by Lydia Pyne
One of Frisby’s most interestingly poignant photographs from those early days of Piltdown is his portrait, later printed as a postcard, of Charles Dawson. The portrait shows Dawson in a jacket and waist vest with a pocket watch, sitting in a chair with fossils on a table in front of him. He cradles a reconstructed cast of Piltdown in his left hand as he examines a bit of cranium in his right hand. Trees reflect off the glass doors of the bookshelves in the backdrop. Dawson, who died in 1916, looks every bit the part of a proper fossil collector, intrigued by the paleo remains. The photograph also creates an interesting story arc—the fossils are in bits and then must be reconstructed or mediated by the person, with the construction of each “stage” of the paleo process in his hands. There’s a sense that Dawson is negotiating the fossils from indistinguishable bits of rock to a fully recognizable fossil ancestor.
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However much Smith Woodward and Dawson worked to keep the remarkable find veiled in secrecy and their excavations completely under wraps—again, to allow them time for detailed analyses of the fossils—there were rumors of the “remarkable skull” found at Piltdown circulating in the British media by late September 1912. By mid-November, the story was reported in the national press, and the duo began to make preparations to formally present the fossil to the Geological Society of London.
The night of Wednesday, December 18, 1912, the Geological Society was packed to the gills in anticipation of seeing the Piltdown material in the flesh. (Or bone, rather.) The braincase consisted of four large pieces reconstructed from nine fragments. In addition to the fossils, Smith Woodward also unveiled the first of his reconstructions of the fossil, filling in the missing parts of the hominin’s face, crania, and jaw. At the Geological Society presentation, Smith Woodward and Dawson presented the fossil’s scientific name, Eoanthropus dawsoni—“Dawson’s dawn ape,” in honor of its discoverer. Many in attendance, such as Smith Woodward, the Honorable Professor of Archaeology William Boyd Dawkins, and those associated with the British Museum (Natural History), were excited about the Piltdown fossil since it so perfectly fit with the in-vogue scientific theory that big brains had a particularly long existence.
Smith Woodward claimed that the find pointed to a “missing link” in the chain of human evolution—a fossil that could be reconstructed as a human ancestor with a large brain evidencing the long significance of Homo sapiens culture (assuming a big brain was requisite for complex human culture writ large—language, symbology, and so on). Smith Woodward wasn’t alone in his interpretation. The Piltdown fossils were folded into the paleo community, and many fossils found in subsequent decades (such as the 1925 Taung Child in South Africa) were ignored due to the wielding influence of Piltdown. Even prominent American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (then president of the American Museum of Natural History) declared the skull and jaw a perfect fit and the specimen fascinating. In short, the Piltdown fossil offered human evolution a neat narrative with the evidence to back it up. But the complete, unquestioned acceptance of the fossil as a specimen from a single individual of ancient geological age was far from a sure thing, even upon Piltdown’s unveiling in 1912.
Portrait: Examining the Piltdown Skull, by John Cooke, 1915. Back row: F. O. Barlow, G. Elliot Smith, Charles Dawson, Arthur Smith Woodward. Front row: A. S. Underwood, Arthur Keith, W. P. Pycraft, and Ray Lankester. Note Charles Darwin portrait behind the examiners.
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The second Piltdown field season lacked the secrecy that surrounded the first, and in 1913 the Piltdown site was flooded with visitors, especially enthusiasts affiliated with the Geological Association. In fact, going to Piltdown’s site became rather like embarking on a holiday excursion for scientists and general public alike. Photographs of that season show the Association’s ladies and gentlemen in full Edwardian splendor milling around the site, picnicking, and peering at the excavations.
Archaeologist William Boyd Dawkins, author of the classic 1880 book Early Man in Britain, accepted the initial interpretation of Piltdown put forward by Smith Woodward and Dawson. “Man appears in Britain and the Continent at the period when he might be expected to appear,” Dawkins argued in Geology Magazine in 1915, “from the study of the evolution of the Tertiary Mammalia—at the beginning of the Pleistocene age when the existing Eutherian mammalian species were abundant. He may be looked for in the Pliocene when the existing species were few. In the older strata—Miocene, Oligocene, Eocene—he can only be represented by an ancestry of intermediate forms.”11
One of the biggest debates in the paleointelligentsia of the early twentieth century was the development of an evolutionary sequence of “humanlike” traits and the order that these traits appear in the fossil record. The question of whether brains developed before or after bipedalism occupied a good proportion of paleo research efforts. The Piltdown fossil seemed to weigh in on all the big questions and was touted as proof that large brains had evolved first.
By 1915, Piltdown was firmly ensconced in the paleo world, despite some detractors. In fact, Piltdown was so completely established in the scientific community, any theory or hypothesis about human evolution had to address the Piltdown fossil, either in support (usually) or as detractors (less so). “The ‘dawn man,’” Henry Fairfield Osborn wrote in the 1925 edition of Men of the Old Stone Age, referring to Eoanthropus dawsoni, “is the most ancient human type in which the form of the head and size of the brain are known. Its anatomy, as well as its geologic antiquity, is therefore of profound interest and worth of very full consideration.”12
While various scientific communities would continue to debate Piltdown’s geological and anatomical details for decades, the fossil came to life through the barrage of newspaper articles and quickly became a staple of museum exhibits on Early Man, thanks to casts and artists’ reconstructions of the fossil. Unlike Paleolithic sites in Europe, like La Chapelle, Piltdown was relatively accessible for British scientists interested in examining the fossil’s location for themselves, as Barkham Manor was only a train ride away from London.
The British Museum’s Guide to the Fossil Remains of Man was issued in 1918 specifically to educate visitors about Piltdown. “That he cannot be later than early Pleistocene is proved, if it be admitted that the bone implement shown in fig. 2 (p. 11) was made by Piltdown man; for this implement is fashioned from the middle of the thighbone of one of the gigantic elephants (such as Elephas meridionalis and Elephas antiquus) which lived in Europe in the latter part of the Pliocene and the early part of the Pleistocene period.”13 The hubbub that surrounded Piltdown, where it was discovered, and how it was displayed in museums meant that people were invested in the social success of the fossil.
The preface to A Guide to the Fossil Remains of Man, a pamphlet text for museumgoers, published by the Department of Geology, British Museum (Natural History) (today’s Natural History Museum, London), 1918.
Upon the original publication of the Piltdown fossil, Sir Arthur Smith Woodward and Sir Arthur Keith each created a cast, and the reconstructions offered slightly different interpretations of Piltdown’s cranial anatomy. When more cranial fragments were recovered during the 1913 field season, scientific consensus favored Smith Woodward’s reconstruction over Keith’s, implicitly lending credibility to Smith Woodward’s overarching theories. (Casts of Piltdown—used even today as teaching materials or historical curiosities—are based on Smith Woodward’s reconstructions.) Interestingly, the cast of Piltdown caused some issues within scientific communities, as not all researchers were satisfied with examining a cast of a fossil and not the fossil itself. In his 1915 assessment of the Piltdown remains, Smithsonian scientist Gerrit Smith Miller, Jr., complained about having to use a cast of the remains for his study. Even with the cast, Miller concluded that the skull fragments and jaw were simply too different from each other to assume that they were from the same individual. Miller posited that the cranium was from a human and assigned the jaw to the proposed species Pan vertus, a species of fos
sil chimpanzee suggested by Miller.
Comparison of La Chapelle-aux-Saints Neanderthal, Piltdown Man, and modern Homo sapiens in A Guide to the Fossil Remains of Man, published by the Department of Geology, British Museum (Natural History), 1918.
But most of Piltdown’s public met the fossil through art and museum exhibits, not necessarily through the fossil’s cast replicas. Sketches of Piltdown weren’t hard to come by—every newspaper article that mentioned the fossil seemed to have some kind of artistic doodle of Piltdown’s face to put with the article. But it was Belgian museum conservator Aimé Rutot’s reconstruction of the fossil that came to dominate the paleoart genres and museum scenes of the early twentieth century. The reconstruction was part of a series of sculpted busts of prehistoric humans, produced in Belgium in the 1910s, that were widely disseminated throughout the 1920s (either as copies or in photographs), and it was this reconstruction that became Piltdown’s most public face.14
This stereoscope reconstruction of Piltdown by Keystone would have been a way for people to “see” the Piltdown exhibit.
Rutot’s reconstruction pushed public awareness of the fossil even further when the Keystone View Company included Piltdown as one of the stereoscope cards in its biology unit as a teaching tool. This specific card—“Evolution, Early Man: Piltdown”—puts the Piltdown fossil squarely in the public’s eye on two levels. Not only does Rutot’s reconstruction put a face on the fossil, the Keystone stereoscope cards reinforced the accessible nature of the image—no scientific expertise was needed to use the instrument or to interpret the image. The Piltdown specimen could be studied, photographed, and sketched and the cast propagated through scientific, educational, and museum circles, lending a sense of credibility—even legitimacy—to the fossil copy.
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Although Piltdown appeared to offer perfect evidence for the British-driven and British-centered view of human evolution, several aspects of the find were troubling to many within scientific communities. Some were concerned that the bones were conveniently missing their most diagnostic features, while others were concerned about whether the gravels that the fossil was found in were really as ancient as the Pleistocene.
Scientific responses to the Piltdown fossil varied, even in that initial meeting in December 1912. Two major issues about the fossil were immediately raised by the discussants, including the prominent anatomists Arthur Keith and Grafton Elliot Smith and archaeologist William Boyd Dawkins. First, they were concerned about the association of the skull with the jaw—whether the recovered and fragmentary parts belonged to the same species, let alone the same individual. Second, opinion was split regarding the age of the fossil—whether the Piltdown discovery was rather recent in age, from the Holocene, or older, from the Pleistocene. If the gravels and surrounding materials could be undisputedly sourced to an older geological epoch (say, the Pliocene or Pleistocene), then logically the fossil materials that were recovered from those sediments would geologically be associated with the older materials—indicating that Piltdown Man was a legitimate fossil, old enough to be a contender in the hominin family tree. Indeed, as British Museum anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith noted, why would one assume “that Nature had played the amazing trick of depositing in the same bed of gravel the braincase (without the jaw) of a hitherto unknown type of early Pleistocene Man displaying unique, simian traits alongside the jaw (without the braincase) of an equally unknown Pleistocene Ape displaying human traits unknown in any Ape”?15
Skull of Eoanthropus dawsoni, or Piltdown Man. The smooth white sections are reconstructed parts of the cast, while the darker brown sections are replicas of the Piltdown remains. (Wellcome Library, London)
The Piltdown man of Sussex, England. Reconstruction of bust at ¾ view, sculpture by J. McGregor, 1927. (Wellcome Library, London)
In his popular book Missing Links, John Reader notes, “The experts may have disputed the association of the Piltdown jaw and skull … but the Piltdown remains proved beyond doubt that mankind had already developed a remarkably large brain by the beginning of the Pleistocene. And the implications of this were very important.”16 Most important to Piltdown’s success was that these experts elevated the evolutionary significance of the Piltdown fossil above the Pithecanthropus fossil in Java and the La Chapelle Neanderthal—because of Piltdown’s larger brain and its clean geological context. Piltdown’s solid footing in British scientific circles made the fossil particularly difficult to challenge until new fossils were discovered in Zhoukoudian in China (described by Franz Weidenreich in the late 1930s), providing paleoanthropology with a more complicated evolutionary tree.
By the late 1940s, the rumblings of discontent about Piltdown within academic circles deepened. Archaeologist Alvan T. Marston, for example, gave a paper at the Geological Society of London in 1947, where he described the Piltdown mandible and canine tooth as “pure ape”—a claim that, if true, would mean that the fossil wasn’t a human ancestor. (Marston had discovered a Pleistocene hominin cranium at Swanscombe—a site in Kent, England—in the mid-1930s; his participation in scientific meetings as an elevated amateur would not be as odd as it might seem to modern readers.) Marston’s claim prompted a great deal of discussion and added to earlier concerns, like those expressed by Gerrit Smith Miller, Jr., of the Smithsonian. Dr. Kenneth Oakley, a geologist and paleontologist from the British Museum (Natural History), suggested that it might be possible to test the Piltdown fossils for fluorine content using a method he himself had developed, and this test would help to resolve the community’s questions.
Testing the Piltdown fossil—any fossil, really, but Piltdown specifically—using Oakley’s criteria meant comparing the fluorine content of modern, subfossil, and fossil materials of specific ages. Fluorine testing does not present researchers with an absolute date, as would be the case with carbon-14 testing or other radiometric testing, but it does indicate whether the materials being tested are the same age. If tested materials showed the same amount of fluorine, then the materials would be the same age, since the materials would have absorbed the same amount of fluorine from their environment. This logic had been applied to the femur, skullcap, and tooth Dutch anatomist Eugène Dubois had recovered in the late nineteenth century in Java, indicating that the Java individual was just that: a single individual. Oakley’s method of testing the Piltdown materials—the cranium, jaw, canine, and other mammalian fossils from the collection—meant researchers would be able to know whether the Piltdown fossil parts were really from one individual, as assumed, or not.
Fluorine testing requires a small part of a fossil be destroyed in order to measure the amount of fluorine in the specimen. In September 1948, after months of careful consideration, the British Museum’s Department of Geology gave permission for Oakley and his associates to sample part of the Piltdown fossil for their analysis. “The curator of a palaeontological collection, which may contain rare specimens of great scientific importance, is frequently faced with the problem of whether to allow such specimens to be reinvestigated by treatment with acids, section, removal of fragments for chemical analysis, or other methods which might seem to involve damage to a unique object,” notes W. N. Edwards, keeper of geology for the British Museum (Natural History), in the 1953 publication The Solution of the Piltdown Problem. “The cautious attitude of a previous generation has undoubtedly preserved for their successors many fossils which, for examples, might have been damaged by mechanical treatment in the past, but can now be developed in perfection by more recently devised chemical methods.”17 In The Piltdown Inquest, author Charles Blinderman describes the sampling: “This wasn’t as much of a desecration as drilling into the Crown Jewels, but the fossils had been protected from German bombs during two wars, from being molested by inquisitive scientists for forty years, and even from the public, who viewed not the fossils themselves, but casts.”18
The first round of fluorine tests indicated that the Piltdown materials were of a similar age and differed from the elephant
and hippo fossils excavated from Piltdown. But the results also showed a difference in fluorine content between the crania and mandibular fragments. Subsequent chemical analyses measured nitrogen in the Piltdown materials and indicated that the pieces were much too recent to have come from the Pleistocene. The Piltdown “fossil” was made up of bones from three modern species—a human skull, an orangutan jaw, and chimpanzee teeth. Under the lens of powerful microscopes, the teeth in the mandible showed striations across their surfaces—evidence that the cusps on the ape molars had been filed down to make a correct identification of their species difficult. And thanks to this new scrutiny of the “fossil,” researchers found that the entire set of bones was stained with a dark iron solution to make it look older than it was. The findings were conclusive: Piltdown Man was a fake.
“From the evidence which we have obtained, it is now clear that the distinguished palaeontologists and archaeologists who took part in the excavations at Piltdown were the victims of a most elaborate and carefully prepared hoax,” anthropologists Kenneth Oakley, Joseph Weiner, and Wilfrid Le Gros Clark argue in the report of their findings, The Solution of the Piltdown Problem. “Let it be said, however, in exoneration of those who have assumed the Piltdown fragments to belong to a single individual, or who, having examined the original specimens, either regarded the mandible and canine as those of a fossil ape or else assumed (tacitly or explicitly) that the problem was not capable of solution on the available evidence, that the faking of the mandible and canine is so extraordinarily skillful, and the perpetration of the hoax appears to have been so entirely unscrupulous and inexplicable, as to find no parallel in the history of palaeontological discovery.”19
