Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [29]
A minor literary industry sprang up to identify the culprits. The list of suspects was long but was eventually whittled down to two men. The most obvious candidate was Charles Dawson, the local lawyer who was the first person to search for fossils in the Piltdown quarry. An amateur archaeologist, he was known to be keen to build up a reputation for himself in academic circles by making spectacular discoveries, but the full extent of his ambition did not become evident for decades. In subsequent investigations, Dawson turned out to be an inveterate hoaxer and forger, claiming dozens of significant finds that later turned out to be fraudulent.
The other candidate was Martin Hinton, an eccentric and devious character with a reputation for playing practical jokes who rose to become the Keeper of Zoology at the Natural History Museum. Throughout the period of the Piltdown affair, he was working as a curator in the museum’s Geology Department. One possible motive attributed to him was that he was driven by an abiding dislike of the department’s Keeper of Geology, Arthur Smith Woodward, and set out to discredit him. In 1978, contractors clearing a loft in the southwest tower of the museum found a trunk belonging to Hinton which turned out to contain bones stained and carved in the same way as the Piltdown fossils and associated artefacts. Researchers considered it to be ‘a smoking gun’.
Whoever the perpetrator was, for British scientists it was a humiliating episode. Raymond Dart called it ‘the most outrageous palaeontological fraud which was to mislead the thinking of every recognised authority in anthropology for forty years and so arrest the recognition of the Australopithecines until July 1953’.
Over the course of seven years, from 1952 to 1958, the Leakeys toiled away at Olduvai, spending short seasons there with a small team of assistants, working intensively until the money ran out. Concentrating on Bed II, they uncovered huge numbers of artefacts and animal fossil bones, and laid bare the ancient living floors of early hominids but found virtually no evidence of hominid remains; their haul amounted to just two teeth.
In June 1959, they decided to change the focus of their work to Bed I. Within a day, their veteran field assistant, Heselon Mukiri, spotted a hominid tooth. The area around it looked promising, but their funds for the season were almost exhausted. Louis hurried back to Nairobi to obtain an overdraft to cover three more weeks of excavation. He also arranged for a cameraman, Des Bartlett, who worked for a British television series, On Safari, to film the excavation from the start.
While waiting for Bartlett to arrive at Olduvai, the Leakeys spent a few days exploring other sites. On the morning of 17 July, they had planned to investigate an area in the gorge several miles from the camp. But Louis awoke with a fever, so Mary set out on her own, taking two dogs with her, deciding to explore a different site nearer to camp.
She found plenty of material there—broken stone tools and fragmented fossils littered the surface. But one scrap of bone caught her eye. Unlike other items, it was not lying on the surface but projecting from beneath it. ‘It seemed to be part of a skull’, she wrote. ‘It had a hominid look, but the bones seemed enormously thick—too thick, surely’. Her doubts soon vanished.
I carefully brushed away a little of the deposit, and then I could see parts of two large teeth in place in the upper jaw. They were hominid. It was a hominid skull, apparently in situ, and there was a lot of it.
Mary rushed back to camp. ‘I’ve got him! I’ve got him!’ she shouted. Louis was quickly on his feet, heading for the site with Mary. But the sense of exhilaration he felt when he saw the fossil was quickly overshadowed by disappointment. He had hoped to find a Homo—a fossil that would turn out to be the