17 A ‘carved’ shell from Red Crag, England
The Red Crag ‘face’
In 1881, the geologist Henry Stopes (father of the feminist and pioneer of birth control, Marie Stopes) described a curious shell, with a crude but recognisable human face on its surface. It had been found in the well known Late Pliocene shell-bearing deposits at Red Crag, Suffolk. This has been taken to be evidence for very early humans in England (Late Pliocene deposits date from between 2.1 and 1 million years ago, according to the conventional geological chronology).
The face resembles those carved into pumpkins at Hallowe’en by American children. It is a simulacrum, a natural object that nevertheless bears a resemblance – albeit slight – to a human face. A cursory glance at a photograph of the object reveals that there is no trace of deliberate carving and the overall impression is that it belongs to the same class of artefact as the ‘Face’ on Mars.
18 A modern human skull found at Castenedolo, Italy
The Castenedolo skull
In the late summer of 1860, Professor Giuseppe Ragazzoni (1824-1898), a prominent geologist from the Istituto Techniche di Brescia, was collecting fossil shells from Pliocene deposits at the base of a low hill called Colle di Vento at Castenedolo, about 10 km southeast of Brescia. There, he found an anatomically modern human skull, supposedly in a formation dating from the Astian stage of the Middle Pliocene, about three to four million years old. It had coral cemented onto it with blue clay. Nearby, he found bones belonging to the thorax and limbs.
Like so many of these nineteenth-century discoveries, the exact circumstances of the find are unclear; the most likely explanation is that the skull belonged to a relatively recent (and probably post-glacial) burial cut through this deposit. The archaeological applications of stratigraphy were not understood at this time, so a geologist working on Pliocene deposits would naturally assume that all bones and fossils from this stratum were contemporary with its formation. Although the anatomist Giuseppe Sergi (1841-1936) visited the site in 1883 and was unable to identify a grave cut, a skeleton was found at the site in 1889, when Sergi was able to confirm that it did indeed lie in a grave. A radiocarbon date obtained in 1969 confirmed the recent date of the skull; the presence of a second skeleton in a grave makes it likely that Ragazzoni had unknowingly stumbled upon an ancient cemetery. There is a discussion of the find on the TalkOrigins website.