This is probably wrong.
Michael Cremo has evidence…
Nah, he has amateur paleontology from 18th and early 19th century with near zero documentation about the particulars of each find, and selective quoting/reporting of professional paleontology from the mid 1920s onwards.
Take his account of the Laetoli footprints. These are sets of about 70 hominin footprints found in 1976/1977 in an ash layer that dates to 3.66 million years and provide the earliest evidence of human bipedalism. According to Cremo, these are evidence
Homo sapiens existed 3.6 million years ago.
There was indeed some initial speculation/argument in the scientific literature that the footprints were homo sapiens - it would have been a HUGE deal if they were. Cremo provides lots of sources from the early to mid 1980s to back this up, even some quotes from the early 1990s.
Yet, he completely fails to report that from the late 1970s/early 1980s onwards, the strong majority opinion was that the tracks were made by
Australopithecus afarensis or potentially an undiscovered early
Homo species
.
Worse still, he also fails to report the analyses done on the biomechanics of the gait and stride length in the late 1980s which ruled out modern
Homo sapiens as having made the trackways. Unless whoever made them was doing some kind of weird bent at the knee duck walk and had undergone some mild toe mutilation, the tracks don't resemble what a modern human would have left behind
.
He also omits the fact that
Australopithecus afarensis fossils were discovered in the same area in the same 3.66 million year ash layer.
When you actually take time out to read the literature, Cremo's evidence deflates like an underdone souffle. But, when he wrote the book in the early 1990s, very few people had access to scientific journals, and fewer still had the means to cross check his sources.
