Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [352]
On Saturday, June 2, 1912, Woodward and Dawson, accompanied by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a student at a local Jesuit seminary, began excavations at Piltdown and were rewarded with some new discoveries. On the very first day, they found another piece of skull. More followed. Dawson later wrote: “Apparently the whole or greater portion of the human skull had been shattered by the workmen, who had thrown away the pieces unnoticed. Of these we recovered, from the spoil-heaps, as many fragments as possible. In a somewhat deeper depression of the undisturbed gravel I found the right half of a human mandible. So far as I could judge, guiding myself by the position of a tree 3 or 4 yards away, the spot was identical with that upon which the men were at work when the first portion of the cranium was found several years ago. Dr. Woodward also dug up a small portion of the occipital bone of the skull from within a yard of the point where the jaw was discovered, and at precisely the same level. The jaw appeared to have been broken at the symphysis and abraded, perhaps when it lay fixed in the gravel, and before its complete deposition. The fragments of the cranium show little or no sign of rolling or other abrasion, save an incision at the back of the parietal, probably caused by a workman’s pick” (Dawson and Woodward 1913, p. 121). A total of nine fossil skull pieces were found, five by Dawson alone and an additional four after Woodward joined the excavation.
Dawson and Woodward decided to keep their discovery quiet until such time as they would officially announce it, but news of the fossils circulated privately among scientists with interest in human prehistory. Sir Ray Lankester wrote to J. Reid Moir in 1912: “It seems possible that it is our Pliocene Man—the maker of rostro-carinate flints! At any rate if they say to us ‘you say we call in vague, unknown agencies such as torrents and pressure to produce these flints by natural force, but you are in the same position of calling in a hypothetical man. You have no other evidence that such a man was there!’ Now we can say, ‘Here he is.’ It is wonderful that, after so many years, man’s bones should turn up in a gravel. I do not despair now of you finding a sub-Crag human cranium and lower jaw. You must keep this dark for a month or so yet as the discoverers will not be ready to publish before that lapse of time and more will be found some day in the same place” (Millar 1972, p. 125).
Others also received previews of the coming attraction, among them, Lewis Abbott, an amateur geologist associated with Benjamin Harrison of Ightham. Harrison’s eoliths (Section 3.2) had, like Moir’s Red Crag tools (Section 3.3), convinced many researchers that human fossils would be found in southern England’s Pliocene and Early Pleistocene formations. After consulting Abbott about the Piltdown fossils, Dawson wrote to Woodward, “Abbott is in no doubt. They are man and man all over” (Weiner 1955, p. 100). Sir Arthur Keith also appears to have heard whispers of the Piltdown discoveries, for in a paper presented at the British Association meeting of 1912, he spoke of new fossil evidence for human beings of the modern type in Britain in the Middle Pleistocene, predating the Neanderthals of Europe (Millar 1972, p. 108).
In December 1912, Dawson and Woodward presented their formal report on the fossils they had discovered at the Piltdown site to the Geological Society of London. The report was published in the journal of the Society in 1913. Concerning the geological context of the discovery, Dawson and Woodward (1913, p. 119) stated: “At Piltdown the gravel-bed occurs beneath a few inches of the surface-soil, and varies in thickness from 3 to 5 feet; it