But does that invalidate expertise? After all, any system that strives towards objectivity should be manageable by technicians and computers, like the sequencing laboratories that routinely examine DNA “fingerprints.” Surely, we don’t need specialists any more…
Actually we do, because the familiar adage “rubbish in, rubbish out” applies even more in an age of systematics married to computer algorithms. The most important part of understanding any group of animals and plants remains their characters, their morphology. Discovery of new, unsuspected characters, new kinds of “hairs on legs,” can change a classification for the better, something which remains more important than the latest whiz-bang computer program. The worry now is that the leisurely ways of the old museums are no longer possible. The pressure on publication means that young scientists cannot spend a decade learning their trade—their group of ammonites or moths or whatever; and there is really no substitute for experience. It was always true that some people have a kind of feel for what is significant in a group of organisms; this is a gift, like a musical ear. This gift is found in the born naturalist, and may determine who eventually earns a living in the business. It is equally true that there is the equivalent of tone deafness, which I might term taxonomic blindness. Many people will wave vaguely at a landscape admiring the trees, but won’t distinguish an ash from an oak, let alone a spruce from a larch. Flowers are daisies or not-daisies. I guess my instinctive appreciation of how much they might be missing is equivalent to a musician feeling for one who cannot appreciate Mozart. The more you know about nature, the more you see, and this is enriching.
Not that the experts always get it right. Possibly the most famous fraud in scientific history was perpetrated upon the Geology Department of the Natural History Museum: Piltdown Man. Between 1908 and 1913 a series of discoveries of fossil bones around the little village of Piltdown in the rural county of Sussex allowed the identification of the “missing link” between apes and humans. Recall that this was before the exploration of Africa as the cradle of human evolution, and that Charles Darwin’s observations on likely human descent were at the time almost unsupported by fossil evidence. Here was a discovery devoutly to be wished by the scientific community, and the find of Eoanthropus dawsoni fitted the bill. The occupier of the Keeper’s position at the time, Arthur Smith Woodward, named the species “in honour of its discoverer” Charles Dawson, a local Sussex solicitor who enjoyed a considerable reputation as an antiquary and amateur palaeontologist. In my childhood copy of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia there was a reconstruction of Piltdown Man, as solid as you like, dressed in skins and hammering away with his stone tools. He enjoyed forty years of existence. But in November 1953 he evaporated: the evidence on which he had been based was nothing more than a cheap fraud. Arthur Smith Woodward had been duped by a faker. Eoanthropus dawsoni was a confection of dyed bones—“not one of the Piltdown finds genuinely came from Piltdown,” as Sir Gavin de Beer, Director of the Museum, wrote in 1955. Piltdown’s mandible was probably that of an immature orangutan. Human skull fragments had been similarly stained with iron to make them “fit.” Bone “tools” had been filed down with rasps. Nothing was what it seemed. When Arthur Smith Woodward spent field seasons in the Piltdown pits over several years, he was being set up like any “mark” by a conman. Fortunately for the reputation of the Natural History Museum, its staff were equally involved with the subsequent exposure of the fraud. Kenneth P. Oakley first noticed that the fluorine concentrations of Piltdown bones were far too low to support its supposed antiquity. Once doubt set in, the fraud was obvious—all that staining and filing and the admixture of different sources of bones—so much so that today wonderment is expressed about how a scientist of the stature of Smith Woodward could have fallen for it. There has even been the suggestion that he must have been party to the deception. Given his impeccable record elsewhere, and the fact that he fruitlessly continued “digging” long after the supply of bones had dried up, this is extremely unlikely. He was the patsy, poor man. He wanted Piltdown to be genuine and as a consequence was led by the nose.
The anthropologist and exposer of the Piltdown fraud, Kenneth Oakley, in his working habitat. Oakley is the one in the middle.
But the perpetrator must be fingered, and, as in any good whodunnit, there is a wealth of delicious red herrings. Charles Dawson was friendly and shared excavations with the Jesuit anthropologist Marie-Joseph Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who, for unsurprising reasons, is often referred to just as “Teilhard.” By the middle of the twentieth century he was a famous metaphysician whose book The Phenomenon of Man was popular, if not required, reading for those with an interest in alternative culture. Although many of Teilhard’s ideas have not led to testable hypotheses, his holistic view of the Earth and its place in the cosmos anticipates the stance of many Earth-systems scientists today. He fell seriously foul of the Catholic establishment in Rome, to the extent of having a number of his works proscribed. He also happened to have found the canine tooth of Piltdown Man in 1913. Could he have been responsible for the other fakes? A close examination of the evidence shows that Teilhard was not in the country when certain crucial discoveries were made; the simplest explanation is that he was required as an “expert witness” for the authenticity of material discovered on other occasions. The fraudster was someone else. My favourite but not favoured suggestion for the faker is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, renowned creator of Sherlock Holmes. Could Piltdown be his invention of the perfect crime, a real-life masterpiece for which all his fiction had been just a rehearsal? The argument in his case is a subtle one. Conan Doyle was a convinced spiritualist, and the then Director of the Natural History Museum, E. Ray Lankester, was a prominent and outspoken sceptic. By discrediting the distinguished Director, the spiritualist camp would have bloodied the nose of the opposition, and made the public sceptical about the sceptic. It is, to say the least, a convoluted argument, although great fun. The evidence linking Conan Doyle with the scene of the crime is very slim, but then I suppose that might be proof of the fiendish cunning of the hoaxer. Conan Doyle as Moriarty, the master criminal! My own view is that this theory represents what might be termed the Jack the Ripper Syndrome: many names have been suggested as the true identity of Jack, but most of them are famous people, like the Prince of Wales or the painter Walter Sickert. Obscurity is much less compelling. Were I an opportunist, I might well be penning a book suggesting Jack the Ripper as the guilty party in the Piltdown fraud.
More modest suggestions for the Piltdown hoaxer include the mammal man at the Natural History Museum, Martin Hinton. He certainly was not enamoured of Arthur Smith Woodward, and may well have experienced more than a modicum of Schadenfreude at his colleague’s discomfiture. Hinton is perhaps most justly famed for his important part in persuading the government of the day to eliminate the muskrat, Ondatra zibethica, from British shores; this giant rodent had escaped from fur farms and was breeding unchecked, and its burrowing into riverbanks, railway embankments and the like was causing flooding and landslides. The Destructive Imported Animals Act became law in 1932, and allowed for dedicated staff to trap and shoot the invasive pest. The total elimination of the muskrat was achieved by 1939. Hinton should have been recognized by a grateful nation, but he never was. “Muskrat Disaster Averted” is not a likely headline. The same escape story was repeated several decades later with the coypu, Myocastor coypus, as principal actor, and I can remember the little white vans belonging to the coypu exterminators lurking around the marshes in East Anglia. Hinton’s relevance to the Piltdown Man scandal was the discovery, many years after his death, of a canvas trunk apparently belonging to him hidden away in an obscure attic of the Museum in which were found various bits of bone and stains. It could have been a rehearsal for the fraud. However, it is clear that Hinton, who was a young temporary assistant at the time of the Piltdown “discoveries,” was never at the pits during the excavations. It seems much more likely that the trunk contained his, or some
one else’s, experimental attempts to replicate the techniques of the fraudster, something that anyone interested in mammal bones would have wanted to try out once the hoax emerged. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the story is the fact that a large trunk could be hidden away unopened for years in the Museum. However, there is a tradition of chaos and concealment among the mammal workers. The disorder in the office of Hinton’s successor, Arthur Hopwood, was legendary. Tony Sutcliffe, who followed on from Hopwood as fossil mammal man, told me that he had to help with the dismemberment of the heaps after Hopwood’s death in 1961. A curious, musty smell pervaded the midden. Underneath piles of unanswered letters and scientific reports was a shoe box tied up with string. Inside the box was a brace of mummified pheasants and a label carrying the message: “A small gift to Dr. Hopwood, Christmas 1958.”
The examination of the Piltdown skull, from a painting in the Geological Society of London. Dawson is the figure whose face is closest to the portrait of Charles Darwin. E. Ray Lankester, the Director of the Natural History Museum, is farthest to the right.
Some of the artefacts associated with the Piltdown site. Above the notorious “cricket bat”; below stone tools published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London in 1914
In fact, the guilty party is now known beyond reasonable doubt: it was Charles Dawson, the eponym of Mr. Piltdown himself. Miles Russell has shown in Piltdown Man: The Secret Life of Charles Dawson that Dawson was a serious, serial fraudster. Piltdown Man was merely his most ambitious wheeze. Dawson had produced a number of archaeological objects that were designed to increase his reputation and “solve” archaeological problems, or perhaps provoke gasps of admiring surprise from the professionals. He found tiles to “prove” the Roman name of Pevensey Castle, or he discovered unique Bronze Age artefacts—which were probably fakes. To the antiquarian world there seemed no end to his luck. Many of his discoveries are not readily authenticated, but neither are they necessarily bogus. Infuriatingly, though, at least some of his discoveries are genuine, and his published historical compilations are undoubtedly useful, so he was probably a talented archaeologist who attempted to puff himself up beyond his true worth. He simply could not resist self-aggrandizement; and his duplicity went to his grave undetected. His wife always felt he had failed to say something important to her before he died, but it seems unlikely that it would have been a confession. In his photographs Dawson looks every inch the Edwardian gent: erect and moustachioed, medals on his chest, a veritable pillar of society. He must have been entirely plausible in person, skilled at “playing” Smith Woodward, who was led inexorably on through the Piltdown years by a discovery here, a discovery there, all of them noteworthy. Dawson was also, in retrospect, the obvious person to perpetrate the fraud. After all, he found the objects, or was close by when others did so. He discovered the new sites. He orchestrated the whole project. To use the hoary criteria of the fictional detective, he had both the motive and the opportunity. He had even been discovered by one of his visitors furtively dyeing bits of bone. Indeed, a fellow amateur archaeologist, Harry Morris, had entertained private suspicions about his Sussex contemporary from the first, but had kept his counsel for reasons of his own. Dawson may be a less glamorous solution to the mystery of the Piltdown forger than Teilhard or Conan Doyle, but he is almost certainly the correct culprit. His memorial, a sandstone monolith, still stands in the grounds of Barkham Manor, near the pit that was once world famous. Like the pit, the stone is now overgrown and unacknowledged, but its inscription can still be made out: “Here in the old river gravel Mr. Charles Dawson FSA found the fossil skull of Piltdown Man, 1912–1913.” Maybe its complete obliteration would be most appropriate for a man who diverted history for forty years.
The anthropologists in the Natural History Museum have long since outlived the scandal. Kenneth Oakley went on to a distinguished career, and published widely on hominid artefacts and remains until he became tragically disabled with multiple sclerosis—even then, he continued to struggle into the Department of Palaeontology on crutches. The techniques he pioneered were developed further by another of the Museum’s formidable and able women researchers, Theya Molleson, who became the expert on ancient pathologies reflected in bones, or diet revealed by wear patterns on teeth. Meanwhile, discoveries in Africa were rewriting the story of the emergence of humankind; far from originating on the Sussex downs, Homo sapiens arose in Africa about a hundred thousand years ago. During my lifetime in the Museum I have seen this idea change from one of several theories to become something close to an accepted fact. Dawson’s bogus “missing link” has been replaced by a whole gallery of fossil species, some on the line to modern humans, others on interesting side branches. Mankind in the widest sense moved out of Africa in several pulses, migrating in response to climate change and ecological opportunities. He did indeed reach the British Isles—the story to which Dawson might have contributed if he had not had such vainglorious ambitions. There is currently a programme of research of which the Museum is an important part that goes under the acronym of AHOB—the ancient human occupation of Britain. In overall charge of the project is Dr. Christopher Stringer. The money for it comes from the Leverhulme Trust, one of those charitable organizations without whose patronage it would be difficult to do large-scale science at all. Lord Leverhulme made his fortune from soap products in the early part of the twentieth century; until his death at a considerable age, Leverhulme would preside at an annual party of the Trust’s beneficiaries from a kind of throne. Many scientists—including this one—have reason to be grateful to him.
It is one of the more ironic aspects of the investigation of early human occupation of Britain that one of the most important sites, Boxgrove, lies in the county of Sussex, where Dawson had caused such a time-wasting diversion. There was a real history just waiting to be found. Around an ancient water hole five hundred thousand years ago rhinoceros, horse and deer came to drink, and human hunters were waiting for them. Archaeologists have found splendidly preserved Palaeolithic flint tools, accompanied by the flakes wasted during their manufacture, together with clearly butchered bones, some cracked to extract the nutritious bone marrow. Mark Roberts, who directed the excavations at Boxgrove, has pointed out that these discoveries are consistent with the notion of “man the hunter” rather than his being an opportunistic scavenger as others had claimed. Killing skills root deep into our history. As to the identity of the killers, the discovery of a limb bone and other fragments indicated to Chris Stringer that he was Homo heidelbergensis, one of our predecessor species, but one that was human in many aspects of his behaviour such as hunting co-operatively. As recently as 2005, even earlier evidence of human occupation, up to seven hundred thousand years old, was discovered in Pakefield, on the coast in the East Anglian county of Suffolk. This is at present the earliest occurrence of humans north of the Alps. The crumbling cliffs of Suffolk have yielded many fossils of animals in the past. I have even picked up heavy bits of dark mammoth bone myself on the bleak shores. It is a lonely place to work, and real dedication is required to survey every new piece of sand or clay dislodged by the unforgiving onslaught of the North Sea. The Suffolk coast in winter is frequented by two kinds of people, both of whose sanity might be questioned by the population at large: onshore fishermen and palaeontologists. What they have in common is oilskins, an infinite capacity for hope and a certain camaraderie tinged with competitiveness. The new discovery was a tribute to the persistence and powers of observation of two local amateur collectors, Paul Durbidge and Bob Mutch, who discovered some of the crucial evidence. Tools worked by human hands were discovered in situ among the bones of rhino and spotted hyena. The tools are not much like the exquisitely wrought artefacts of later “stone age” cultures, but the freshly broken flint surfaces are unmistakable artefacts to the trained eye. What eludes the investigators so far are the critical bones of the earlier British Homo himself.
The AHOB project is revealing Britain as one of
the best places to study human history in northern Europe. Wherever new discoveries in the field are made, the materials recovered are still what they always were: fossils, artefacts and sediments. It is still necessary to get the hands dirty and to muddy the seats of trousers. Nowadays, much more attention is paid to tiny fossils of pollen grains and vole teeth than was once the case, but the importance of taxonomic expertise remains the same—you need people who know their stuff: Adrian Lister for the elephants and their relatives, Andy Currant for the voles, Russell Coope for the beetles. What is thoroughly new is the variety of techniques that can be applied to the material collected. No tomfoolery with specimens is possible now that they can be chemically analysed down to their very atoms, and their geochronology investigated using Radiocarbon dates (if they are not too old), Mass Spectrometric Uranium series, Electron Spin Resonance and Optically Stimulated Luminescence. This is white-coated laboratory science: “real” science, doubtless, to devotees of gadgets and gizmos. One of the intentions is to use oxygen isotope measurements from fossils to link the sporadic fossil record in Europe with the standard climatic cycles recognized from sampling continuously deposited oceanic sediments; ratios of these isotopes fluctuate in harmony with the ambient temperature. This provides crucial information, because early human history coincides with the climatic fluctuations of the Pleistocene, a period which began 1.8 million years ago and lasted until twelve thousand years before the present. This is a large part of the “ice age”—in fact, it comprises a whole series of advances and subsequent retreats of the northerly ice sheet.*6 As a species, we always have been in thrall to climate change, as we may well be again over the next century if global warming predictions are fulfilled. What AHOB has proved beyond doubt is that mankind’s history in Britain is one of repopulation with long intervening periods when apparently no people were able to cope with the frigid conditions. They retreated southwards into continental Europe. The longest of these periods was from 180,000 to 60,000 years ago, after which humans, including Neanderthals, recolonized when the climate ameliorated. Another, younger frigid period between 22,000 and 16,000 years ago has also so far failed to yield any evidence of human occupation of Britain. Since this period included the Last Glacial Maximum, when ice extended south almost to the Home Counties, this fact may not be altogether surprising. Only after this time were our own distant ancestors, belonging to Homo sapiens, able to move in. If we had a notion that inhabitants of these islands were invaded by Vikings and Normans but otherwise inviolate, then it is clearly wrong. Repeated invasion has been the very stuff of our history.
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