by Lydia Pyne
Today, the Old Man’s bones reside in the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and images of the fossil show up in scientific studies and popular museum exhibits. Over the last one hundred years, the Old Man and his Neanderthal contemporaries have undergone serious changes in the definition of Neanderthals as a species—our own notions of humanness challenge our notions of Neanderthalness. These changes in Neanderthal research and studies have unfolded in archaeology, paleoanthropology, genetics, and museum theory (how the species is displayed to audiences). Somewhere in the century since the fossil’s discovery, the Old Man moved from an “it” to a “him.” He has a personality and a temperament. He also has a purpose.
The discovery of La Chapelle-aux-Saints 1, the Old Man, required a particular framework to truly make sense of what a human-but-not-human fossil species meant. This extended beyond simply accepting evolution as a mechanism of change or the legitimacy of the Neanderthals as a separate species. It necessitated a cultural component—a metaphor or archetype—that was easily accessible in culture writ large. This framework came from other cultural tropes and analogies, mechanisms that allowed culture and science to seamlessly intersect and offer explanations about a species as curious as the Neanderthals.
The history of Neanderthals’ discovery has been told many times and in many ways. Where many might frame this history through the Neanderthals’ interpretation as a “missing link,” many other explanatory devices, including literature, can tell us more about how the species was internalized and used. Indeed, the idea that nineteenth-century science would reach for analogies and metaphors to explain fossil discoveries isn’t far-fetched. That it should look for such explanations in literary characters and tropes shows how much science drew from literature during this time. This meant being able to explain Neanderthals beyond simply their evolutionary mechanisms—they had to make sense culturally as well. And while the La Chapelle skeleton might not offer an explanation for all Neanderthal behavior, any explanation of Neanderthals in scientific literature or popular media deals, by necessity, with the legacy of La Chapelle’s interpretations.
Today, the Old Man’s fame comes from a curious mix of science, history, and even caricature—he is a phylogenetic foil for Homo sapiens. “We see ourselves, for better or worse, in comparison to Neanderthals,” suggests archaeologist Dr. Julien Riel-Salvatore. “We want to see how we stand out, but lately research seems to shy away from the question of direct competition with Homo sapiens. We’re moving toward a more nuanced understanding of the species; offering hypotheses that are not just quasi-biological explanations for human-Neanderthal interactions or a strict biological determinism to explain Neanderthal extinction.”28
Today, the Old Man is more than just the sum of his studies—more than just his skeleton and more than simple scientific evidence. After his discovery, he became a character de force in hominin evolutionary history. Like a dignified family patriarch, the Old Man presides over our evolutionary story. He is paleoanthropology’s first famous fossil and he continues to resonate in both the scientific and popular imagination.
Charles Dawson holding cast of Piltdown skull, ca. 1914.
(The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. Used with permission)
CHAPTER TWO
PILTDOWN: A NAME WITHOUT A FOSSIL
On February 14, 1912, Charles Dawson, a legal solicitor and well-known artifact collector, happened to notice some peculiarities about a bed of gravel that contained bits of bone near Barkham Manor, at Piltdown, close to his hometown of Lewes in southern England. Dawson’s curiosity about the site prompted him to write to his friend and colleague Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of geology at the British Museum (Natural History) in London, to tell him of his discovery.
“I have come across a very old Pleistocene (?) bed overlying the Hastings Bed between Uckfield and Crowborough which I think is going to be interesting,” Dawson penned to Smith Woodward in a letter dated the following day. “It has a lot of iron-stained flint in it, so I suppose it is the oldest known flint gravel in the Weald. I (think) portion of a human (?) skull [sic] which will rival H. Heidelbergensis [sic] in solidarity.”1
Dawson was the author of the extensive two-volume History of Hastings Castle and an avowed antiquarian enthusiast. He was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Geological Society of London. For years, Dawson had collected fossils around the Lewes area and sent them to Smith Woodward and the British Museum. But the discovery of these flint artifacts and the portion of a human skull mentioned in that February letter were curiosities of a different kind. While Paleolithic Stone Age materials had been found in England for decades by amateurs and professional collectors alike, these artifacts had not been found with bones old enough to be a species different and older than Homo sapiens.
The Heidelberg fossil from Germany that Dawson referenced in his letter was a humanlike jaw discovered in 1907—the Mauer mandible, as it became known—that had pushed back the age of humanity’s antiquity in Europe. The Mauer mandible was significant to researchers, like Smith Woodward and Dawson, interested in Homo sapiens antiquity in Europe. Alluding to this fossil, naturally, would have piqued Smith Woodward’s interest. The discovery of an ancient human from the Pleistocene was something completely new for the British paleointelligentsia. While Britain did have evidence of ancient humans—from the geologically recent Holocene—nothing as old as the Pleistocene had been found prior to Dawson’s discovery. Given this, Arthur Smith Woodward was more than just a little interested in learning about the fossil remains, and so he set about organizing further excavations of the Barkham Manor gravel pit.
The turn of the twentieth century was an exciting time for paleontological discoveries, and fossils captured scientific and public imaginations alike. In that original letter to Smith Woodward, Dawson also wrote, “Yes, Conan Doyle is writing a sort of Jules Verne book on some wonderful plateau in S. America with a lake which somehow got isolation from ‘Oolitic’ times and contained old the [sic] fauna and flora of that period, and was visited by the unusual ‘Professor.’ I hope someone has sorted out his fossils for him!”2 Arthur Conan Doyle’s issues with South American fossils aside, little could either Dawson or Smith Woodward imagine that the portion of human skull from those very old Pleistocene beds at Piltdown near East Sussex would easily be the most famous—or infamous—discovery in the history of studying human evolution. Over the last hundred years, the legend and mystique of Piltdown has well outgrown its humble gravel origins.
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When Dawson’s discovery at Piltdown entered the paleodiscourse in 1912, it was a truly curious find. To begin with, the fossil’s anatomy was a bit of a conundrum—when assembled together, the fossil appeared to have an apelike jaw and humanlike skull, suggesting the fossil could be the perfect “missing link” between apes and humans. The shape and features of the skull seemed to emphasize humans’ distinctive “big brains” and suggested that we acquired the capacity for complex thought very early in our evolutionary history. With those characteristics, the fossil lent a credibility, even legitimacy, to a narrative of unilinear evolution—that humans were the culminating end point of primate evolution. Fragmented though it was, the Piltdown fossil provided a very neatly packaged evolutionary story for the antiquity of Homo sapiens.
But the irony was that the Piltdown fossil wasn’t really a fossil human ancestor—it wasn’t even a “real” fossil. In the early 1950s, the Piltdown materials were found to be a hoax. It was fossil forgery of the first degree, comprising real but very recently old human crania, orangutan bones, and chimpanzee teeth all masquerading as a fossil much older than it was. For early twentieth-century studies in human evolution, Piltdown was simply a critical piece of evidence for sorting out humans’ ancestral family tree; by midcentury, Piltdown was a social experimentum crucis—a litmus test, if you will, for using new technologies and methodologies against long-held beliefs about the specimen as a fossil ancestor. More th
an one hundred years after its discovery, Piltdown is an unsolved mystery as well as a cautionary tale for bending fact to fit the theory.3
Consequently, Piltdown Man remains one of the most-studied but least-resolved fossils within paleoanthropology, and for forty years the fossil has been an anchoring point for interpreting hominins and hominin phylogeny. But why? And how? How did the fossil move from a “portion of a human (?) skull [sic] which will rival H. Heidelbergensis [sic] in solidarity” to a scientific and social problem that needed a solution? Why does this problematic fossil have an incredible staying force within the scientific field even today?
In the first decade of the twentieth century, the fledgling discipline of paleoanthropology had precious few fossils to hang their science on. It could boast a couple of Neanderthal skulls from France, the Old Man’s skeleton, of course, the Homo heidelbergensis jaw from Germany, some other scattered skeletal elements from around Europe, a skull from Australia, and a few other bits and fragments here and there. The reigning fossil du jour was the Dutch anatomist Eugène Dubois’s 1891 discovery of Java Man (which Dubois termed Pithecanthropus erectus), found in Trinil, Indonesia, which dominated the paleointellectual landscape for decades.
Although many Paleolithic stone tool artifacts had been found in Britain by the early twentieth century, there wasn’t any kind of skeletal candidate for human ancestry that indicated the geologic antiquity of early Homo sapiens in Britain. If the stone tools and other evidence of early man were being recovered, the logic went, then it should be only a matter of time until a suitable skeleton (from the geologically old Pleistocene era) was discovered with them. But the question still fronted the scientific community: Where was the elusive skeleton of “early man”—as he was called—in Britain?
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After the initial discovery of the Piltdown materials and the ensuing February 1912 letter, the fossil and its excavation were kept a closely guarded secret from the media’s prying eyes to allow scientists to study the fossil carefully. In his official account of the Piltdown discovery, published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London later that same year, Charles Dawson suggested that his interest in the Piltdown site had been piqued well before 1912:
Several years ago I was walking along a farm-road close to Piltdown Common, Fletching (Sussex), when I noticed that the road had been mended with some peculiar brown flints not usual in the district… . Upon one of my subsequent visits to the pit, one of the men handed me a small portion of an unusually thick human parietal bone …
It was not until some years later, in the autumn of 1911, on a visit to the spot, that I picked up, among the rain-washed spoil-heaps of the gravelpit, another and larger piece belonging to the frontal region of the same skull, including a portion of the left superciliary ridge … I accordingly took it to Dr. A. Smith Woodward at the British Museum (Natural History) for comparison and determination. He was immediately impressed with the importance of the discovery, and we decided to amply labour and to make a systematic search among the spoil-heaps and gravel, as soon as the flood had abated; for the gravelpit is more or less under water during five or six months of the year. We accordingly gave up as much time as we could spare since last spring (1912), and completely turned over and sifted what spoil-material remained; we also dug up and sifted such portions of the gravel as had been left undisturbed by the workmen.4
This account of the fossil’s discovery was read at a meeting of the Geological Society of London on December 18, 1912. However, various newspapers that covered that meeting quoted Dawson as claiming to have been first handed a fragment of cranium “four years ago,” putting the “discovery” of the fossil in 1908.
Perhaps more spectacularly, Dawson claimed that the Piltdown cranial fragments had been accidently broken and then discarded by the workers at the gravel pit, where Dawson alleged the workers said that the pieces looked like broken “cocoa-nuts.” (The original notes to his portion of the Geological Society paper provide us with a bit of archival evidence to the “coconut” story associated with Piltdown.) Under the heading “Brief Story of Discovery” in his Quarterly Journal article, Dawson wrote: “Human skull found and broken by workmen. Hence subsequent digging both in spoil-material and in the bottom layer of gravel left untouched by them.”5 In fact, two versions of the “coconut” story appear in the newspaper. The first relates how Dawson was handed a fragment of the broken skull and his subsequent efforts to recover any other discarded pieces. The second description of the coconut story reports that all of the coconut parts of the specimen were discarded and then recounts Dawson’s efforts to recover them.6
Regardless of the exact circumstances of the fossil’s discovery, upon receiving Dawson’s letter Smith Woodward agreed to visit the site and considered it worthwhile to launch an excavation and formal investigation. Throughout the summer of 1912—at Smith Woodward’s and Dawson’s own expense, as Smith Woodward’s wife, Lady Maud, recalled years later—the first field season of digging was completed on weekends by a few trusted colleagues. Smith Woodward came down from London and lodged with his wife at the railway hotel in Uckfield or at Dawson’s home in Lewes.
In his memoir, The Earliest Englishman, Smith Woodward described some hilarity that surrounded those 1912 excavations: “Both the landowner and the farmer had given Mr. Dawson permission to explore the gravel pit at Barkham Manor without knowing precisely what was his object. He had merely expressed interest in the brown flints found there. The eagerness with which we all dug and sifted gravel during the first week therefore excited much interest and curiosity in the neighbourhood.”7 One can almost picture a Downton Abbey–esque moment where life at the manor was interrupted by a group of guys digging around the road leading to the property. “The police were informed,” Smith Woodward recalled, “and the following Monday morning the local constable appeared at Mr. Dawson’s office in Uckfield (where he was Clerk to the Magistrates), stating that he had a report to make. Dr. Dawson, as usual in such cases, admitted the constable, and was surprised to learn from him that, ‘three toffs, two from London had been digging like mad in the gravelpit at Barkham, and nobody could make out what they were up to.’ Mr. Dawson’s embarrassment may easily be imagined, but he remained calm and quietly explained to the constable that there were interesting flints in the neighbourhood, and perhaps the men he reported were merely harmless seekers after these flints.”8
The famous French Jesuit prehistorian and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, joined Smith Woodward and Dawson’s original excavation team in the spring of 1912. In a letter dated May 18, 1912, Teilhard describes the work at Barkham Manor: “I forgot to tell you that when Dawson came along the last time [April 20, 1912] he appeared with a large carefully wrapped box from which he excitedly drew one third of the skull of the ‘Homo Lewensis’ found by him during these last years in some alluvia (reposing on Wealdian) near Uckfield. The skull is certainly very curious, of deep chocolate colour and especially of a stupefying thickness (about one centimetre at the thinnest points); unfortunately the characteristic parts, orbits, jaws etc. are missing.”9
Over that 1912 field season, Dawson, Smith Woodward, and Teilhard collected skeletal remains, mammalian fauna, and artifact implements. The laborers found an additional seven cranial fragments, the right half of a jaw with two molars in situ, as well as a modest assortment of fossil animal bones and stone artifacts. Between Dawson’s original collections at Barkham Manor in 1908 and 1912, recovered artifacts included a total of ten bone fragments from a cranium and mandible, ten fragments of fauna (ancient hippopotamus, mastodons, and horses, mainly), and twelve artifacts classified as a variety of Paleolithic scrapers, drills, and other stone tools.10 The Piltdown skull was an isolated find, yes, in that there weren’t other remains of human ancestors in the assemblage or other sites like Piltdown in the area, but the skull and jaw were found in the company of mastodon molars and Paleolithic tools—givi
ng Piltdown Man an archaeological context and an authenticity derived from associated stone tool artifacts.
For the 1912–1913 Piltdown field seasons, Smith Woodward employed local photographer John Frisby to take pictures of the site and excavations, as well as produce a rather formal portrait of Dawson with the Piltdown fossil. Frisby’s photographs show Smith Woodward and Dawson excavating at the site, often with unnamed laborers. (One of the most well-known photographs has “Chipper the Goose” preening his way across the lower left quadrant of the image.) Hiring a photographer to document the Piltdown area illustrates how important the site was to the Piltdown research team.
Central to the Piltdown story is the field site of Piltdown itself. In the early days of the fossil’s discovery, the Piltdown quarry functioned as a text to be read, interpreted, and reread as the paleointelligentsia quibbled over Piltdown’s evolutionary relationship with other fossil hominin finds. Since the site was relatively close to the intellectual metropoles for the study of human evolution—as opposed to fossil hominin sites in Java, South Africa, or even rural France—Piltdown was a physical place for researchers to visit and make sense of. That physicality, coupled with reports and photographs from famous scientists, offered a particular legitimacy for the fossil’s initial discovery. The presence of a field site made the fossil real in a way that was difficult to challenge. Photographing the excavations was yet another way of cementing that social legitimacy.
