; his vagueness made even Lyell impatient. Yet this rather unscientific individual, who was always jumping to the wrong conclusions, made discoveries of inestimable importance. It was his associate Lartet, however, who made the most exciting discovery so far.

Now financed by an English industrialist named Henry Christy, and able to devote his full time to his researches, Lartet abandoned the Tertiary layers, and began to study the next era—the Pleistocene or Ice Age. In September 1860, he came across a pile of primeval kitchen rubbish in Massat, in the department of Arriège, in which he found a stag antler with a cave bear scratched on it. Ancient man, it seemed, was an artist. When a man named Brouillette had found a bone engraved with two does 20 years earlier, the professors had dismissed it as a product of children. But Lartet’s antler was in a completely unexplored layer. The learned world was now forced to take him seriously.

Next he moved to the valley of the river Vézère, in the Dordogne. This valley was, as Herbert Wendt has commented, as important for prehistory as the Valley of the Kings was for Egyptology. In 1864, Lartet found a mammoth’s tusk with hand-axe marks on it—proof positive that man was a contemporary of the mammoth.

In 1868, Lartet heard of a new discovery made in the Vézère valley—a cave uncovered by railway construction near the village of Les Eyzies, at a place called Cro-Magnon. Lartet sent his son Louis to look at it. Louis had no doubt that this was the greatest discovery so far. The cave was full of the artefacts of its former occupants. But, more important, it contained skeletons. And a skull that lay at the back of the cave was virtually identical to any skull that could be found in the local churchyard, with a large brain-case and the jutting chin of modern man.

It may be of sinister significance that this dwelling place of modern man was the scene of violence. The six Cro-Magnon humans—including three younger men, a woman and a baby—had died under strange circumstances. The woman’s skull had a deep head wound, which was in the process of healing. But it seemed that she had died while giving birth to the baby. How she and the others had died was undetermined—the Cro-Magnon cave constitutes the first detective story in human history.

As usual, the professors would have none of it. They said the cave was simply a burial site, and that it was probably more or less modern. But their certainty was soon undermined as other Cro-Magnon skeletons began to turn up in other places, which were obviously not modern burial sites. On a wall in a cave at Les Combarelles there was an engraving of a bearded human face. All the evidence indicated that such caves were occupied by hunters. The ancient men of the Vézère valley lived by pursuing animals. Near the village of Solutré, thousands of bones of wild horses were found at the foot of a steep crag—the hunters had chased them into a trap and over the cliff.

In short, man's direct ancestor was not Neanderthal man, but these Cro-Magnon hunters and artists, whose women wore ornaments of carved ivory and shells.

Cro-Magnon man might have been discovered a decade earlier if a Spanish hidalgo called Don Marcelino de Sautuola had showed more curiosity. In about 1858—the exact date is not certain—a dog belonging to Don Marcelino, who lived at Altamira, vanished down a crack in the ground when he was out hunting; the crack proved to be the entrance of an underground cave. Don Marcelino had it sealed up for safety. About twenty years later, after attending the Paris Exhibition of 1878 and seeing Ice Age tools, Don Marcelino went into the cave and began digging for human artefacts; he found a hand axe and some stone arrowheads. Then, one day, his five-year-old daughter Marie came into the cave with him and cried out in excitement; she had seen pictures of charging bulls on the walls, in a part of the cave whose low ceiling had made it inaccessible to her father.

The pigment proved to be still wet. And this was to be Don Marcellino’s downfall. For when he announced his discovery to the world, the experts denounced it as a fraud. Don Marcelino died a bitter and disappointed man. But years later, after one of these experts—a man named Cartailhac—had studied similar caves at Les Eyzies, he realised that he had done Don Marcelino a great injustice, and hurried back to apologise. Marie de Sautuola, now an old lady, could only smile sadly and take him to see Don Marcelino’s grave.

Many other painted caves were later discovered—one of the most spectacular at Lascaux—full of these drawings of bison, bulls, wild horses, bears, rhinoceroses, and even of men wearing deers’ antlers. These latter were obviously shamans, or magicians, and it seemed that the purpose of the drawings was magical—to make sure that the prey was somehow lured into the path of the Stone Age hunters.

And what of Neanderthal man, who was still around 50,000 years ago, when Cro-Magnon man was performing his magical ceremonies? The fact that he had vanished from history while Cro-Magnon was still flourishing suggests the sinister hypothesis that he had been wiped out by his artistic cousin...

But how old
was
man?

So far, the palaeontologists had succeeded in tracing human history back a hundred thousand years, into the Pleistocene era. A jaw discovered many years later—in 1907—in a sandpit near Heidelberg pushed back the age of Neanderthal man to about 150,000 years. But since he was definitely not ‘the missing link’, this did nothing to clarify the early history of man. But ancient skulls and human artefacts were always turning up in far older layers, apparently justifying Boucher de Perthes’s conviction that man might date back to the Tertiary era.

For example, in 1866, in Calaveras County, California, a mine owner named Mattison discovered part of a human-type skull in a layer of gravel 130 feet below the surface, at a place called Bald Hill. The layer in which it was found seemed to date from the Pliocene era, more than two million years ago. It was examined by the geologist J. D. Whitney, who told the California Academy of Sciences that it had been found in Pliocene strata.

This outraged religious opinion in America, since it seemed to contradict the Bible. The religious press attacked the Calaveras skull as a fraud, and one Congregationalist minister announced that he had talked to miners who had planted the skull as a hoax on Whitney. The original hoaxer had been a Wells Fargo agent named Scribner, to whom the finder of the skull, Mr Mattison, had taken it—not realising that he had planted it as a joke. But a Dr A. S. Hudson, who tried to get to the bottom of the story some years later, was assured by Scribner that it was no hoax. And Mattison’s wife verified that her husband had brought it back from the mine encrusted with sand and fossils, and they had kept it around the house for a year. In spite of all this, the hoax story stuck.

One of those who did not believe it to be a hoax was Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder of evolutionary theory. He knew that Whitney had investigated many other reports of human bones found at great depths in mines, and that in some cases the bones appeared to come from strata even older than the Pliocene. Whitney had also investigated stone tools and artefacts that seemed to be millions of years old. Ten years earlier, a complete human skeleton had been found by miners under Table Mountain, Tuolumne County, and nearby were bones and remains that included mastodon teeth—which seemed to date the skeleton to the Miocene, more than five million years ago. Another fragment of a human skull was also found in Table Mountain in 1857, near mastodon debris. Whitney examined a human jaw and stone artefacts from below the same mountain, with a possible age of more than nine million years. Human bones found in the Missouri tunnel, in Placer County, came from a layer deposited more than eight million years ago. Whitney also spoke to a Dr H. H. Boyce who had found human bones in Clay Hill, Eldorado County, in a layer that could have been Pliocene or even Miocene. Whitney brought together all his evidence for ‘Tertiary Man’ (the Tertiary period ended with the Pliocene) in a book called
Auriferous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California
in 1880.

Some of the artefacts found in Tuolumne, California, sounded so absurd that it was hard to see how they could
not
be a hoax. These included a mortar found
in situ
(i.e. found embedded in the earth at the site, not, say, in some river valley where it might have been carried by rivers or glaciers), in gravels more than 35 million years old, a pestle
and
mortar found at the same depth, and a pestle (known as the King Pestle) found in strata more than nine million years old. Yet there would be no possibility of their being ‘planted’ in recent times. It seemed more likely that they might have been taken there by primeval miners thousands of years ago.

Understandably, Alfred Russel Wallace was inclined to feel that these finds—and dozens of others like them—suggested that man might indeed be millions of years older than Darwin and Haeckel believed—perhaps because ‘through culture, [man] has been partitioned from the vagaries of natural selection’. So when he heard that a Kent grocer named Benjamin Harrison had been finding stone hand axes in beds of gravel that seemed to date from the Pliocene (more than two million years old) and even the Miocene era (more than five million), he hastened to go and see him. Harrison lived in Ightham, not far from London, in an area of the Weald—a kind of valley between the North Downs and the South Downs, eroded away by rivers.

A river acts as a kind of excavating tool, for as it cuts down into the earth, it leaves the past exposed in the form of gravels. It reverses the usual law of archaeology—that the deeper the level, the older it is, for the higher gravels are the oldest. Searching these higher levels, Harrison found not only ‘neoliths’—sophisticated stone tools made during the last hundred thousand years—but also ‘palaeoliths’, tools that are perhaps a million years old, and even ‘eoliths’, tools so primitive that it is often hard to tell them from naturally shaped stones.

In 1891, Wallace went to see Harrison, and was fascinated by his stones. Like the eminent geologist Sir John Prestwich, he had no doubt that Harrison’s palaeoliths and eoliths proved that tool-making animals had been around for millions of years.

But now the end of the century was approaching, scientists like Wallace and Prestwich were gradually becoming a minority. Darwin’s suggestion that man had descended from the apes had aroused bitter and derisive opposition, so that even to make such a statement at a public meeting was enough to unleash shouts of rage or jeers of sarcastic laughter. The argument had become polarised—religious bigots on the one hand, and aggressive supporters of the ape-man on the other. The ape-man supporters had been delighted with the discovery of Neanderthal, for it seemed to prove that man had been little more than an ape in the last hundred thousand years or so. So Wallace, Prestwich and others of their way of thinking found themselves, whether they liked it or not, tarred with the same brush as ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce and Captain (now Vice-Admiral) Fitzroy, Darwin’s former shipmate, who remained implacably opposed to Darwinism.

Ernst Haeckel, the German Darwinist who liked to assert: ‘It is now an indisputable fact that man is descended from the apes’, agreed with Wallace on one central point: that early man should be sought in the Tertiary era, perhaps five million years ago. He was also convinced that man’s original ancestor was a gibbon, a monkey with very long arms, which is found in Java and Sumatra. He would later prove to be wrong about this. But his suggestion fell on fertile ground, for it reached the ears of a young Dutch student of anatomy named Eugene Dubois, who greatly preferred palaeontology to medicine.

It seemed to Dubois that the best way to satisfy his passion for ancient man was to join the army as a doctor and get himself posted to the Dutch East Indies. In 1888 he sailed for Sumatra, then succeeded, on medical grounds, in being transferred to Java. He had been sent a skull found in the Trinil highlands of central Java—a skull whose exceptional brain capacity resembled that of Neanderthal man—and now went to dig in the same place. Soon he found another skull, and then, in a region of Tertiary deposits, a fragment of jaw-bone with a tooth. He also found many animal bone fragments, until he filled several boxes. Then, in succession, he found a molar, and large bowlshaped fragment of a skull, and a fossilised thigh-bone. This, he felt certain, was the missing link, Haeckel’s
Pithecanthropus
or ape-man. Yet already there was a feature that seemed to contradict the Neanderthal find. The thigh-bone showed that this ape-man walked erect, not crouching. He was
Pithecanthropus erectus
.

Dubois wrote and told Haeckel, who was delighted. Then Dubois took his finds back to Leyden, where in 1896 he exhibited them at an international conference. To his disappointment, only a quarter of the professors were convinced. Some thought it was a gibbon, some thought the thigh-bone and the skull did not belong together, some thought it could not be from the Tertiary period (they proved to be right). And Virchow, who had declared Neanderthal man to be an idiot, now declared that
Pithecanthropus
was modern.