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eyebrow ridges, retreating forehead, stooped posture, bent knees and low intelligence. An illustration authorised by Boule to depict his findings was published in 1909 by the French magazine L’Illustration and by the Illustrated London News. It portrayed an excessively hairy, apelike thug wielding a club, teeth bared, eyes glaring—an image that became embedded in popular culture for more than fifty years. Boule excluded all possibility that Neanderthals could have stood in the direct line of human descent; they were an unfortunate offshoot. Other leading scientists—including Arthur Keith—concurred. Once again the missing link was missing.

The gap was soon filled by one of the most audacious hoaxes in history—a fossil find that fooled the British scientific establishment for more than forty years. In 1908, it was said, a labourer digging in a gravel pit at Piltdown in southern England found fragments of thick human skull which he passed to Charles Dawson, a local lawyer and amateur fossil hunter. Over the next few years Dawson visited the site frequently, and in 1911 he found another fragment from the same skull. He took his finds to Arthur Smith Woodward, the Keeper of Geology at the British Museum and an eminent palaeontologist, who expressed keen interest in them. In 1912, Woodward set off for a summer of digging at Piltdown, joining Dawson and a French palaeontologist, Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. By the end of the season they had found three more pieces of skull bone along with an apelike jaw, assorted mammal fossils and a few crude stone tools—altogether a remarkable haul.

Back in London, Woodward pieced together the bits and pieces to produce a reconstruction of the skull; and in December 1912, he unveiled it at a crucial meeting of the Geological Society, naming it Eoanthropus dawsoni—‘Dawson’s dawn man’.

The skull accorded neatly with the prevailing view among scientists about what a proto-human should look like: it possessed a relatively large brain while retaining certain apelike features such as the jaw. A leading neuroanatomist, Grafton Elliot Smith, who specialised in brain studies and supported the ‘brain-led-the-way’ school, concurred with Woodward that Eoanthropus dawsoni—or Piltdown Man, as it was popularly known—represented the ancestor of modern humans. Arthur Keith initially had some doubts, but after further discoveries of a canine tooth in the gravel pit at Piltdown and fragments of a second individual at another site two miles away, he too fell for the hoax.

Much to the satisfaction of British scientists, Piltdown Man put England firmly on the anthropological map, trumping French and German claims. Indeed, it became a matter of national pride that the earliest human ancestor had been found on home soil. News of the discovery swept around the world.

No one, meanwhile, gave much thought to Darwin’s suggestion forty years before that Africa was the most likely birthplace of humankind.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

THE VALLEY OF WILD SISAL

SETTING OUT ON FOOT across the Maasai Steppe in 1913 at the head of a column of fifty porters, Hans Reck, a twentyseven-year-old German geologist, had no clear idea how to find his destination. Behind him rose the snow-capped peak of Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. Ahead lay volcanic highlands lining the Great Rift Valley. Reck’s mission was to investigate a ravine to the west of an extinct volcano named Ngorongoro that had aroused keen interest in Berlin. But he had been given only vague instructions about its location.

Two years before, a German entomologist, Professor Wilhelm Kattwinkel, had stumbled across the ravine by chance while leading a medical expedition to this remote part of what was then German East Africa (now Tanzania). When Kattwinkel had asked local Maasai tribesmen the name of the ravine, they had thought he was referring to the wild sisal growing there—Sansevieria ehrenbergii—and had told him they called it ‘oldupai’. Kattwinkel had duly recorded the name of the ravine in German as ‘Oldoway’.

Exploring the eroded slopes