Aztec Treasure House. Evan S. Connell
were collected and glued together. And one hot August day Father Teilhard de Chardin, who had become interested in the project, was seated on a dump heap beside the pit idly running his fingers through the gravel when he noticed a canine tooth.
This tooth caused further debate at the Geological Society. It was very large, perhaps too large, and it appeared to be the tooth of a relatively old man whereas the jaw was that of a young man. Did this tooth come from another skull?
Piltdown Man eventually was accepted by English scientists, not without discomfort, as certain applicants for a social club may be accepted; but among friends and relatives, so to speak, he was admitted to the evolutionary tree. Elsewhere his credentials were not approved. Giuffrida-Ruggeri in Italy, Mollison in Germany, and Boule in France all thought the jaw belonged to an ape. American experts, too, looked skeptically at the reconstruction.
Against their doubts stood the simple argument of the discovery: fossil remains taken from Pleistocene gravel, much of it excavated under the meticulous supervision of Dr. Smith-Woodward of the British Museum.
Year after year the dispute simmered.
Then in 1953 the skull got a new custodian, Dr. Kenneth Oakley, who subjected it to a fluorine test. Buried bones gradually absorb fluorine from water in the earth; the longer the burial, the more fluorine.
Results of Oakley’s tests were astonishing and puzzling. On the basis of fluorine content the jaw and skullcap did indeed belong together, yet they held less fluorine than animal bones taken from the same stratum. The contradiction so exasperated Dr. Oakley that he abruptly told a colleague: “This thing is bogus!” But his intuitive thrust was ignored, perhaps because the skull had been in the museum such a long time—almost forty years. One hesitates to denounce an old acquaintance.
A few months later an Oxford anthropologist named J. S. Weiner was driving home at night when he clearly understood that Piltdown Man was a fake. And it is curious how often an insight such as Weiner’s is accompanied by actual physical movement. The astronomer Kepler, while drawing a figure on the blackboard for his students, was seized by an idea which led to our modern concept of the universe. The mathematician Poincaré reported that just as he was getting aboard an omnibus, just as his foot touched the step, a brilliant realization unfolded: “that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.” Beethoven, writing to his friend Tobias von Haslinger: “On my way to Vienna yesterday, sleep overtook me in my carriage. . . . Now during my sleep-journey, the following canon came into my head. . . .” A. E. Houseman: “Two of the stanzas . . . came into my head, just as they are printed, while I was crossing Hampstead Heath. . . .” And we have the testimony of Bertrand Russell who says that while walking toward Cambridge, capriciously tossing a tin of pipe tobacco and catching it—at the exact instant a ray of sunlight reflected from the metal surface of the tin he understood the basis of a certain philosophical argument. Goethe, too, experienced a swift flowering of knowledge while out for a walk, just as he noticed the whitened skull of a sheep on a hillside.
So it happened with the anthropologist, driving alone at night from London.
Weiner mentioned his startling thought to Sir Wilfred Le Gros Clark at Oxford. Then he took a chimpanzee jaw and spent a while filing down the molars. He was surprised by how quickly the teeth could be redesigned to look like human teeth. He dipped the chimp’s jaw in permanganate until it acquired a suitable brownish hue and when it was dry he laid his new fossil on the desk of Le Gros Clark. He is said to have remarked with a look of innocence: “I got this out of the collections. What do you suppose it is?” And Sir Wilfrid, who knew immediately, exclaimed: “You can’t mean it!”
They decided to have a conference with Oakley.
Soon after that conference Piltdown Man started falling apart. Those distinctively human molars had been artificially flattened; close inspection revealed that their surfaces were not quite on the same plane, as though the counterfeiter had altered his grip when he moved from one tooth to the next. The delicate turbinal bones were not what previous investigators had presumed them to be; they were merely a few bone splinters of indeterminate origin. The canine tooth found by Teilhard de Chardin was X-rayed and discovered to be a young tooth that had been ground down until the pulp chamber was almost exposed, which would not happen to a living tooth.
New chemical tests showed a nitrogen concentration of 3.9 percent in the jaw, 1.4 percent in the skullcap. There was also, on this occasion, a discrepancy in the fluorine content.
Details were noticed that should have been noticed earlier. Stone “tools” from the pit had been superficially stained with iron salts—except for one that had been colored with bichromate of potash. An elephant-bone pick, when examined under a glass, revealed uncharacteristic marks. This implement, said Oakley, was probably obtained from a Middle Pleistocene brick-earth or sandy formation: “The ends were whittled with a steel knife. . . .”
Various bones taken from the pit were given a newly developed test for uranium salts. If the bones had come naturally to their ultimate resting place the Geiger counter should have clicked along at more or less the same speed, but Oakley noted a wide spectrum, including one “fossil” so radioactive that when left on a photographic plate it took its own picture.
Thus, after forty years, the walls came tumbling down. The pit had been salted from top to bottom. The skullcap was old, perhaps even Neolithic; the jaw was recent and apparently belonged to a female orangutan. Of eighteen specimens collected by Dawson and Smith-Woodward ten unquestionably were fraudulent. As to the other eight, they are not held in high esteem.
Punch ran a cartoon showing Piltdown Man in a dentist’s chair with the dentist saying, “This may hurt, but I’m afraid I’ll have to remove the whole jaw.”
And a motion was put before the House of Commons: “That the House has no confidence in the Trustees of the British Museum. . . .”
Among those trustees were some rather celebrated personages including Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a member of the royal family.
Many scientists regarded the great Piltdown farce as not only an embarrassment but a waste of time. Others disagreed. It did stimulate public interest in anthropology; it did remind professionals of the need for accurate data and improved analytical procedures.
One is entitled to ask, of course, how so many eminent scientists could have been fooled for such a long while. There’s no satisfactory answer. Dr. Louis Leakey suggested that the Piltdown bones were accepted as genuine because they fitted the pattern of what a very early human skull ought to look like. And this preconceived image must have been known to whoever contrived the hoax. Leakey himself had been dissatisfied with the skull, yet the idea of a forgery never occurred to him.
Asking himself how he could have been duped, he recalled a day in 1933 when he went to the British Museum. After explaining to the curator that he was writing a textbook on early man, he was escorted to the basement where the Piltdown fossils were kept in a safe. They were removed from the safe and placed on a table, together with reproductions. “I was not allowed to handle the originals in any way,” said Leakey, “but merely to look at them and satisfy myself that the casts were really good replicas.” The originals were then locked up, leaving him with only the casts to study. “It is my belief now that it was under these conditions that all visiting scientists were permitted to examine the Piltdown specimens. . . .”
Two other important questions cannot be answered. First, who was responsible? Second, what was the motive?
Charles Dawson, who died in 1916, is thought to have been the villain. Whoever concocted the fake had known quite a lot about anatomy, geology, and paleontology. Dawson qualified. There were no other suspects. “It is certainly not nice to accuse a dead man who cannot defend himself,” wrote the Dutch geologist von Koenigswald, “but everything points quite clearly to his responsibility for the forgery.”
Besides, Dawson once claimed to have observed a sea serpent in the Channel—although one must admit this is not impossible. Another time he was sure he had found a petrified toad. And he seems to have been