Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
Page 54
Another less ambiguous and more annoying example of prestidigitation that Mifsud draws attention to concerns Evans’ misrepresentation of the position of the British archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson on the subject of the Palaeolithic in Malta with specific reference to the two taurodont molars that had been discovered in Ghar Dalam in 1917. Here, writing in 1925, is what Caton-Thompson actually said:
The discovery of possible Palaeolithic man appeared to me of considerable importance to prehistory … Apart from the discovery in the red earth of the two taurodont teeth, in circumstances incapable of satisfactory interpretation, there are but two other records in the island of possible relics of Palaeolithic man.49
In this passage there can be no doubt that Caton-Thompson is treating the taurodont teeth – along with the two ‘other records’ she mentions – as ‘possible relics of Palaeolithic man’. Moreover, when she says that they were found in ‘circumstances incapable of satisfactory interpretation’ she means that they cannot be satisfactorily interpreted within a Neolithic framework.50
But this is not what Evans has her saying in his Prehistoric Antiquities. It’s there, discussing the 1917 taurodonts on page 19, where he argues that ‘the teeth from Ghar Dalam could … quite easily belong to a later period …’ He then reinforces this point with a footnote in which the reader is informed: ‘Miss Caton-Thompson remarks that that the discovery of the molars was made “in circumstances incapable of satisfactory interpretation”.’
Thus, by smoke and mirrors, we are led to believe that the taurodonts were not found in a good Palaeolithic context, whereas Caton-Thompson herself had originally stated almost the opposite. As Mifsud puts it:
Evans … misinterpreted Caton-Thompson when he extracted one phrase of hers out of its context and quoted it in another; he thus created the impression the validity of the molars was being questioned by her as archaeological evidence, whereas the contrary is correct … Evans’ inaccuracies were perpetuated through repetition by later authors … who have accepted Evans on the weight of his authority … including anatomists, archaeologists, medical historians, and other historians, until errors crystallized into accepted facts.51
Truth and fiction (2)
But Mifsud has much bigger game in his sights than scholars misrepresenting one another. What he’s really after lies in the interpretation that Trump and other archaeologists have subsequently put on the ‘careful chemical analysis’ undertaken at the Museum of Natural History in London. This is the analysis which supposedly confirms that the Ghar Dalam taurodont teeth were not contemporary with the Cervus (Deer) Layer in which they had been found but, on the contrary, were ‘more recent than the deer bones’. Such an interpretation, Mifsud demonstrates, though honestly held, is quite unjustified. Because, although they have only ever been published in a highly abridged form – which does lend itself strongly to the erroneous interpretation innocently put on them by others – the Natural History Museum tests did not confirm the Ghar Dhalam teeth to be ‘more recent’ than the Cervus Layer of deer bones washed into the cave in a cataclysmic flood of the late Palaeolithic between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago. On the contrary, as we shall see, the results of the tests are highly ambiguous. Nevertheless, to the extent that any interpretation can legitimately be put on them at all, these results suggest much more strongly that the human teeth are contemporary with the Cervus Layer – and thus in every sense part of the ancient Ice Age deposit.
We will look into this in more detail in a moment. Meanwhile, although this error has very large ramifications for our views about when humans first settled in Malta, I want to make it absolutely clear here, in the plainest possible language, that David Trump is not to blame for it in any way. As he told us when Sharif interviewed him in October 2001 he himself is not a chemist and he had therefore relied on the proper authority for the opinion he had expressed in the most recent edition of his Archaeological Guide. That authority had been none other than the Natural History Museum’s Kenneth Oakley, celebrated in the 1950s for his uncovering of the Piltdown Man hoax, and the top scientist in his field at the time:
Sharif: First of all, I’d like to get your general opinion on the work of Anton Mifsud and colleagues who, particularly in the book Dossier Malta, have alleged that the orthodox view of Neolithic being the earliest habitation of Malta is firstly wrong and secondly based on gerrymandered evidence. What’s your general opinion about that?
Trump: That on a matter such as this I trust Dr Kenneth Oakley and his followers far more than I trust Dr Anton Mifsud.
Sharif: OK, so by referring to Oakley you’re specifically referring to the same chemical tests carried out at the Natural History Museum in London that Mifsud reported upon at length in Dossier Malta?
Trump: Yes.
Sharif: Have you read Dossier Malta? Trump: Yes.
Sharif: And so you’re aware of all the specific allegations and claims?
Trump: Yes.
Sharif: And you don’t accept Mifsud’s evidence and allegations particularly
regarding the chemical tests.
Trump: Frankly, no. I’m not a chemist, I can’t give an expert opinion on the details of this. But I certainly trust Dr Kenneth Oakley much further than I trust Dr Anton Mifsud in his arguments.
Sharif: I’d also like to ask you, do you accept any of the claims in Dossier Malta about humans being there before the Neolithic? Is any of that likely or plausible?
Trump: The latest evidence suggests that it would have been much easier than we had allowed for Palaeolithic humans to have reached Malta. But, and it’s a very big but, we have no evidence whatsoever that they actually did. I’m quite prepared to believe it’s possible. If evidence were advanced I would give it all consideration. I would certainly not rule it out of court out of hand. To my mind, no reliable evidence has yet been advanced …
Sharif: To come back to the tests done at the Natural History Museum: In your own Archaeological Guide - there’s an updated edition from March 2000 – you refer to them as a ‘careful chemical analysis’ and state that this analysis confirms that the Ghar Dalam taurodont teeth were not contemporary with the Cervus Layer.
Trump: These are the Oakley analyses.
Sharif: Yes. Can I ask, what was your source for that view, that the human teeth and the deer samples are not contemporary?
Trump: Yes, well the stratigraphic evidence such as it was – there was a certain amount of disturbance there – that there were three layers of interest in the cave. The lower one with your pigmy hippopotamus, elephant, etc. – no evidence whatsoever of human activity. Layer two, with the deer bones – still no confirmed human activity there. And then the upper level, which was largely mixed, with everything from Neolithic down to modern all jumbled up.
Sharif: Sure, I understand that. My question is specifically what was the academic source …
Trump: … for the analyses? Now, if I remember rightly, the first test done suggested that the teeth could have been contemporary with the deer bones at least – not with anything earlier. But the – I’m speaking from memory here …
Sharif: Sure, I accept that.
Trump: … further tests were done which, if not categorically disproving, strongly suggested that the teeth belonged with that uppermost level -could be as early as Neolithic, but not as early as the deer bones.
Sharif: OK, now, as far as I know, there are only two places that give these results. One is a review – a summary – in the 1964 Museum Scientific Report, which quotes a letter from Oakley, that’s a 1964 source – is it that which you used to actually know what the results were?
Trump: No, it was personal communication from Kenneth Oakley himself.
Sharif: Oh, so did he give you a full list of the chemical results or just a summary?
Trump: No, he just discussed them in general terms.
Remember the ‘Missing Link’?
There will always be some archaeologists who behave as though they are omniscient about
prehistory. But though it has been said that Piltdown Man could never happen again, the amazing success and longevity of this extraordinary hoax – which began in 1912 and was not exposed until 1953 – is a reminder that when things do go wrong in the study of any area of the past they can go very wrong indeed. In the Piltdown case a false and (with hindsight) obviously absurd idea about the sequence of human evolution was sustained for forty years because it fitted in with the deep-seated prejudices and preconceptions of the British Empire (the Piltdown skull – claimed to be that of the ‘missing link’ between apes and men – was, naturally, British!). For the entire period until it was unmasked this counterfeited skull enjoyed all the prestige of a full scientific classification (Eoanthropus dawsoni – literally ‘Dawn Man, found by Dawson’) and pride of place in a display case in the Natural History Museum in London. So Piltdown was an embarrassing episode. And although, to their credit, the fraud that had taken in scientists for so long was also exposed by scientists, the net effect was to shake the public’s confidence in the infallibility of science and of scientific judgement.
Here are the rudiments of the story, which is little spoken of today:
Fossilized fragments of cranium and jawbone were found [in 1912] by Charles Dawson in a gravel formation at Barkham Manor, on Piltdown Common, near Lewes, England. Together with these were fossil remains of extinct animals, which suggested an early Pleistocene age for the site … In 1953 and 1954, as an outcome of later discoveries of fossil man and intensive re-examination, the remains were shown to be skilfully disguised fragments of a quite modern human cranium and an ape (orang-utan) jaw fraudulently introduced into the shallow gravels … The animal bones were found to be genuine remains of extinct species, but they were not of British provenance … The eventual exposure of the fraud clarified the sequence of human evolution by removing the greatest anomaly in the fossil record. At the same time, a series of valuable new tests were developed for palaeontological study.52
And here are the connections with Ghar Dalam:
Amongst the remains of extinct animal species that the hoaxer had introduced into the Piltdown gravel in order to give authentic Pleistocene ‘context’ to the skull was a hippopotamus tooth. It is now thought that this tooth had come from Ghar Dalam.53
The same ‘valuable new tests’ which proved that the different fragments of bone assembled in the Piltdown skull were not contemporaneous with one another or with the animal remains introduced into the gravel were also run on the Ghar Dalam taurodont teeth in 1952 [the ‘careful chemical analysis’ referred to earlier by Trump] and suggested very strongly that they were contemporary with the deer remains in the cave’s Cervus Layer.54
Or, to put it another way, the very tests that were accurate enough to prove Piltdown Man young and a fraud indicated that the Ghar Dalam taurodonts must be old and genuine.
Beyond truth and fiction
But if the Ghar Dalam taurodonts are genuine then why aren’t we told this in Evans’ Prehistoric Antiquities, the canonical text of Maltese archaeology that was published almost twenty years after the results of the 1952 tests were known? Or was Evans correct in 1971 when he promulgated the dogma that ‘the two taurodontic molars can hardly be accepted as good evidence for the existence of man in the Maltese islands in pre-Neolithic times’?55
Anton Mifsud’s approach to this investigation was to set aside all preconceptions and prejudices – both his own and those of the archaeologists – about whether or not Malta could have been inhabited by humans in pre-Neolithic times. He took the view, consistent with his personal philosophy, that all that should matter, and be weighed up, were empirically verifiable facts. In the case of the Ghar Dalam taurodonts the ‘best’ facts (i.e., those that most clearly speak for themselves without requiring interpretation) fall into two categories, both of which are well understood by archaeologists.
On the one hand there is the superb stratigraphy of the site – the distinct layers of deposits laid down one on top of the other at different times. Archaeologists all over the world routinely derive dates and sequences of dates from stratigraphy such as this. And, indeed stratigraphically, the human remains at Ghar Dalam lie contemporaneously with Pleistocene red deer and other extinct fauna in the deer layer’.56
Secure stratigraphy on its own should have been enough to confirm the presence of Palaeolithic man on Malta. From the beginning, however, J. D. Evans would not accept the obvious implications, raising the objection that the teeth must be intrusive. So the question now, as Mifsud explains, is not whether the teeth were really found in the Deer Layer – because they certainly were -but whether they were there as a result of ‘an intrusive later burial by Neolithic humans, or else an actual deposit of the remains of Palaeolithic humans together with the remains of the deer layer fauna during the late Pleistocene’.57 And in order to answer that question stratigraphy on its own, no matter how good, is not enough. What’s needed is the record of the scientific tests that were done on the Ghar Dalam teeth in 1952 at the Natural History Museum in London.
Mifsud travelled to London and, after some detective work, managed to find the original records in the vaults of the Natural History Museum. To make sense of them we first need to know more about the so-called FUN (Flourine, Uranium, Nitrogen) tests that the Museum conducted on the Ghar Dalam teeth in 1952.
Oakley’s FUN
Although some of them had a long prior history, the FUN tests had been modified and developed by the British palaeontologist Kenneth Page Oakley of the Natural History Museum, apparently with the specific intention of confirming or denying the antiquity of the Piltdown skull.58 But it is a little-known fact, now clarified by Anton Mifsud’s research, that these tests were first applied in 1952 to human and animal remains from Ghar Dalam (and also, as we shall see, from the Hypogeum in Malta) – i.e., a year before the same tests were used with such devastating effect on the Piltdown skull in 1953. Mifsud notes that Oakley ‘was in Malta on several occasions, on holiday, and as the guest of (the Maltese palaeontologist and geologist) George Zammit Maempel, with whom he shared common scientific interests’.59
In assessing the Piltdown skull, Oakley began by measuring the concentrations of fluorine. The surprise, notes Mifsud, was that:
The skull and the jaw gave readings that set them wide apart in time by several tens of millennia. The other scientific tests, including Nitrogen [and] Uranium Oxide … confirmed the hoax … Pursuing the matter further Oakley then sought the origins of the associated remains of the Piltdown assembly. The hippopotamus molar gave a low fluorine reading which immediately suggested its source from a Mediterranean limestone cave, such as a Maltese one, typically Ghar Dalam. Tests on Ghar Dalam hippo molars confirmed the suspicion.
Malta thus became involved and this led to the performance of the same repertoire of chemical tests on the other finds at Ghar Dalam … These chemical tests had by this time established themselves as the most reliable indices for the purposes of relative dating of archaeological specimens elevated from the same horizon …60
So the tests that were conducted on the Ghar Dhalam teeth and other material from the Deer Layer were the best and most appropriate tools available in the 1950s for settling what is indeed ‘the basic question’ of the taurodont controversy: were the human teeth deposited in the Deer Layer at the same time as the rest of the layer was laid down, i.e., between 18,000 and 10,000 years ago, or were they introduced into it later than 7200 years ago in the form of a burial by the Neolithic people responsible for the Cultural Layer?
Here are the bare minimum of details about the tests necessary to understand the results:
Flourine and uranium
These two tests work because after death and excarnation the bones and teeth of animals and humans deposited together in the same environment – as well as such substances as deer antler – absorb fluorine and uranium from their surroundings. From environment to environment the supply of fluorine and uranium changes – the less there is, the
less the bones, teeth and antlers can absorb, and vice versa – but within any given context the rate of absorption of the available local fluorine and/or uranium will be the same for any bones, teeth and antlers deposited there. Thus ‘the estimation of fluorine confirms or refutes contemporaneity of bones and teeth in the same horizon’.61
Example: if human teeth and deer bones and/or antlers are excavated from the same stratum (‘horizon’ in archaeology-speak), and if the teeth prove on testing to contain much lower levels of fluorine or much lower levels of uranium (or much lower levels of both) than the deer remains, then the implication would be that the teeth must be much younger than the deer remains and are thus intrusive to the horizon. If, however, the environment is one known for its particularly low levels of natural fluorine, such as limestone cave-systems like Ghar Dalam, then the fluorine test obviously becomes less useful the lower the local level of fluorine is – and of no use at all once that level reaches zero. But with this proviso, and with the passage of time:
Both elements accumulate in greater amounts. When bones are buried in different levels at the same location, older bones positioned in lower levels show greater amounts of fluorine and uranium than do those positioned above them. The accumulation of both elements is dependent on time and water-action present at the location. In view of the low concentrations involved, fluorine estimation may not be ideal for limestone environments, but once measurable amounts are present conditions are more suitable than if the percolating water is saturated with the mineral.