Sharif: Do you mind me asking, what’s the nature of the Green Book? Are these things filed as attached pages or they on separate pages that are easily removed.
Humphrey: It’s a ring-binder.
Sharif: Would a page have to be ripped in order to be removed?
Humphrey: No, it could probably be opened, but it would be a hassle, because you’d have to pull out half the pages in the book – M being in the middle of the alphabet, because they’re filed by country.
Sharif: Because, you know, the basis of our whole story here is this idea that something is going wrong with the preservation of records relating to Malta. And that’s why, I mean, I understand it would be much better to go and see these results in a published … in an academic periodical with comments about them, but they never made it that far except in very abridged and misleading form in a 1964 Scientific Report of the National Museum of Malta.
Humphrey: The reason they might not have been published is because they were considered suspect.
Sharif: Fine, that’s what someone would say who’s not directly involved. But the real story is why and how these exact same test results were allowed to be used from the beginning to support a Neolithic date. Because in 1968 and earlier, these were valid dating techniques and what they suggested on balance was that the human teeth from Ghar Dalam were not Neolithic but Palaeolithic.
Humphrey: It was the best that they had then …
Sharif: Yes. So it’s really a question of representation, rather than truth. It is a question of what would happen if evidence was ignored – and it has been ignored in this case. It’s almost not the point of the argument to use this as proof that orthodox opinion is wrong, as much as it is to show that certain personalities responsible for forming orthodox opinion about Maltese prehistory did not give proper consideration to evidence that might have contradicted their own position.
Sharif asked Dr Humphrey whether she herself did not feel it would be interesting to follow up the ‘anomalous’ uranium oxide reading of 13 parts per million for Despott’s molar (Ma.2) – a reading, as we’ve seen, that is indicative of Palaeolithic antiquity for this tooth.
Humphrey: My interpretation – now, don’t forget these techniques went out of use before I was born, I didn’t even learn them at university because they were obsolete. But my interpretation of them now, as a non-expert, is that they’re inconclusive, that they’re ambiguous. Because, for example, for Ma.2 there is that seemingly very high uranium result that would suggest an early date. But you’ve also got a very high nitrogen result [the contested figure of 1.85 per cent] that would suggest a recent date … Erm … so to me that would be unsatisfactory. I would consider that inconclusive.
Sharif: OK, it’s not my position to agree or disagree. But it is your position to stand up, not for what makes good TV and what doesn’t, but for what’s scientifically valid. So, I just wish the Green Book page was there …
Humphrey: So do I …
Sharif: To end it all…
Humphrey: Well, it wouldn’t …
Sharif: No it wouldn’t – what would end it would be to carbon-date the contested tooth.
Humphrey: Yeah, I think that’s the only way you’d get any truth out of this.
Unfortunately, however, the Maltese authorities remain resolutely opposed to any carbon-dating of Despott’s molar and have recently been reluctant even to grant access to it.
Limbo
Since David Trump had in good faith regarded the ‘careful chemical tests’ on Despott’s molar carried out in the 1950s at the Natural History Museum as reliable, we thought it would be interesting for him to hear Louise Humphrey’s view of the tests as ‘inconclusive’ and ‘ambiguous’.
Sharif: I just want to ask one more question about these chemical test results. Now, the problem I have with it is, I’ve interviewed Dr Louise Humphrey at the Museum …
Trump: The Natural History Museum in South Kensington?
Sharif: Yes, exactly. Now, she’s seen all the results in the Green Book, but only in Mifsud’s book, which is today the only published record of these results in the whole world because, for some reason, the Museum don’t know why, but they’ve lost the one specific page in the Green Book which has the human chemical test results for the Ghar Dhalam teeth.
Trump: That is a pity. Of course the people who are arguing against it will probably suggest this was all part of the conspiracy.
Sharif: Yes, that’s basically what will happen.
Trump: These glorious conspiracy theories!
Sharif: I’m in no position to claim there’s dishonesty or whatever. It’s not really my interest. My interest is that in 2000, in your book, you described these as careful chemical analyses which effectively proved that the teeth were more recent than the deer bones. Now, Dr Louise Humphrey is saying, in 2001 – just last week – she’s saying that these results are completely ambiguous and aren’t really worth the paper they’re written on. Therefore, she’s saying, even if we found the lost page, it’s not really relevant to archaeological inquiry on Malta. In other words, she’s completely against Oakley’s FUN testing because she regards it as obsolete and disreputable, basically. What would your view be on that, considering what you wrote in 2000? The reliability of these chemical test results, as they stand – and you’ve said you aren’t an expert on them and I accept that …
Trump: I er … don’t quite know what to say. Erm … the only thing to do would be to … get directly myself, before changing anything, the scientific opinion on these. And if that is exactly as you say, to admit that those tests did not prove what it was thought at the time they did. Could we please get some more tests done?
Sharif: Sure, particularly carbon-dating …
Trump: Well now of course we’ve got the AMS that can do it with very small samples, that might be possible.
Sharif: Mmm, particularly, there’s this one tooth sample, Despott’s molar …
Trump: But the deer bones are not … they’re not Pleistocene, are they?
Sharif: Yes, the layer is Pleistocene. And the layer above it is, well Mifsud claims it is a relatively coherent stratigraphic layer …
Trump: I see …
Sharif: So that does make a barrier above the Cervus Layer which establishes that the Cervus Layer is Pleistocene. Obviously that doesn’t rule out intrusion of later material into it …
Trump: No … Yes … If we could get a direct date on the teeth … That would put human occupation back earlier, well before the date we’ve got. But at the moment then, the whole issue is unproven.
Sharif: Yes, that is exactly my feeling. Particularly, Dr Humphrey would draw attention to this nitrogen reading of 1.85 per cent for tooth sample Ma.2 … You probably don’t remember any of this …
Trump: I don’t, and I wouldn’t know what it meant.
Sharif: Oh sure, well basically there is a large amount of internal inconsistency in the results that are reported in the Green Book. These are the results done on the Maltese samples between 1952 and 1969. Now, from what I can tell from Dr Louise Humphrey who does seem to know her stuff, I must say, is that at best these results are ambiguous. And if you look at Mifsud, he does make quite a good case that particularly with the uranium oxide reading that, yes, they don’t prove anything, but if they are suggestive of anything, it’s of a Pleistocene date. So what Mifsud is actually alleging is that what Oakley reported in the official Museum publication in 1964 was not representative – and I’m not saying it’s dishonest, maybe he took what he felt was representative – but the modern opinion is that those results he gave were not representative of the full set of results, the majority of which actually suggest a Pleistocene date. The fluorine and most of the nitrogen and particularly a uranium oxide reading for one of the tooth samples from Ghar Dalam [Despott’s molar] are extremely suggestive of a Pleistocene date. Obviously, we’d much rather have carbon-dates – but unfortunately carbon-dates are not available for any of the Ghar Dalam teeth. S
o to what extent do you feel that what I’m saying – and I’m your only source for this apparently right now – but how do feel about this whole ‘Neolithic-first’ thing in the settlement of Malta if this point is made?
Trump: If this point is made, I would accept that we’ve got to reconsider the argument that the Neolithic settlers were the first on the island. I would do that quite willingly, if secure evidence is put forward. I’ve nothing against Pleistocene settlement of the island …
Sharif: Sure, sure, it’s an academic question really, not a question of religion. But implicit in that point you just made is that you think that Oakley’s chemical test results are quite pivotal to the ‘Neolithic-first’ case. They’re an important strand of evidence supporting that orthodox model that there were no humans before the Neolithic. Is that right?
Trump: I think so, yes.
Sharif: Is there any other pivotal evidence that supports that?
Trump: Only the complete absence of any other evidence. And one has to admit that negative evidence is never reliable. It may just not have been found. But until either this evidence comes through securely or other evidence comes to light …
Sharif: Well I think the future lies with getting the National Museum in Malta to give access to these most controversial tooth samples from Ghar Dalam to allow them to be carbon-dated. I think that’s the future – this is just my view – but until that’s been done things are rather up in the air.
Trump: The whole thing is in limbo really, yes. Yes.
The miraculous transmutation of Baldacchino’s molar
There are other matters that add to this sense of Maltese chronology in limbo. Readers will recall that, as well as two teeth with normal roots excavated in Ghar Dalam in the 1920s by Caton-Thompson and George Sinclair, there are altogether three taurodont teeth – Rizzo’s and Despott’s molars, both discovered in 1917, and Baldacchino’s molar, discovered in 1936. Where reference codes have been applied to these teeth they are prefixed ‘Gh.D’ in the case of the National Museum of Malta, and ‘Ma.’ in the case of the Natural History Museum. Thus, for example, the Natural History Museum code for Despott’s 1917 taurodont molar is Ma.2, for Caton-Thompson’s normal tooth Ma.1, and for Baldacchino’s 1936 taurodont molar Ma.7. The National Museum of Malta code for Baldacchino’s molar is Gh.D/3.
Although Baldacchino’s molar was one of the teeth assayed for its nitrogen level at the Natural History Museum in 1952, we’ve seen that the very low result of 0.44 per cent that it produced was withheld from the 1964 official Report on the tests. Then in 1971, Evans’ Prehistoric Antiquities of the Maltese Islands somehow failed to mention the existence of Baldacchino’s molar at all in its survey of Ghar Dalam, and discussed the taurodont controversy with reference only to the Rizzo’s and Despott’s molars. Since Evans’ text remains the basic work of reference on prehistoric Malta, the net effect of this omission was to consign Baldacchino’s molar to a research limbo – where it stayed until Anton Mifsud focused attention on it again in 1997 when he published the suppressed 1952 test results in Dossier Malta.
The odd thing is that when Baldacchino discovered the tooth in 1936 he described it as being heavily fossilized. Today the very few people who have been allowed to see it in the vaults of the National Museum of Malta report that it is not fossilized – and this mysterious transmutation is confirmed in Anton Mifsud’s 1997 photographs ‘where it is evidently identical in shade to modern molar teeth, rather than to the 1917 molars’.83
Even odder is the fact that a startling discrepancy exists between the very low result of 0.44 per cent obtained from the tooth in the 1952 nitrogen assay and the result of the uranium oxide assay that was carried out on it in the 1960s at Kenneth Oakley’s request (this was at the same time that Oakley also ran the uranium assay on Despott’s molar). The nitrogen result makes Baldacchino’s molar very old – definitely Palaeolithic. But the uranium assay gave ‘a nil reading for uranium oxide’,84 indicating that the tooth was most probably modern.85 Last but not least, although the tooth now coded Gh.D/3 in the vaults of the National Museum of Malta is a taurodont, Mifsud points out that its degree of taurodontism is relatively minor – mesotaurodont or hypotaurodont, and that it certainly does not attain the very large hypertaurodontic type of the two 1917 molars.86
What should we conclude from these paradoxes? The obvious answer, Mifsud suggests, is that Baldacchino’s molar was old when it was described as fossilized in 1936, and still old when it was assayed for nitrogen in 1952, but it was no longer old when it was assayed for uranium in the 1960s. In other words, a modern taurodont tooth – perhaps one of several that are known to have been extracted in Malta during the early 1960s87 – was substituted for Baldacchino’s Palaeolithic molar some time after its nitrogen test in the 1950s and before its uranium test in the 1960s.
It is impossible to guess who might have actually carried out the switch but it was undoubtedly facilitated by the peculiar lack of documentation that afflicted the tooth after 1952. As we’ve seen, Evans failed to mention it in 1971. Mifsud points out that it was also:
omitted in subsequent references to taurodontism in archaic human remains. J. L. Pace (1972) and G. Zammit Maempel (1989) do not mention it in their contributions.88 It has never been published in a photographic form, so that a substitution was all the more easily possible …89 Baldacchino’s molar was kept in a box of its own separate from Despott’s and Rizzo’s molars. It was replaced by a modern taurodont and labelled as Gh.D/3. The same could not be done to Despott’s and Rizzo’s for they had been studied, photographed and radiographed by several workers.90
In the light of Mifsud’s evidence about the switching of Baldacchino’s molar, how can we be sure that Despott’s molar wasn’t also swapped for a modern tooth before being sent off for the nitrogen test in which it gave an anomalously high reading? Perhaps we should regard the switching – and apparent loss – of Baldacchino’s molar as plain negligence, along with the ignoring and misrepresenting of crucial data in the Green Book. Still, I have to be suspicious of the fact that negligence in Maltese archaeology has always tended to remove evidence that threatened the ‘Neolithic-first’ theory of Maltese prehistory.
Anthony Frendo is courageous enough to stick his neck out from the ivory towers of the University of Malta to acknowledge, albeit carefully, that something is amiss:
The evidence marshalled by Mifsud indicates that the tooth examined in 1968 … is not the same as that examined originally in 1952. There is no direct evidence to affirm that an intentional switch did take place, but it is well-nigh conclusive that the tooth in question is not the same.91
19 / Inundation
One hears frequently of Malta’s ‘land-bridges’. Such there certainly were, at least north to Sicily – they are needed to explain the fossil fauna of Ghar Dalam for example – but not, as far as we know, at a period when there were men to take advantage of them. They are of great interest to the geologist and palaeontologist, but none to the archaeologist.
Dr David Trump, 2000
Anton Mifsud and his colleagues have exposed the Palaeolithic skeleton (and teeth!) in the cupboard of Maltese prehistory. But their investigation has taken years of dedicated effort, patiently cutting through the misrepresentations, the omissions of contradictory data and the strange disappearances of pivotal evidence that have allowed archaeologists to persist for so long with the fiction that no humans reached these islands until the Neolithic around 5200 BC.
Since 1997, the National Museum of Archaeology has been embroiled in an unwelcome local media controversy – that has refused to die down – about the very grave charges set out in Dossier Malta. And since 1999 the evident preference of senior officials that the ‘Mifsud problem’ should (like the Ghar Dalam teeth?) just ‘go away’ has been further frustrated by the visible support now being given by prominent archaeologists such as Anthony Frendo to the demand for a complete review of the prehistory of Malta in the light of the confirmed presence of
Palaeolithic man.
But this ferment – which is really a struggle for the soul of Malta’s past – has so far remained very much an internal Maltese problem. Beyond the shores of the islands, where Dossier has never been published or circulated, the international community remains ignorant of the scandal – and the prehistory of the world’s oldest free-standing megalithic temples continues to be taught without any reference at all to the Palaeolithic.
The tampering and selective loss of anomalous evidence that Mifsud alleges is only part of the problem. Much damage, in my view, has already been done by two generations of archaeologists ‘conditioned’ in the school of J. D. Evans, who have tended to filter, or redefine, or file as ‘out of context’ any hints or traces of human activities before 5200 BC that they might have come across in their fieldwork in Malta. And I want to be clear that I am not attributing these tendencies to any conspiracy. It’s just a matter of how the rational mind works: if the foundation of everything you have been taught and believe about Malta is that it was first inhabited by humans in the Neolithic then this makes it much more difficult to see the Palaeolithic, even if it’s there. Perhaps the most significant consequence, certainly until very recently, is a profound lack of interest amongst archaeologists in the fact that Malta, Comino and Gozo were joined to form one large island in the late Palaeolithic – an island that was in turn joined to Sicily by a land-bridge 90 kilometres long (and thence to the Italian peninsula).