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http://www.nexusmagazine.com/ribeiro.html


an excerpt

My theoretical approach to archaeology is informed by the Puranas, the
historical writings of ancient India, which posit a human presence extending
much further back in time than most archaeologists today are prepared to
accept (Cremo, 1999). Therefore I was intrigued when I learned of some
anomalously old stone tools discovered by Carlos Ribeiro, a Portuguese
geologist of the 19th century.

While I was going through the writings of the American geologist J. D.
Whitney (1880) who reported evidence for Tertiary human beings in
California,1 I encountered a sentence or two about Ribeiro having found
flint implements in Miocene formations near Lisbon. The Tertiary comprises a
group of geological periods -- the Pliocene, Miocene, Oligocene, Eocene and
Palaeocene -- extending from 2 million to 65 million years ago. The Miocene
extends from 5 million to 25 million years ago. According to current
accounts, the oldest anatomically modern humans came into existence about
100,000 to 150,000 years ago, and the oldest hominids, human ancestors, go
back about 4 million years.