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Lubenow similarly claims that the leg bones ER 1481 (about 1.9 million years old) are "fully modern", but gives no documentation of this. Although ER 1481 is similar to modern humans and belonged to a bipedal creature, there are numerous features in which it differs from H. sapiens (McHenry and Corruccini 1976, Aiello and Dean 1990).

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The case for A. afarensis as the Laetoli trailblazer hinges on the fact that fossils of the species are known from the site and that the only available reconstruction of what this hominid's foot looked like is compatible with the morphology evident in the footprints. But in a presentation given at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists meeting in April, William E. H. Harcourt-Smith of the American Museum of Natural History and Charles E. Hilton of Western Michigan University took issue with the latter assertion.

The prints show that whoever made them had a humanlike foot arch, and the reconstructed A. afarensis foot exhibits just such an arch. So far, so good. The problem, Harcourt-Smith and Hilton say, is that the reconstruction is actually based on a patchwork of bones from 3.2-million-year-old afarensis and 1.8-million-year-old Homo habilis. And one of the bones used to determine whether the foot was in fact arched--the so-called navicular--is from H. habilis, not A. afarensis.

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But according to bipedalism expert C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University, other features of the australopithecine foot, such as a big toe that lines up with, rather than opposes, the other toes, indicate that it did have an arch. Even if it did not, Lovejoy contends, that would not mean A. afarensis was incapable of humanlike walking. "Lots of modern humans are flat-footed," he observes. "They are more prone to injury, because they lack the energy-absorptive capacities of the arch, but they walk in a perfectly normal way."

For their part, Harcourt-Smith and Hilton note that a new reconstruction of the A. afarensis foot built exclusively from A. afarensis remains is needed to confirm these preliminary findings. As for identifying the real culprit, if A. afarensis did not make the prints, that would put the poorly known A. anamensis in the running. But just as likely, speculates Harcourt-Smith, an as yet undiscovered species left the prints. That is to say, consider the world's oldest whodunit an unsolved mystery.

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By Colin Groves
When a big square package, weighing over 3.5kg, arrived in my pigeon-hole, a number of thoughts flitted across my mind. Which student hates me enough to send me a letter bomb? Will the postman sue me because of his hernia? After the package, when unwrapped, proved to contain a 914 page book, I felt like the Prince Regent on being presented by Edward Gibbon with a copy of his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire": "Another great damn thick square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?". And then that final, heart rending, cry, "Why me?".

There is a letter from the senior author, Michael Cremo, accompanying the book. "Because your work, or that of your colleagues, is discussed in my new book Forbidden Archeology, I am sending you an advance copy." Can this be conspiracy theory as applied to archaeology by someone who feels that The Truth has been suppressed by The Establishment? It can. The letterhead is "Bhaktivedanta Institute, San Diego". Can this be a representative of that other fundamentalism, the Hindu variety? It can.

Remind ourselves what fundamentalist Hindus believe. Like fundamentalist Christians and Jews, they dismiss evolution. Unlike the latter, who believe the world has existed only six to ten thousand years, fundamentalist Hindus believe it has been going for billions and billions of years - far more than geology allows, in fact. And human beings, and indeed all living creatures, have been here all along. But in the event, it is going to make little difference; an apologia will consist of a recital of long-forgotten (long-suppressed, in their view) "evidence" of humans coeval with trilobites and dinosaurs, and arguments that supposed ape/human intermediates really aren't that at all.

But this time we get nearly a thousand pages! Gish, Bowden and Lubenow, the Christian creationists, can't raise even half of this between them. The difference is that Cremo and Thompson have read much, much more of the original literature than the other creationists, and their survey is correspondingly more complete. Yet I can't really say that their understanding is much greater, for all that; their tone of argument is as perverse, they are just as biased.

The fossil and archaeological evidence for human and cultural evolution is not all of consistently high quality. In the nineteenth centure, human remains and artefacts were usually found by accident and by amateurs; they would be dug up, removed from context, and presented with a flourish to the nearest "expert". Controlled excavation was not a widely practised are; photography of a find in situ was an unusual occurrence. The finds' stratigraphy was often vague in the extreme; those re-examining their significance in later times had to rely on the fading memories of untrained workmen who had been enlisted by the finder.

This state of affairs improved as archaeology and palaeontology developed, and contextual information came to be recognised as crucial. Today, accidental discoveries are rarities; usually specimens turn up because someone has an idea where to look, given the prevailing geology and landscape, and an excavation is mounted with all kinds of specialists - geomorphologists, geochemists, taphonomists, above all photographers - riding along to ensure that everything about the site and its contents is recorded.

Cremo and Thompson seem not to understand this; they seem to want to accord equal value to all finds. One of many, many "out-of-context" human fossils which they discuss is the Foxhall jaw, a specimen of modern Homo sapiens discovered in 1855 and commonly ascribed at the time to the Late Pliocene, when (as we now believe) the human lineage was represented by just a bunch of near-apes called the australopithecines. The jaw was found by workmen, one of whom sold it to Dr. Collyer, a passing American physician, for the price of a glass of beer, and Collyer showed it to the luminaries of the day - Owen, Prestwich, Huxley, Busk - who expressed a variety of opinions, that it could or could not have come from the site and level claimed for it, and so that it could or could not be an example of "Pliocene Man". The jaw not long afterwards disappeared.

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But scientists have suppressed, ignored, or forgotten these pieces of evidence. Prejudices based on current scientific theory have acted as what Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson call a knowledge filter.

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