27 Letter-like shapes in marble
Letter-like shapes found inside a block of marble
In November 1829, workers at the Henderson Quarry near Norristown, 17 km (12 miles) northwest of Philadelphia (Pennsylvania, USA), cut a block of marble found at a depth of 18-21 m (60-70 feet) and estimated to be around eight million years old. While sawing through the block, the workmen spotted a rectangular indentation, about 38 mm (1½ inches) wide by 16 mm (⅝ inch) high, with two raised characters inside it, one of which was said to resemble the Greek letters pi and iota (ΠΙ) (some accounts reverse the letters and make the IU).
It is difficult to know what this is meant to demonstrate. Does the discovery mean that someone was writing using the Greek alphabet (or, if we reverse the figures, the modern Latin alphabet) eight million years ago? If so, how did the ‘letters’ come to be encased inside a block of marble? Whilst Greek inscriptions may easily be made on the surface of a marble block, it is impossible to inscribe inside marble, which is what this discovery would demand if we are to accept it as part of a writing system. This phenomenon is known as a simulacrum: something in nature that happens to resemble something else with meaning to the observer.
28 Chalk ball near Laon, France
The chalk ball found near Laon
Maximilien Melleville, the Vice President of the Société Academique de Laon (France) and author of Dictionnaire historique du département de l’Aisne (1857), reported the discovery of a chalk ball from an early Eocene lignite bed and a translation of his report appeared in The Geologist of April 1862. The conventional date for these beds is 45 to 55 million years old. He was in no doubt that the ball was genuine, as it had been stained a black colour by contact with the lignite, apart from a small circle at the top of the object, where it had protruded through into a shyly deposit above, which retained the pale yellow of natural chalk.
This discovery seems perfectly genuine, but it is unclear why anyone believed that the ball must have been the product of human manufacture. Moreover, the published photograph does not give any confidence in Melville’s description, showing instead a roughly spherical object with unevenly stained surfaces. Melville provided no evidence for the object having been carved, but gave the game away in his quoted statement that “as extraordinary as it might seem to those attached to standard evolutionary views, the evidence associated in this find suggest that if humans made the ball, they must have been in France 45 - 55 million years ago.” Melville would appear from this to have been an early opponent of Darwin’s then new theory of evolution by natural selection (On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859).