Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [28]
Leakey’s interest in the potential of Miocene sites in western Kenya had been prompted by discoveries made there during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1927, a white farmer in Koru quarrying for agricultural lime had found some fossilised bones, including the upper jaw of an ancient ape, which were eventually sent to Arthur Hopwood at the British Museum for examination. Hopwood was convinced that the jaw belonged to an ancestor of chimpanzees. In 1931, he spent five weeks exploring Miocene sites in western Kenya, recovering nine more specimens of apelike creatures from Koru and numerous other mammal fossils. Writing in a London journal in 1933, Hopwood labelled the Miocene apes Proconsul africanus—‘Before Consul’—taking the name of a famous zoo chimpanzee. The following year, Leakey had begun exploring Miocene deposits on Rusinga Island, finding sixteen more specimens of Miocene apes. On subsequent visits, he found several more fragments, including the most complete jaw of any Miocene ape yet discovered.
The Leakeys’ 1948 expedition to Rusinga was a triumph. Two days after setting up camp under a spreading fig tree near Kaswanga Point, Mary spotted the glint of a tooth on the sloping surface of a small gully. Carefully brushing the surrounding area, she uncovered the greater part of a Proconsul skull, the first ever to be discovered. ‘This was a wildly exciting find’, she wrote in her autobiography. ‘Ours were the first eyes to see a Proconsul face’.
The discovery made news around the world. When Mary took the skull to England for examination, she was met by a scrum of reporters. The reception at the airport, she cabled to Louis, was ‘overwhelming’. Crowds flocked to see the skull on exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London. Delighted by the find, Boise promptly provided a cheque for £1,600 to assist further expeditions to Rusinga. The tally of finds at Miocene sites in western Kenya eventually rose to more than 15,000 fossils, including bones of 450 individual apes.
In 1951, the Leakeys took Charles Boise to Olduvai. During previous visits they had managed to cover much ground, exploring in all 180 miles of exposures and marking out potential sites. But they had never been able to undertake any major excavations. Louis’s great ambition was to find evidence of the early man he believed had produced the stone tools uncovered there. Although Boise found the heat, wind and dust tiring, he nevertheless enjoyed himself and set up a covenant for the Leakeys to carry out excavations for the next seven years. It was to prove to be a turning point in their work there.
In England, the demise of Piltdown Man finally came in 1953. The chain of events that ultimately exposed the fraud started when Kenneth Oakley of the Natural History Museum subjected the fossils to a new dating technique, the fluorine absorption test. The tests established that they were relatively modern. Subsequent investigations swiftly revealed the hoax. Every single one of some forty finds at Piltdown had been forged and planted there: The skull fragments belonged to a modern human, 600 years old; the jawbone belonged to an orang-utan estimated to be 500 years old; the teeth had been filed down to produce a human pattern of wear; all the objects had been carefully stained to give them an aged appearance. What was astonishing was that so many eminent scientists had allowed such a crude forgery to pass without challenge for so long.
Piltdown Man was no ordinary hoax: It was a systematic campaign carried out over several years. The early skull fragments were created in advance and salted with the intention that more extensive finds would be planted at a later stage. Pieces were put together to fit in with the prevailing view about what an ancestral human should look like. Convinced of its authenticity, some scientists—including Sir Arthur