Pithecanthropus alalus
Darwin thought it probable that humans had evolved in Africa.
His reasoning went like this: humans are (“however much
the conclusion may revolt our pride”) members of the
“catarrhine” or Old World group of primates. (The
other group, the “platyrhines,” live in Central
and South America.) The ancestors of mankind must therefore
have lived somewhere in the Old World other than Australia
or the oceanic islands. “In each great region of the
world,” Darwin’s logic continued,
...the living mammals are closely
related to the extinct species of the same region. It is therefore
probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes
closely related to the gorilla and the chimpanzee; and as
these two species are now man’s closest allies, it is
somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on
the African continent than elsewhere.
When the first remains of an extinct kind of human were discovered,
however, they turned up in Europe rather than in Africa. Three
years before the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859
a skull and some arm, leg and hip fragments had been unearthed
near Düsseldorf in the Neander Valley or “Thal.”
(“Tal,” in the modern spelling, related to the
English “dale,” is the German world for valley.)
Ancient human bones resembling those found in the Neanderthal
had been unearthed in Europe since 1829. All the remains of
extinct humans discovered in Europe in the Nineteenth Century
were, in fact, of the Neanderthal type. The limb bones of
this kind of human were shorter and more massive than ours
are, and their lower jaws sloped back steeply under their
mouths, leaving no trace of the chin which juts out under
the mouths of our kind of human. Their foreheads also sloped
back abruptly from the big ridges of bone over their eyes,
and the occipital or hindmost areas of their skulls stuck
out further than ours do. The shape of the Neanderthal brain-case,
was, therefore, quite different from ours, but its size –
its cubic capacity – was the same or a little larger.
Even in the Nineteenth Century, it was already realized that
Neanderthals must have been in existence relatively recently.
In anticipation of the discovery of the fossilized remains
of the much older species whose body-shape and mental capacity
must have stood midway between those of apes and humans, a
German disciple of Darwin, Ernst Häckel, suggested a
scientific name for it: Pithecanthropus alalus –
“the ape-man who couldn’t speak.”
Unlike Darwin, Häckel thought that human evolution might
have been connected with Asia (through a hypothetical, sunken
connection between Africa/Madagascar and the East Indies that
he called “Lemuria.”) The East Indies were, after
all, also inhabited by “human-like” apes: orangs,
gibbons and siamangs. Häckel favored the gibbon as our
closest relative. Male chimpanzees and gorillas are, he thought,
much bigger than their female counterparts, (an assumption
which is only true of the of the latter species) while gibbon
males and females are, like those of our species, relatively
close to each other in size. Gibbons also walk relatively
easily on their hind legs compared to other apes (although
they usually hold their immensely long arms above their heads
while they’re doing so to keep them out of the way).
Häckel also attached significance to the fact that the
gibbon is – like he assumed Homo sapiens to
be – a monogamous primate.
A talented Dutch anatomist called Eugène Dubois (1858-1940)
was one of the many young Europeans of his generation who
were fascinated by the new theory of evolution by natural
selection. (The Origin of Species had been published
a year after his birth.) Initially Dubois couldn’t make
up his mind whether Darwin or Häckel was right about
where human evolution had started. He eventually settled,
however, on Asia. He’d learned from Alfred Russel Wallace’s
biogeographical writings that Java and Sumatra had been joined
to Asian mainland during the glacial periods. He knew, too,
that those islands had never been covered by ice the way large
parts of Europe had been. He may have been influenced, also,
by the convenient fact that the East Indies, of which Java
and Sumatra were parts, were Dutch colonial possessions. Against
the advice of family and friends, he resigned a promising
academic appointment, and joined the Dutch army as a surgeon
to enable him to travel, as he did in 1887, to the Indies
to look for Häckel’s Pithecanthropus.
Dubois’ first excavations, conducted in Sumatra, were
undertaken whenever he could take time off from his medical
duties. He was so successful, however, at unearthing the remains
of extinct animals that he was eventually able to persuade
the Dutch government to turn his paleontological investigations
into a formal part of his duties, and grant him funds to expand
them.
Five years after his arrival in the Indies, excavating a
promontory jutting into the Solo river near the Javan village
of Trinil, Dubois’ workers unearthed the skull-cap of
a large primate. This skull-cap, which included the “supra-orbital
margins” (i.e. the top edges of the eye-holes), was
complete enough to allow a reasonable estimate of its original
capacity: about 850 cc. This was a significant number because
it lies about halfway between the average cranial capacity
of the bigger anthropoid apes (around 450 c.c.) and that of
humans (1375 c.c.). That must have seemed like a strong indication
that the skull-cap could be that of the midway-between-apes-and-humans
species he’d come to the Indies to find.
Dubois was initially inclined, however, to think that the
skull had been that of an ape. The fact that its capacity
was larger that of any of the contemporary ape species might,
he feared, merely have reflected the fact that it was merely
that of an exceptionally large kind of ape. A year later,
however, and some fifteen meters from where the skull-cap
had been found, Dubois’ workers found a thigh-bone –
a femur – that was indistinguishable from that of a
modern human. The Trinil site also yielded a molar tooth which
was completely human in appearance. Because the femur and
the molar were found in the same layer of gravel which had
contained the skull-fragment, Dubois concluded (correctly,
as subsequent finds would show) that all three were remains
of the same species. The human characteristics of the latter
two finds persuaded him that the species in question wasn’t
the “pure ape” that he’d originally feared
it might be, but that it was, in fact, the ape-man he’d
come to the East Indies to find.
Because its very human-like femur suggested strongly that
his “ape-man” had walked upright, Dubois named
his find Pithecanthropus erectus
rather than P. alalus. It’s
ironic that Dubois initially feared that skull he’d
discovered was too ape-like to be the Pithecanthropus
he was looking for, because erectus turned out, in
the end, to be too human to be an “ape-man.”
The size of its brain was, as we’ve seen, only about
halfway between that of our brains and those of the great
apes, but that was erectus’ only ape-like feature.
Subsequent discoveries would show beyond doubt what the Trinil
femur and molar tooth already hinted at: that the rest of
their owner’s anatomy was overwhelmingly human-like.
The species discovered by Dubios is now referred to, therefore,
as Homo erectus rather than Pithecanthropus
erectus. The rules of scientific nomenclature tell us
that the “erectus” part of its name is
here to stay, but it, too, has become inappropriate: later
finds have made it clear that erectus could not (as
its name might suggest) have been the first human-like
being to walk on two legs.
But Pithecanthropus erectus was still an immensely
important discovery. It represented, after all, an extinct
human species that was older than the Neanderthals. Returning
to Europe in 1895, Dubois exhibited its remains at a series
of lectures and discussions.
Enter Rudolph Virchow, a famous German pathologist who’d
become widely accepted as the leader of, and spokesperson
for, the German scientific community. (Unappreciative members
of that community referred to him as “the Nabob”
or “the Pasha.”) Virchow had previously dismissed
the Neanderthal finds as the bones of modern humans which
had been distorted by disease. Now he rejected the idea that
Dubois had found a human-like being as the “the purest
fantasy imaginable.” The remains Dubois had dug up in
Java were, Virchow explained, those of a giant gibbon.
Seen in a wider context, Dubois’ battle with Virchow
was just another action in the civil war that was being waged
at the time between scientists who accepted Darwin’s
views, and those, like Virchow, who didn’t. Dubois would
not, however, have been inclined to adopt a philosophical
perspective on Virchow’s dismissal of his extraordinary
discovery. A proud man, sensitive to the point of paranoia,
Dubois was short on both tolerance and what we’d now
call people-skills.
Even those who agreed with his proposition that Pithecanthropus
was not an ape could pose a threat to Dubois’ peace
of mind. A Strassbourg anatomist named Gustav Schwalbe travelled
to Leiden to examine the Trinil find and became convinced,
as a result, that Pithecanthropus was the beginning
of an evolutionary sequence that had run through the Neanderthals
to culminate in Homo sapiens. The publication of
this theory advanced both Dubois’ cause and the new
science of paleoanthropology, but it also provided a hefty
boost for Schwalbe’s own professional reputation. In
his Eugène Dubois and the Ape Man from Java,
Bert Theunissen reasons that Dubois resolved, as a result
of that boost, not to allow anyone else to examine the fossils
until he himself had published a full description and analysis
of them. Schwalbe had come close to stealing his thunder,
and Dubois did not, Theunissen surmises, want to take the
risk of that happening again. This, Theunissen thinks, is
the reason why Dubois would not permit anyone else to examine
his Pithecanthropus fossils after 1900. Dubois’
refusal was to remain in effect, however, for nearly three
decades.
Remains similar to those of Pithecanthropus erectus
started showing up in the 1920s and 30s. The first of them
came from China. On the basis of a series of finds from Zhoukoudian
near Beijing from 1927 to 1933, the Canadian anatomist Davidson
Black described a new species called Sinanthropus pekinensis.
Sinanthropus was, in Black’s view, very similar
to Dubois’ Pithecanthropus. Franz Weidenreich,
who succeeded Black after the latter’s premature death
in 1933, agreed with this view. Both Sinanthropus and
Pithecanthropus belonged, Weidenreich thought, in
the Hominidae or human family, rather than the half-ape, half-human
“Pithecanthropoidae” family which Dubois had created
for the latter.
Dubois reacted to this idea with indignation, and tried to
refute it in a 1936 article entitled “On the Gibbon-like
Appearance of Pithecanthropus erectus.” Nearly
forty years before, Dubois had to emphasize the human-like
characteristics of Pithecanthropus to rebut Virchow’s
claim that it was “merely” a large form of gibbon.
Now he needed to emphasize its supposedly gibbon-like qualities
to counter Weidenreich’s assertion that it was “merely”
a human.
Then new finds were made in Java. In 1936 at Modjokerto,
and in 1937 at Sangiran, Ralph von Königswald discovered
two more skulls which also seemed similar to Dubois’
Pithecanthropus. Originally thought to be about a
million years old, these have now been dated by the Argon
40/Argon 39 (“Ar/Ar”) method at 1.81 and 1.66
million years old respectively. Von Königswald named
a species called Pithecanthropus modjokertensis on
the basis of the first of these finds, provoking a vehement
objection from Dubois. The Trinil primate – his primate
– was, Dubois insisted, the only member of the Pithecanthropoidae
family to have been discovered up to that time. Von Königswald
relented and renamed the species Homo
modjokertensis (but continued, we’re told, to refer
to it as Pithecanthropus in private). The ear-hole
and part of the jaw of the Sangiran specimen – areas
which had not been preserved in Dubois’ find –
demonstrated beyond question that its owner had been a very
human-like being. Von Königswald and Weidenreich now
made a detailed comparison between the Javan and Chinese material,
and came to the conclusion that all the Asian finds, including
Dubois’ so-called Pithecanthropus, were “related
to each other in the same way as two different races of present
mankind.” By the second half of the Twentieth Century,
all the Asian finds, including Dubois’, were being referred
to, as we’ve seen, as Homo erectus.
Dubois himself agreed that Davidson’s
Sinanthropus was a member of the Hominidae –
he thought it was a kind of Neanderthal. He was also comfortable
with (and indeed, as we’ve seen, insistent on) the idea
that von Königswald’s Javan finds were members
of the human family. To the day of his death in 1940, however,
at the age of 82, he clung to the belief that his
find was not a member of that family, but of the ape-man family
“Pithecanthropoidae.”
* * *
Among the first scientists to support Dubois’ 1895
claim that his Javan primate wasn’t “just an ape,”
were a Scot called Arthur Keith, and an Australian called
Grafton Elliot Smith. Both these men were young near the turn
of the twentieth century, and both, as one might suspect from
their receptivity to Dubois’ claim, were evolutionists.
Keith didn’t only accept the fact that Pithecanthropus
had human-like attributes – he accepted, too, the idea
that it had been completely adapted to upright walking.
The fact that it had a comparatively small brain persuaded
Keith, however, that Pithecanthropus must have occupied
a side-branch of the human family. Like many of the anatomist-anthropologists
of their time, Keith and Elliot Smith thought that the ancestor
of Homo sapiens must have developed a big, intelligent
brain before it had become capable of walking upright. “It
was not,” as Elliot Smith put it, “the adoption
of the erect attitude that made Man from an Ape, but the gradual
perfecting of the brain, and the slow upbuilding of the mental
structure, of which erectness of carriage is one of the incidental
characteristics.”
Keith was in agreement with this view:
He [Elliot Smith]... rightly foresaw
that before the anthropoid [i.e. ape-like] characters would
disappear from the body of primal man, the brain, the master
organ of the human body, must first have come into its human
estate. Under its dominion, the parts of the body such as
the mouth and the hands, the particular servants of the brain,
became adapted to higher uses.
In addition to sharing the then-current “big brains
came first” view of human evolution, Arthur Keith also
believed in what he called “man’s antiquity”
– the idea that Homo sapiens had evolved its
“true human” or “modern” form much
further back in time than was generally believed. He believed,
therefore, that a big-brained being, very similar to Homo
sapiens, had already been walking upright before either
the Neanderthals or Dubois’ small-brained Pithecanthropus
came into existence.
He supported this notion by suggesting that
several of the modern-looking skulls that had been discovered
in England itself – most notably the Galley Hill skull
which had been found in 1888 – were extremely ancient.
But Galley Hill and the other supposedly “ancient”
British remains did not, in fact, possess any features which
would support the idea of “the vast antiquity of true
humans.” Apart from a somewhat-greater-than-average
thickness in the Galley Hill skull, the “primitive”
features that Keith saw in it simply weren’t visible
to his fellow-anatomists. Galley Hill and all the other remains
for which Keith claimed “great antiquity” are
now universally viewed as recent material.
* * *
In 1907 a human fossil which really was extremely
old turned up in Europe. After unearthing mammalian remains
which included many extinct mammals in the district of Mauer
over a period of some twenty years, Otto Schötensack,
a professor of geology at nearby Heidelberg University, found
a big, robust lower jaw which lacked the kind of protruding
chin which Homo sapiens possesses. The big jaw was
beautifully preserved, and structures like the “symphases”
or joins between its constituent parts, confirmed the already-clear
message conveyed by its teeth: its owner had been human. The
level at which the jaw was found, and the kinds of animals
that were found with it, made it clear, though, that the Mauer
human had lived long before the Neanderthal form emerged.
(The Mauer jaw is presently thought to be about 600,000 years
old, while the classic Neanderthal form only appeared about
130,000 years ago.)
Schötensack named a new human species on the basis of
the jaw: Homo heidelbergensis. No skull parts or
other human bones were found in association with the jaw,
so its finders could not tell whether heidelbergensis
had either a “modern” skull-capacity or a “modern”
ability to walk upright.
Then, in 1912, an even more startling find was made –
this time in England. Human skull-fragments were found together
with an ape-like jaw-fragment in a gravel pit on a farm near
Piltdown Common in the county of Sussex. The ape-like jaw-fragment
bore two seemingly human-like teeth. Most people concluded
from this, and from the fact that the skull fragments and
jaw had reportedly been found so near to each other, that
the skull and the jaw must have belonged to the same species
– and, in fact, to the same individual. The skull fragments
were clearly those of a human species, but that human
species must, judging by its ape-like jaw, be an older one
than heidelbergensis with its obviously human-like
jaw. This reasoning emboldened Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper
of geology at the British Museum of Natural History, to create
a new genus with the grandiloquent name Eoanthropus
– “Dawn Man” – for the Piltdown find.
This impression of great age was reinforced by the remains
of extinct animals (mainly tooth fragments) that were associated
with the Piltdown find: two fragments of molar teeth represented
what was apparently a Pliocene mastodon, and the third, a
Pliocene stegodon. Tooth fragments representing hippopotamus
and beaver species which could also have lived in the Pliocene
were found in the same deposit. The Piltdown pit where these
finds had been made also yielded stone and bone implements
from a seemingly early stage of human technology.
Woodward had been present when that jaw had been dug out
of the ground by his friend Charles Dawson, a solicitor who
was an amateur archeologist and paleontologist. Early in 1912,
Dawson had written to him that workmen had – some years
previously – unearthed, and broken, a human skull in
a gravel-pit on a farm near Piltdown Common in the county
of Sussex. A short while after he’d sent this report
to Woodward, Dawson brought a fragment or fragments of the
skull to London. The bone was extraordinarily thick. “How’s
that for Heidelberg!” he is reported to have called
out as he handed the material to Woodward. Woodward took the
bait, and, over most of the weekends in the summer of 1912,
he travelled to Sussex to search, together with Dawson, through
material dug from that pit. On a few occasions, the pair was
assisted by a 31-year-old French priest by the name of Teilhard
de Chardin who both of them had known previously. Dawson found
most of the rest of the human and animal remains which came
out of the Piltdown gravel pit during that summer, including
the ape-like jaw-fragment, but Teilhard and Woodward also
made a few finds.
Placing Eoanthropus as far back as the Pliocene
would not only confirm that it had lived before Homo heidelbergensis
– it would suggest, in fact, that Eoanthropus’
age must rival or exceed that of Dubois’ Pithecanthropus.
Notwithstanding this, however, the Piltdown skull had clearly
housed a brain which was about the same size as that of a
modern human. If a big brain had been the first distinctively
human characterisic to develop, then Eoanthropus
must surely have a better claim to human ancestry than the
small-brained Pithecanthropus.
A number of anthropologists doubted, however, that so “modern”
a human skull could have been combined in the same species
with such an ape-like jaw. These doubters – the so-called
“dualists” – felt that the Piltdown skull
and jaw must represent two different species: a human and
an ape. An American paleontologist even created a new species
for the presumed ape: Pan vetus – “ancient
chimpanzee.” The feeling among these dualists was that
the skull was probably an “intrusive” object,
i.e. one that might have been buried in the ancient deposit
containing the ape-like jaw at some relatively recent
time. But if that were so, then why were the walls of its
skull as thick as, or thicker than, those of a Neanderthal
skull?
As the controversy over Piltdown burned bright, the careers
of those associated with the find were brilliantly illuminated.
Woodward had enjoyed his share of professional honors before
Piltdown – he’d been made a Fellow of the Royal
Society on the basis of his work in marine paleontology as
early as 1904 – but his close association with Dawson’s
find, turned him into a scientific celebrity. Taking part
in that find was, as he described it to a newspaper reporter
in 1924, “the most important thing that ever happened
in my life.”
Arthur Keith, who had played a prominent part in the evaluation
and reconstruction of the skull, received an even bigger boost
from its “discovery.” Keith’s reconstruction
of Eoanthropus became the centerpiece of the anthropological
exhibit at the museum of which he was the Conservator. People
flocked to Keith’s museum lectures in record numbers.
Piltdown wasn’t only the centerpiece of those lectures
and exhibits – it became the centerpiece of Keith’s
career.
Before Piltdown, that career had been in the doldrums. In
1900, Keith had written a book entitled Man and Ape –
a Statement of the Evidence of Their Common Origin
as it Stands Today. After the manuscript was completed,
his publisher, John Murray, had second thoughts about its
saleability. Murray praised the book’s scientific merit,
but refused, despite the fact that he’d signed a contract
with the Keith, to go through with its publication.
“Murray’s rejection of the book,” Keith
would later write, “was my bitterest disappointment
in my struggle for place and reputation among my fellow anatomists.”
During the next eight years, Keith worked as an anatomy demonstrator,
publishing some work on the human heart. Finally, in 1908,
he was appointed as the Conservator of the Hunterian. This
was a big step up for Keith, but the new job was still, in
anthropologist-historian Pat Shipman’s words, “a
relatively obscure post that he found unsatisfactory.”
Keith would have to swallow more disappointments before his
career would finally take off. In 1911, when he was already
forty-five years old, the Royal Society gave him what he described
as a “slap in the face” by rejecting his application
for membership. (Elliot Smith had, by contrast, been given
his FRS in 1907, at the age of 36.) Keith re-applied in 1912,
a few months before the Piltdown discovery was announced,
and was again rejected.
It was only in 1913 – after his association with Piltdown
had thrust him into the public eye – that Keith was
finally admitted to the Royal Society. The Man and Ape
book which John Murray had rejected, now metamorphosed into
a new work entitled The Antiquity of Man. Published
in 1915, Antiquity was dominated by discussion of
Piltdown. An image of a skull entitled “Piltdown fragments”
was embossed in gold on its front cover. In 1921, Keith was
given a knighthood. “He has gone up,” one of his
contemporaries wrote in 1924, “like a rocket...”
* * *
Piltdown was, of course, exposed as a fraud in 1953. Charles
Dawson, a solicitor who practiced at Uckfield near the Piltdown
site in Sussex at the time of the “discovery”
was clearly the perpetrator of that fraud. John Walsh’s
1996 book Unravelling Piltdown gives a carefully-substantiated
and devastating account of the string of faked archeological
and paleontological “discoveries” that Dawson
concocted before he engineered the Piltdown “discoveries.”
Dawson added old-fashioned business fraud and plagiarism to
those scientific frauds. Walsh’s book gives Dawson’s
reponsibility for the Piltdown fraud what Richard Bernstein
called, in a 1997 New York Times review, “the solidity
of a Euclidean proof.”
The skull of Dawson’s supposed “dawn man”
was in reality that of a recently-living human. Its greatly-thickened
condition was the result of a disease called rachitis or rickets.
The jaw fragment was that of a young female orang-utan which
had been alive even more recently than the owner of the skull.
The characteristic high cusps of the two teeth it contained
had been filed down to give them a human appearance. At the
start of his investigation, Joseph Weiner, a member of the
three-person team that proved that Piltdown was a fake, suspected
only that Piltdown’s ape-like jaw was a forgery or “plant.”
He was astonished, therefore, to discover that none of
the 37 pieces of bone and stone “found” at Piltdown
were genuine. They had all been brought from elsewhere, and
all chemically stained reddish-brown to match the color of
the gravel in the pit in which they were “found.”
Ten other faked objects were, in addition, “found”
at two other sites near Piltdown.
The second of these two subsequent “discoveries”
consisted of human skull-fragments which Dawson reported finding
in 1913 at Barcome Mills (some four miles away from Barkham
Manor, the original “Piltdown” site). Nobody challenged
the genuineness of this “find,” but Arthur Smith
Woodward didn’t announce it as another specimen of Eoanthropus.
“It is not a thick skull,” Dawson
had written to Smith Woodward, “but it may be a descendant
of Eoanthropus.”
The third human “find” was reported by Dawson
at the beginning of 1915. This one consisted of two cranial
fragments, the altered molar from the lower jaw of an ape
(which probably came from the same orang jaw that had been
“found” at the first site) and a fragment of a
rhinoceros molar. This time Dawson was able to claim confidently
that he’d found another Eoanthropus. “...the
general thickness,” he wrote, announcing the “discovery”
of one of the skull fragments to Smith Woodward, “seems
to me to correspond with the right parietal of Eoanthropus...”
Dawson told Woodward that this latest group of bones was
found “on the Sheffield Park Estate.” He would
not, however, tell Woodward the exact place where he found
them. Two full years were to go by before Woodward would announce
the Sheffield Park “find.” Had a kind of standoff
developed between the two men, with Woodward saying he wouldn’t
announce the find until Dawson told him exactly where he’d
found it, and Dawson threatening to make it public via some
other member of the scientific community if Woodward didn’t
stop delaying? We know that Dawson did tell Ray Lankester
(an Oxford professor of anatomy, later attached to the Natural
History Museum) about the new “find,” because
the latter inserted a footnote in his 1915 Diversions
of a Naturalist, which stated that Dawson had discovered
“a second skull of the same character as the first.”
Woodward’s wife later vividly
recalled this uneasy and troubled interlude, explaining that
Dawson “would not give details of the exact spot”
and that her husband on his own “spent much time searching
for it” fruitlessly.
Toward the end of 1915 Dawson became ill with anemia. In
August of 1916, he died at the age of 52. Dawson’s widow
passed the Sheffield Park bones and teeth to Woodward. Woodward
questioned her, and other associates of Dawson, in vain to
get a better idea of where Dawson had found them, delaying
the announcement of “Piltdown Two” for another
six months after Dawson’s death. He must have agonizing
about whether he should make that announcement at all. If
he decided not to do so, he would have to explain
why he wasn’t doing so – Dawson had,
after all, already leaked the news of the “discovery”
before his death. If he made the announcement, on the other
hand, and qualified it with an honest admission that Dawson
had refused to tell him exactly where he’d found the
material, he would not only have raised a big question mark
in relation to “Piltdown Two,” but would also
have aggravated the doubts that many people were already feeling
about Piltdown One.
In the end, the benefits of covering up the truth proved
to be too tempting for Woodward. At a meeting of the Geological
Society on February 28, 1917, he reported that a second set
of Eoanthropus remains had been found on a “large
field about 2 miles from the Piltdown pit.” He implied
that he knew where that field was, by adding that he and Dawson
had already examined it “several times without success
during the spring and autumn of 1914.” “Not then,
not[r?] ever afterward,” Walsh tells us, “did
Woodward further identify or even refer to the ‘field’
he specified so prominently in his official report.”
The announcement that a second thick-boned skull had been
found at a separate location, together with a lower molar
tooth very similar to the teeth contained in the ape-like
jaw of “Piltdown One,” silenced the critics who
were maintaining that the skull and jaw of Piltdown One could
not represent a single species. “Gradually,” Walsh
tells us,
over the next several months and
years, accelerating with the war’s end in November 1918,
many experts who had vehemently opposed the combination of
jaw and cranium now simply gave way, confessing themselves
wrong. The conversion, while by no means complete, was dramatic
and sweeping, affecting some of the leading names in the field
worldwide...
Woodward had known Dawson since 1891, when they were both
27 years old. In that year Woodward, an assistant at the Natural
History Museum, collaborated with Dawson on the description
of the tooth of a mammal-like reptile which had come into
the latter’s possession. Woodward admitted that the
only thing which distinguished this tooth from those of similar
mammals, was its wear-pattern. Deciding it must represent
a new species in the genus Plagiaulax, Woodward called
it P. dawsoni in honor of its discoverer.”
Dawson had, however, fraudulently modified this tooth to give
it the wear-pattern that had brought Woodward to that conclusion.
The “Plagiaulax” tooth was among the
first of many of many faked objects Dawson tried, with varying
degrees of success, to foist on the scientific community.
The Plagiaulax affair also showed, as Walsh points
out, how “pliant and accomodating” Woodward could
be in such matters. Woodward’s credulousness, and the
extent to which Dawson would test it, were, in fact, both
quite astonishing. In a letter written on October 7, 1907,
Dawson tells his friend that, some 18 months previously, he
and other passengers on the cross-channel ferry Manche,
had a four-minute sighting of a sea-serpent. A detailed discription
of the serpent, whose length was “sixty to seventy feet
at the smallest computation,” follows. Dawson adds that
he’d exchanged cards with fellow-passengers who could
confirm the sighting.
It’s not hard to agree with Walsh that this latter
incident “...betrays the forger’s utter confidence
in being able to manipulate, almost to play with, the susceptibilities
of his old friend, the country’s leading expert in marine
paleontology.”
* * *
The Piltdown fraud was emphatically not, as the late Stephen
Gould argued it was, a “schoolboy prank that got out
of hand.” Much more time, effort and care were devoted
to it than are spent on what we usually think of as pranks.
As we’ve seen, the fraud didn’t just consist of
planting a single ape jaw fragment with pieces of a human
skull – it involved the appropriation and modification
of a much larger number of specimens than that. As we’ve
also seen, some forty-seven pieces of bone and stone were
assembled, broken, shaped and/or stained in the course of
perpetrating it. These pieces were then “found,”
or planted for others to find, at Piltdown or reported by
Dawson as having been found elsewhere, over a period of three
years. The intense and sustained nature of this effort makes
no sense unless we accept that it was directed at the attainment
of some non-frivolous, non-trivial goal.
That goal could only have been the achievement of scientific
recognition (together, of course, with the social and financial
benefits that such recognition would entail). None of Dawson’s
previous scientific frauds and fakeries were “pranks”
– all of them were squarely and rationally aimed at
obtaining scientific credit. Dawson did, in fact, reap a considerable
degree of acclamation for his “discovery” of
Eoanthropus dawsoni, but not as much as he’d hoped
for. He was turned down for the coveted FRS – Fellowship
of the Royal Society – despite the fact that his name
was put up for consideration each year between 1913 and his
death in 1916.
Nearly everyone who was directly involved with Piltdown (and
several others on the periphery) have been suspected of conspiring
with Dawson to commit the fraud. During the 1990s Arthur Keith
was in fashion as a suspect, with two scholars, Phillip Tobias
and Frank Spencer, building detailed cases against him.
Keith was as capable of covering up truths that may have
cast doubts on Piltdown’s authenticity as Woodward was.
Although the Piltdown skull did not, for instance, display
the gross deformation which is sometimes brought about by
rickets, it did bear less prominent indications of having
been affected by that disease. The first person to spot those
indications seems to have been S. G. Shattock, who was in
charge of the largest section of the Hunterian museum –
that concerned with pathological lesions of the human body.
Shattock examined the Piltdown skull fragments soon after
they were “found,” and concluded, in a 1914 Hunterian
publication that
... certain details of of the Piltdown
calvaria [top of the skull]... suggest the possibility of
a pathological process having underlain the thickened condition.
In an attempt to establish the specific nature of the “pathological
process,” that may have thickened the skull, Shattock
excluded the possibility of acromegaly and six other potentially
bone-deforming conditions. He stated specifically, though,
that he could not exclude “a past rachitis that has
been followed by a reconstruction of the bone.”
A year later, however, commenting on what he called the “surprising”
thickness of the Piltdown skull, Arthur Keith made the following
assertion in his Antiquity of Man:
The bone is naturally formed; there
can be no question of disease. My colleague Mr. Shattock definitely
settled this point.
As I see it, that lie is on a par with Woodward’s lie
about the “large field” in which Dawson was supposed
to have found Piltdown Two. Neither constitutes proof of active
conspiracy with Dawson, but both were calculated to hide such
manifestly suspicious aspects of the Piltdown “find,”
that one feels that the two men who told them were guilty
of something almost as serious. Woodward’s announcement,
in particular, about where Dawson was supposed to have found
Piltdown Two must make him an accessory after the fact to
the latter’s fraud.
* * *
Paleoanthropology can be a bruising business. We’ve
seen how it led to disillusionment and isolation for Eugène
Dubois. It can, however, also produce very big rewards. In
a 1954 letter to Ashley Montague, the 88-year-old Arthur Keith
talked about those rewards, prefacing his remarks with a descripton
of the “finder” of the Piltdown skull. “So
compelling,” he wrote, “was the honesty of Dawson’s
manner of speech that not a single soul of us, doubted his
word,” “Yet,” Keith continued,
I have now no doubt that he was the author
of all the fraud. And you will ask – what could have
been his motive? If you knew the wonderful fame won by Shoetensack
in 1907 by the discovery of the Heidelberg jaw – you
would realise the fame waiting for the discoverer of a skull
of that early date.
As one of the chief beneficiaries of Dawson’s “discovery,”
Keith had, as we’ve seen, plenty of personal experience
of the “wonderful fame” important finds in the
field of human paleontology could generate.
In the 1920s, many if not most anthropologists regarded
“Piltdown man” as a direct ancestor of our species,
and the oldest such ancestor, moreover, to have been found
to date. The faked human species fit in perfectly with widely-accepted
beliefs of its time. It supported both the “big brains
came first” view, and a “Europeans came first”
belief. It appeared at a time when European civilization in
general, and the British Empire in particular, could still
look like the crowning achievements of human evolution. It
made sense to many that the evolution of our species must
have begun in the place where those achievements were realized.
How else could one explain why Western Europe – and
England in particular – seemed to have enjoyed a head
start in the race for political, technological and cultural
ascendancy?
All these comfortable assumptions were to be challenged in
1924, when a young Australian called Raymond Dart discovered
a real ape-man – the very Pithecanthropus alalus
whose existence Häckel had postulated – in the
most “uncivilized” of all the continents: Africa.
