Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [351]
The Piltdown Showdown
After Eugene Dubois’s discovery of Java man in the 1890s, the hunt for fossils to fill the evolutionary gaps between ancient apelike hominids and modern Homo sapiens intensified. It was in this era of strong anticipation that a sensational find was made in England—Piltdown man, a creature with a humanlike skull and apelike jaw.
The outlines of the Piltdown story are familiar to both the proponents and opponents of the Darwinian theory of human evolution. The fossils, the first of which were discovered by Charles Dawson in the years 1908–1911, were declared forgeries in the 1950s by scientists of the British Museum. This allowed the critics of Darwinian evolution to challenge the credibility of the scientists who for several decades had placed the Piltdown fossils in evolutionary family trees.
Scientists, on the other hand, were quick to point out that they themselves exposed the fraud. Some sought to identify the forger as Dawson, an eccentric amateur, or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Catholic priest-paleontologist with mystical ideas about evolution, thus absolving the “real” scientists involved in the discovery.
In one sense, it would be possible to leave the story of Piltdown at this and go on with our survey of paleoanthropological evidence. But a deeper look at Piltdown man and the controversies surrounding him will prove worthwhile, giving us greater insight into how facts relating to human evolution are established and disestablished.
Contrary to the general impression that fossils speak with utmost certainty and conviction, the intricate network of circumstances connected with a paleoanthropological discovery can preclude any simple understanding. Such ambiguity is especially to be expected in the case of a carefully planned forgery, if that is what the Piltdown episode represents. But as a general rule, even “ordinary” paleoanthropological finds are enveloped in multiple layers of uncertainty. As we trace the detailed history of the Piltdown controversy it becomes clear that the line between fact and forgery is often indistinct.
8.1 Dawson Gets a Skull
Sometime around the year 1908, Charles Dawson, a lawyer and amateur anthropologist, noticed that a country road near Piltdown, in Sussex, was being mended with flint gravel. Always on the lookout for flint tools, Dawson inquired from the workmen and learned that the flint came from a pit on a nearby estate, Barkham Manor, owned by Mr. R. Kenward, with whom Dawson was acquainted. Dawson visited the pit and asked two workers there to be on the lookout for any implements or fossils that might turn up. In 1913, Dawson wrote: “Upon one of my subsequent visits to the pit, one of the men handed to me a small portion of an unusually thick human parietal bone. I immediately made a search but could find nothing more. . . . It was not until some years later, in the autumn of 1911, on a visit to the spot, that I picked up, among the rain-washed spoil-heaps of the gravel pit, another and larger piece belonging to the frontal region of the same skull” (Dawson and Woodward 1913, p. 117). Dawson noted that the pit contained pieces of flint much the same in color as the skull fragments.
Dawson was not a simple amateur. He had been elected a Fellow of the Geological Society and had for 30 years contributed specimens to the British Museum as honorary collector (Weiner 1955, p. 83). Furthermore, he had cultivated a close friendship with Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of the Geological Department at the British Museum and a fellow of the Royal Society. In February 1912, Dawson wrote a letter to Woodward at the British Museum, telling how he had “come