Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

by Graham Hancock

  Could this be for the same reason that Malta lacks what Anton Mifsud calls a ‘civilization territory’ big enough to account for the impressive manifestations of civilization scattered all over the Maltese islands? Could we be missing the evolutionary phases of the great megalithic temples because the land on which those phases are represented is now underwater? And, the corollary of this, is there any evidence that submergences on a sufficient scale to obliterate the entire hinterland of a culture have ever occurred in the Maltese archipelago?

  It is here that settling the date of Malta’s first inhabitation by humans becomes pivotal to our inquiry. Because if we accept the orthodox academic view that these islands were entirely without a human presence until 5200 BC, then we would have no reason to be interested in floods that might have occurred earlier than that date. But suppose there is reason to doubt the academic verdict? Suppose, for example, it were to transpire that Malta had in fact been peopled during the late Palaeolithic, from as early as 18,000 years ago. Then the possibility would have to be seriously countenanced that these Palaeolithic inhabitants and their descendants could have been responsible for the evolution and development of the architecture of the ‘Temple period’ – with the more populous Neolithic settlers merely participating in and merging their identity with its last phases.

  This is why the misrepresentation and possibly even manipulation of evidence by party or parties unknown to give a falsely late date for the earliest human presence in Malta that Anton Mifsud has exposed is, potentially, of explosive significance.

  The leavings of violent floods

  The story begins at Ghar Dalam, a spacious natural cave more than 7 metres wide, 5 metres high and 120 metres long that opens into the wall of one of Malta’s many precipitous valleys, the Wied Dalam, located in the south-east of the island. Though it is arid today, the valley was gouged out by a great river and floods that have flowed violently through it at various times in the past. It continues for just over half a kilometre beyond the cave mouth before finally plunging beneath the sea in Saint George’s Bay.

  The cave is thought to have begun its existence as a solution cavity dissolved in the bedrock by percolating groundwater that was later broken into from above, penetrated and extended by these palaeo-floods. In the process the ongoing erosion of the river bed cut down the valley floor still further so that it now lies 6 metres below the level of the cave mouth. There have been several occasions during the past quarter of a million years when the flooding has been on such a scale as to overtop the valley sides and completely inundate the cave, leaving behind layers of muddy earth, clay and pebbles mixed with a fantastic assortment of animal remains that were carried along in the flood waters. Archaeologists say that the last of these cataclysmic flood deposits was laid down during the melting of the Ice Age. John Samut Tagliaferro of the University of Malta dates the event to 18,000 years ago.22 David Trump goes for a slightly more recent estimate: ‘[This] level in the cave yielded great numbers of red deer bones and was probably laid down in the cool wet period of the closing stages of the last Ice Age some 10,000 years ago.’23 After that terminal Ice Age event between 18,000 and 10,000 years ago no further flood deposits were laid down. The river in the valley floor ran dry and the cave remained undisturbed, gathering dust, visited only by grubbing wild animals, for almost 3000 years.

  Finally, so the official story goes, human beings began to register their presence there with the earliest traces of their occupation – supposedly the oldest in Malta – radiocarbon-dated to around 5200 BC. The dates are from the so-called ‘Cultural Layer’ of the cave: a thin deposit containing beads and other ornaments, buttons, tools, weapons, bones and rubbish – the usual detritus of human habitation – and also fragments of the distinctive incised pottery, excavated here and at other sites in Malta, by which the Ghar Dalam phase as a whole is classified.24

  Because of the earlier flood epochs, however, archaeologists excavating beneath the Cultural Layer found five other layers of deposits, providing a complete archive of climate, ecology and fauna in Malta over approximately the past quarter of a million years. In brief, and in descending order (with the youngest layer, of course, being the highest), we have:

  6. The Cultural Layer: traces of Neolithic man from 5200 BC onwards.

  5. The Calcareous Layer: a thin, sterile, chalky deposit that usefully ‘seals’ the older Pleistocene (Ice Age) layers beneath it and serves as a clear separator between them and the post-glacial Cultural Layer above.

  4. The Cervus Layer: the most recent of the flood deposits, dated to between 18,000 and 10,000 years ago and so named because it contains the bones (in immense quantities) of the Pleistocene European red deer (Cervus elephas, an extinct species). Other Ice Age faunal remains in the Cervus Layer include those of wolf, brown bear and fox.

  3. The Pebble Layer: just that, a stratum consisting almost entirely of stones and pebbles swept into the cave by water action and strewn across its floor.

  2. The Hippopotamus Layer: in which the remains of extinct species of dwarf hippopotamus and dwarf elephant predominate.

  1. The Clay Layer: immediately above bedrock. This layer, the oldest, forming the bottom of the Ghar Dalam sequence, is sterile and contains no remains whatsoever.

  It is certain anomalous discoveries that were made by archaeologists excavating the Cervus (Deer) Layer during the first half of the twentieth century – and the subsequent fate of these discoveries – that threaten to turn the prehistory of Malta on its head.

  Cooked hippo, a human hand bone, and some stone tools

  In fact, points out Mifsud in Dossier Malta, the first anomalous discovery was made much earlier than that – by the Italian scholar Arturo Issel in the 1860s. He began an excavation at Ghar Dalam at an arbitrary 100 paces from the cave entrance:

  The remarkable finds of his, the first official excavation of Ghar Dalam, included the burnt remains of hippopotamus, whose bones had apparently been cooked and opened up to extract the marrow for consumption.25

  The burnt remains of a hippo with its bones in the condition described do strongly suggest a human presence. However, little attention has ever been paid to Issel’s finds, which have not been preserved and have never been considered part of Malta’s archaeological story.26

  Mifsud’s research also revealed that further excavations had been conducted in the 1890s by a certain John H. Cooke, a teacher with a systematic approach towards archaeology. He dug a series of eight trenches at regular intervals throughout the cave from its deep interior to a point just 10 metres before the entrance:

  The main finds were in two trenches. A human hand bone was found in his Trench IV, in the Cervus Layer, whilst a human implement was discovered in Trench VI, also in the deer layer. For the first time human implements and remains lay in the same horizon below the cultural layers of Ghar Dalam, precisely in the Cervus Layer.

  Immediately overlooking Cooke’s layer ‘e’, the fifth layer from the surface, and equivalent to the Cervus Layer, at a depth of two feet three inches, a stone implement was discovered by Cooke. According to Dr A. A. Caruana, he was ‘of the opinion that it has undoubtedly been fashioned by man’.27

  The next digs followed in 1912–13, coordinated by Napoleon Tagliaferro and Guiseppe Despott. Their project was taken over a year later by the British Association, but Despott remained involved, conducting further digs with Temi Zammit in 1914, and leading the digs in 1916 and 1917.

  The rise and fall of Despott’s and Rizzo’s big teeth

  During the 1917 dig the discovery was made, again in the Cervus Layer, of two human teeth of a very special type known as ‘taurodont’ (the word means literally ‘bull-tooth’ and refers to the supposed ‘bull-like’ appearance of the tooth, with a large heavy body and extremely short or non-existent roots). Anton Mifsud takes up the story:

  The breakthrough came about in the summer of 1917, in one of the two trenches Despott had excavated that year. Trench I was situated 50 feet from
the entrance, and the crucial Trench II lay 60 feet further inside the cave. It was in the latter, Trench II, that two taurodont molars were discovered in the stratum of red cave earth. The curator Giuseppe Despott and a Mr Carmelo Rizzo were supervising their men digging in Trench II, when the latter’s workers came across a large bull-shaped human molar tooth amongst several deer teeth obtained from the Deer Layer of this trench; a few days later Despott himself discovered a similar molar a few feet away, several inches deeper in the cave earth …

  Despott’s molar was registered as lying one foot deeper in the cave earth of the Cervus Layer, and separated by seven feet from Rizzo’s; the pair of molars possibly derived from two individuals, but their relative proximity cannot exclude a single source. The teeth had an unusually large pulp cavity so that the roots were very small.28

  By chance, just a few years earlier, the famous British palaeoanthropologist and anatomist Sir Arthur Keith had described unusual teeth of exactly this sort found at sites elsewhere in Europe. He had attributed these teeth to Neanderthal Man and it was he who had coined the term ‘taurodont’ for them.29 Now Rizzo and Keith submitted photographs of their molars to Keith for examination and were delighted when he diagnosed them, without hesitation, as taurodont:

  In size and form such teeth have been seen in no race of mankind except H. Neanderthalis; in condition of fossilization and in the fauna which keep them company, in the red cave earth in Ghar Dalam, they are in their proper Pleistocene setting.30

  Keith followed this up by writing a letter to Nature on the subject and, in subsequent years, the hypothesis began to be widely accepted, indeed orthodox, that at least Neanderthal humans had been present on Malta during the Palaeolithic and had left their remains at Ghar Dalam. The view was strengthened in the 1920s by the discovery of a large number of definitely late Neolithic human remains and artefacts, including 2250 teeth, in the Burmeghez cave. Keith examined the teeth carefully and could not find a single example of taurodontism among them. This he took as further support for his hypothesis of the more ‘primitive’ Palaeolithic origin of the Ghar Dalam teeth.31

  Soon afterwards the hypothesis came under attack from various quarters. Scattered reports had begun to appear in the dental literature of taurodont teeth in modern humans, which, if confirmed, would much reduce the probability that Despotts and Rizzo’s molars were very old Neanderthal teeth – rather, for example, than more recent ones that had somehow (perhaps through burial) been introduced into the Cervus Layer. However, further investigation of the evidence demonstrated that while some of the modern teeth were genuinely taurodontic none of them showed anything like the degree of taurodontism evident in Despott’s and Rizzo’s molars.32 Under a classification that Keith had already proposed the latter were as ‘hypertaurodontic’ as any Neanderthal teeth from other parts of Europe, whereas the modern human teeth were mesotaurodontic or more commonly hypotaurodontic (the least severe form of the condition).33

  Keith’s defence held, there was support from other worthy authorities, a third taurodontic tooth was discovered in 1936 by Dr J. Baldacchino (then the Curator of the Museum) in the same Cervus Layer as the two 1917 molars34 – and through the combination of all these favourable auspices, ‘A slot was secured for Neanderthal humans in the Maltese history books, albeit for a few decades.’35

  Why only for a few decades? ‘In the early 1950s,’ explains Mifsud,

  the person in charge of archaeological surveys in Malta, J. D. Evans, defined the Maltese Neolithic … as the start of Malta’s history, at the same time that he discarded the taurodont molars as unreliable evidence on the basis of their isolation. Three years later, in 1962, a Maltese dental surgeon, J. J. Mangion, reported upon the incidence of taurodontism in modern Maltese, and thus seemed to discredit the validity of the Ghar Dalam molars as diagnostic … evidence for Neanderthal humans.

  But, as Mifsud says, the coup de grace was delivered in 1964, when a report from Malta’s Museum of Archaeology misrepresented the results of chemical dating tests carried out on the taurodonts by claiming them to be Neolithic. Within a decade Neanderthal man was out of the Malta history books and the taurodonts were totally discredited as evidence for a Palaeolithic presence in the Maltese islands.36

  Trump and Evans on the record on the taurodonts

  Before we look into the grave charge of misrepresentation that Mifsud is lodging here, and find out whether the claim of taurodont teeth amongst the modern Maltese is as significant as Evans made it out to be, let’s clarify the ‘official’ position on the taurodont controversy today.

  In addition to J. D. Evans’ comprehensive 1971 survey, The Prehistoric Antiquities of the Maltese Islands, which still forms the foundation for all orthodox teaching about Malta, an important channel through which the voice of orthodox Maltese archaeology reaches the general public is David Trump’s highly regarded Archaeological Guide – most recently updated in March 2000.37 On page 91 of this updated edition Trump gives the visitor helpful information about the Hippotamus Layer and the Cervus Layer of the Ghar Dalam cave and then concludes: ‘No trace of human occupation has been found in either of these levels.’38 Interestingly, however, Trump then directs the reader to: ‘see below’.39

  What he actually says ‘below’ is framed as an attack on Mifsud’s investigations in Dossier Malta that reopened the taurodont controversy in 1997 -although Mifsud is not acknowledged by name. Trump begins his statement on page 92: ‘Two human teeth gave rise to much controversy, which has recently been reopened. For present purposes I hold to the former version, but see p. 19.’40 On page 19 we find a passage in which Trump appears to be hedging his bets, ever so slightly, on the dogma that there was no human presence in Malta before 5200 BC:

  There is very little to suggest that man reached the islands until something like 7000 years ago, and nothing secure … though there is always at least a faint possibility that material of the Old Stone Age [i.e. the Palaeolithic] may yet come to light …41

  We then turn back to page 92, where Trump continues that the two Ghar Dalam teeth:

  were of taurodont form, with a single large hollow root, found commonly in Neanderthal man. But this form is known, if rarely, in modern man too – one was extracted from the jaw of a living Maltese only a few years ago – and so does not prove the presence of Neanderthalers here. Careful chemical analysis at the British Museum (Natural History)… confirmed that these teeth were contemporary with the bones of domestic animals, more recent than the deer bones and much more recent than the fossil fauna. It was similar analysis which suggested that the hippopotamus tooth implicated in the Piltdown forgery probably came from the same site.42

  It is also worth reminding ourselves of Evans’ position on the taurodont matter as he set it out in his Prehistoric Antiquities - although this, of course, refers to the earlier episode of the controversy in which Despott had proposed that the teeth ‘could be used as evidence of the presence of man in Malta during the Middle Palaeolithic period’.43 Evans replies that the suggestion does not fit the facts:

  Dr Baldacchino has since pointed out that taurodontism occurs in teeth definitely assignable to the Neolithic period of Malta (for instance, some from the Hypogeum). The two teeth from Ghar Dalam, therefore, could quite easily belong to a later period. A few other human teeth and bones which have been found at depths of up to 6 ft (1.80 m) all appear to be of the modern type. In view of these facts, then, the two taurodontic molars can hardly be accepted as good evidence for the existence of man in the Maltese islands in pre-Neolithic times.44

  Earlier on the same page, while reporting the 1917 discovery of the Ghar Dalam teeth, Evans describes them as: ‘two very large human molars, both exhibiting the characteristic of taurodontism, or fusion of the roots’.45

  Truth and fiction (1)

  It is disturbing that, in the passage cited above, Evans wrongly equates taurodontism, a condition in which the tooth either has extremely small roots or no noticeable roots at all, and in
which the pulp cavity of the tooth is correspondingly enlarged, with an entirely different condition known as ‘fused’ roots.46 This is a mistake of some significance, Mifsud reminds us:

  For while the condition of fused roots was commonly found in Neolithic and in modern man, taurodontism was not. Hence the reason [i.e. confusion of fused roots with taurodontism] for Evans’ assertion further down the same page that taurodontism was described by Baldacchino as being common in Neolithic teeth: ‘Dr Baldacchino has since pointed out that taurodontism occurs in teeth definitely assignable to the Neolithic period for Malta (for instance, some from the Hypogeum).’47

  But is Evans’ confusion genuine? Or is it sleight of hand to persuade us that the possibly very ancient human teeth from Malta – said on the basis of their taurodontism to be Palaeolithic – are not after all diagnostic of the Palaeolithic because the same taurodontic morphology ‘occurs in teeth definitely assignable to the Neolithic period for Malta’?

  If it is not sleight of hand then it is bad scholarship. For no taurodontic teeth have ever been recovered from the Hypogeum. And although Evans might have been confused, Baldacchino himself knew very well how to distinguish taurodontism from fused roots. After studying the thousands of teeth in the Neolithic deposit from the Burmeghez burial cave he wrote:

  No trace of taurodontism was found in these specimens; the only form of degeneration which was present was that with which we are familiar in modern teeth -fusion and maldevelopment of the roots, particularly in those of the third or ‘wisdom’ molars.48