Ancient Traces

by Michael Baigent

  Creatures of the New World

  Pterodactyl reports are not restricted to the isolated jungle swamp ‘islands’ of Africa. They occur elsewhere, in an area which would seem one of the most explored areas of the world, North America.

  On 26 April 1890 the Tombstone Epitaph (one of the most delightfully named newspapers in the world) ran a story, replete with the usual exaggerations, that, several days earlier, two riders travelling through the Huachuca desert south of Tombstone, about fifteen miles north of the Mexican border, came across a huge flying monster. It was reported to have been over ninety feet long with wings 160 feet across: wings which were bat-like, leathery and devoid of feathers. Its head was eight feet long with a jaw bearing a row of sharp strong teeth. The two riders were said to have shot and killed it.32

  In 1969 a magazine repeated this story with all the exaggeration of the original and it was seen by a then elderly man who had, as a child, personally known the two original witnesses and the original story. He decided to set the record straight and related a sober and credible account of the incident. He explained that the two riders were well known and respected local ranchers. They had indeed come across a very strange creature that day, something totally unknown to them with large leathery wings. These were not the vast size reported by the newspaper; rather, the wingspan was estimated as between twenty and thirty feet; still huge, of course. They had shot at it with their rifles but failed to kill it; twice it managed to take to the air before plunging down again. They left it, wounded, still struggling in its attempts to fly off.33

  Much more recently in Texas, on 24 February 1976, three schoolteachers were motoring down a country road near the Mexican border when a great shadow fell across them. They saw, flying close above them, a huge creature with very large wings of tight-stretched skin over long fine bones; wings rather like those of a bat. Except that these wings were fifteen to twenty feet across. They had never seen or heard of anything remotely like this creature before. Subsequently they spent some time rummaging through reference books looking for anything, alive or dead, which might explain this bird – if that was what it was.

  They finally found a creature which appeared identical: a pteranodon – a very large-beaked pterosaur with wings reaching thirty feet across. Unfortunately, this had been extinct since the time of the dinosaurs, almost 65 million years ago.34

  Strangely, several days earlier, a similar flying creature – perhaps the same one – had been seen by two other witnesses also near to the Mexican border.

  Such creatures may even have flown further north. On the morning of 8 August 1981, a couple were driving across Tuscarora Mountain in Pennsylvania. Ahead two large bat-like creatures, evidently surprised by the sudden appearance of the car, were running towards them, skin-covered wings outstretched, in an attempt to take off. Their wings spanned the width of the road: at least fifteen feet. They took to the air and for the next fifteen minutes the couple watched them gradually soar into the distance. They later identified them as ‘prehistoric birds’ like pterosaurs.35

  The world of orthodox science cannot explain these sightings. It is forced to either ignore them or dismiss them as mistaken, fantasy or fraud. But science can provide proof that identical creatures once existed and in the same area. Between 1971 and 1975 the fossil remnants of three pterosaurs were excavated at a site in western Texas. These were dated from the last years of the dinosaur period. While the skeletons were not entirely complete, sufficient bones were found to be able to estimate their wingspan at around fifty feet.36

  Not only are these the biggest such flying creatures ever found, but they are also the most recent pterosaurs ever found dating from the very end of the dinosaur period. According to the fossil record, this species was the very last in existence. Some day, perhaps, we may unearth some more recent fossils of this type – or perhaps some remains.

  We have seen how isolated yet stable areas can harbour large unknown animals, animals long thought extinct. The sea, already demonstrating some of its mysteries with the coelacanth and Megamouth shark, may yet reveal the existence of more unknown creatures, a megalodon perhaps or a ‘Caddy’. The jungles of central Africa apparently hold one or more semi-aquatic monsters which may represent relict dinosaurs. Could Texas be such an area?

  It has long been a deeply held claim that everything is biggest in Texas. Could these stories represent a Texan exaggeration of some close encounter of the large bat kind? Could it really be possible that such unknown creatures could find a refuge in North America where the skies seem forever filled with aeroplanes and helicopters? Are there any isolated and remote areas like those of Central Africa near Texas, where some large, as yet unrecognized creature might live? In fact there is one.

  Northern Mexico is dominated by the largely unexplored Sierra Madre mountain range which runs like a bony spine up the country from Oaxaca to the United States border. This region is a perfect place for unknown creatures still to survive, hidden away from human contact. Cryptozoologist Dr Karl Shuker suggests that it is here that they might be sought.

  Dr Shuker notes a further intriguing possibility: in 1968, an archaeologist found a curious carved relief at the ruined Mayan city of El Tajin which sits in the south-eastern foothills of the Sierras. This carving depicted a ‘serpent-bird’ which the archaeologist argued was not some fabulous legendary beast but an accurate depiction of some flying creature well known to the ancient Mayans. This ‘serpent-bird’ is a very good likeness of a pterosaur.37 Could this archaeologist be correct? If so, it indicates that such a creature was alive in historical times, perhaps as late as the final collapse of the Mayan civilization 1,000 years ago.

  Dr Shuker comments:

  Cryptozoology is full of curious coincidences, but few are more curious… than the undeniable fact that modern-day reports of giant pterosaurian look-alikes just so happen to emanate from the very same region that was once home to a bona fide creature of this type.38

  From before the Dinosaurs

  What are the chances of a creature found in fossil strata 64 million years old being alive today? Rather slim, one would think. What of a creature twice that age? Would the chances be twice as slim? The survival of the coelacanth shows how foolish such appeals to reason are in this subject. It would seem possible that any earlier animal, under the right conditions, might have a chance of surviving. It could be objected that the sea is a far more stable environment than anything to be found on land. And this seems a reasonable argument. But the truth is far stranger than this.

  As an example, there is one animal whose survival gives all zoologists, however sceptical they might be, pause for thought: the tuatara.

  The tuatara is a very primitive reptile, superficially resembling a lizard, with three eyes – the third only partly functional. It grows about two feet in length and lives a mostly isolated nocturnal life. Fossil remains of its type have been dated to as far back as over 200 million years ago and since that time the animals have changed very little. In every part of the world except the South Pacific, the fossil record ceases with that of the dinosaurs. If it were not for the South Pacific remnants, it would have been believed that all the tuataras vanished in the same cataclysm which took away the dinosaurs. But the tuatara saw the dinosaurs come and go; it may well do the same with humans.

  It still lives today on a few, very small, very remote islands near to the coast of New Zealand. A second species lives on a ten-acre islet in the Cook Islands about 2,000 miles away. Of all the world, how did these small islands, far apart from each other and thousands of miles away from the major continents, end up with the only living tuataras?

  What would be the chances of science predicting this situation? It is fair to say that, however much reason was stretched to its limits, such a survival in these so isolated environments could never have been considered even remotely possible.

  We can only conclude that, with nature, anything is possible. And to forget that simple truth is to live in a fa
ntasy world. The approach of the cryptozoologists must be correct: it is more, rather than less, likely that large unknown species still exist, still continue to elude our gaze, in the sea, on the land or in the air.

  This scientific adventure is set to continue.

  5

  The Mysteries of Human Evolution

  It was the evening of 30 November 1974. In Ethiopia’s Afar Desert, at Hadar, American anthropologist Donald Johanson was celebrating. He had, late that morning, found a fossilized fragment of a potentially human skull which, together with other bones, represented about 40 per cent of an ancient female skeleton. These were, he considered, the earliest such remains of humans or human-like creatures ever found.

  Johanson was excited: he had been searching in this area for two seasons, impelled by the certain hunch that he would find something of importance. And that day, as he wrote later, he had awakened feeling lucky.

  -As the night rapidly fell, Johanson sat with a beer in his hand and a tape recorder at his side belting at full volume into the night. He was playing a much loved recording: the Beatles’ ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. The song played time after time as Johanson and his colleagues drank their beer and talked excitedly of the implications of their find. Johanson wrote later of that exuberant and high-spirited night, ‘At some point during that unforgettable evening – I no longer remember exactly when – the new fossil picked up the name of Lucy…’1

  And it is as Lucy that she has been known ever since; Lucy, who died over 3.5 million years ago, in or beside what was once a large lake.

  The Ascent of Mankind: Rounding Up the Usual Suspects

  Lucy wasn’t human, but neither, argued Johanson forcefully, was she an ape. Nevertheless, she was no more than three and a half feet high, she walked upright but her hands reached to her knees, and her shoulders, ribs and waist bones, together with evidence of strong muscles, seemed better adapted for tree climbing. Lucy was aged about thirty years but already her vertebrae held traces of the onset of arthritis or a similar disease. She had died rapidly, perhaps by drowning.

  Unfortunately, the front of her skull was never found and so the exact size of her brain could not be determined. But from the fragments it was estimated to be only a little larger than a chimpanzee’s: around 230 to 400 cubic centimetres (14.0 to 24.4 cubic inches).

  Lucy was placed in a group of creatures seeming to share elements of both apes and humans. They had been first discovered in South Africa in 1925 and were named ‘southern apes’, or in Latin, Australopithecus – (austral means ‘southern’, pithecus ‘ape’). It is now thought that at least six species of this half-way human or half-way ape creature existed, of which Lucy, at the time, was the oldest known.

  There is no evidence that any of this group learned to make tools. Yet they seem to have survived until around 1 million years ago when they were certainly in contact with early man who, at the time, was skilfully constructing a variety of stone implements.

  This raises the unwelcome question of whether this primitive creature can truly be seen as an ancestor of humankind, as many (but not all) modern scientists propose; and as most journalists writing on the subject seem to accept with uncritical obsequiousness. The most vocal supporter of this idea – that Lucy and her clan are ancestral to humans – is Johanson himself who has proved adept at gaining scientific and media acceptance for his ideas.

  African discoveries of fossil hominids considered ancestral to humans.

  The Arguments: Lucy as Ancestral or Parallel

  The human species has been allocated the genus Homo. Modern man – anatomically speaking – is called Homo sapiens (which includes such ‘cavemen’ as Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon). Our immediate ancestral species is considered to be a more primitive type of human called Homo erectus whose remains are found spread over wide parts of the world, from Africa and Europe to China.2

  But here fierce arguments amongst experts begin: quite a number of apparently older, apparently more primitive types of early man-ape exist but they do so in something of an archaeological limbo. So few fossils have been found that all the theories are based upon extremely tenuous evidence.

  Donald Johanson argues that Lucy’s people were ancestral to true humans. He believes, in other words, that the genus Homo, modern man, over time developed from ape-like creatures like Lucy.

  His assertion is fiercely contested by a member of the most famous dynasty of experts on early humanity, Richard Leakey, whose base has always been the National Museum of Kenya, Nairobi. His father Louis and his mother Mary were both pioneers in the field, and his wife Maeve also has great expertise and experience. She continues to excavate and publish on the subject.

  Richard and Maeve Leakey are cautious; they do not accept that Lucy and her type are the direct ancestors of modern mankind as Johanson argues. The Leakeys, while accepting a family tree of the various Australopithecus species so far discovered, will not commit themselves to connecting the line of Homo development to any of them.3 Although they do accept that a connection should probably be made somewhere, they prefer to await further information. They have considerable support for this position amongst other scientists.

  Richard Leakey avoids direct confrontation on this issue, contenting himself with pointing out what seems conclusive evidence that Lucy and the other Australopithecus remains found are far more like apes than humans.4 He considers that humans derived from some much earlier creature, originating perhaps 7.5 million years ago, whose fossil remains have not yet been found.5 He concludes that humanity has a far older history than supposed by those such as Johanson. Leakey’s father, Louis, originally considered that the origins of mankind might reach back to over 40 million years ago;6 though in the modern scientific world this is no longer considered a tenable hypothesis.

  Clearly the fossil record, as it presently stands, is not going to clarify matters regarding human evolution. To do so we would need to find a great many more fossils including some substantially complete finds. Yet already over sixty years have passed since the Leakeys first began work at Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, during which time an extensive and detailed search has been made in likely geological strata. If such evidence existed, surely some trace of it would have been found?

  Perhaps the experts have been looking in the wrong place? Or failing to identify correctly the fossils which have been found? Or both?

  To investigate these possibilities we need to approach matters from another angle: firstly, we need to ask what kind of environment could have given rise to the oddities of the modern human body and where in Africa, or elsewhere, that environment might be found.

  The Orthodox Position: The Savanna Theory

  Around 25 or 30 million years ago huge forests covered the greater part of the earth’s land masses. Within these forests primates – apes and monkeys – evolved from a small ground-dwelling, four-legged creature about the size of a squirrel.

  Twenty million years ago we find evidence of the widespread existence of many types of apes living in the trees. But about 15 million years ago the forests began gradually to vanish. Ten million years ago apes still ruled the remaining forests but then, shortly after that time, for some mysterious reason, virtually all the ape fossils disappear. Why this should be is an unsolved mystery.

  From around 8 million years ago until the era of Lucy, some 4.5 million years later, is a ‘Dark Age’ for primate fossils. Until recently, excavations, while revealing tens of thousands of other fossilized animals within this period, had revealed only an arm bone, a tooth and a fragment of jaw containing another tooth. Encouragingly, from the mid 1990s following research at new sites, the situation has improved marginally.

  In 1995 Maeve Leakey and her colleagues established a new species of very early Australopithecus with a number of fossils including almost complete jaws, part of a tibia and pieces of skull and teeth, which they had excavated near Allia Bay, eastern Lake Turkana. These have been dated to just over 3.9 million years ago.7 An even
earlier find in Ethiopia of fossil teeth, part of a lower jaw, skull and arm fragments by Dr Tim White and his team was placed into another supposedly ancestral genus and species in 1995. It was dated to around 4.4 million years ago.8

  Despite the excitement which attended these finds, it is not much to show for a period of almost 4 million years. Furthermore there is no explanation of any worth which might account for this lack of evidence.

  According to the orthodox ‘Savanna’ thesis, it was during this ‘Dark Age’, following changing climatic conditions, that the forests gradually became so reduced in size that the increasing population of primates within them found themselves under pressure from limits on the available resources of food. In time this pressure grew so great that one primate group decided to seek beyond the forests for their food. They moved out into the great grassy plains of Africa – the savanna.

  It was upon this vast grassland, continues the theory, that the characteristics we now know as human were advantageous. So, by natural selection, those creatures showing them gained ground over those which did not. The human traits evolved: man stood up, walked on two feet in order to see over the tall grass, grew his brain and lost his covering of thick fur.

  This theory, of course, leaves much unexplained. None of the most prominent physical characteristics of humans would be an obvious advantage in this new environment: a huge grassed plain filled with fierce and fast predators.