Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [354]
On the human appearance of the skull, Woodward stated in 1913: “A detailed examination of the several bones of the skull is interesting, as proving the typically human character of nearly all the features that they exhibit. . . . there cannot have been any prominent or thickened supraorbital ridge, and the missing region above the glabella may be restored on the plan of an ordinary modern human skull” (Dawson and Woodward 1913, p. 127).
Woodward then compared the apelike Piltdown jaw with the Heidelberg jaw, which is larger and heavier than the Piltdown specimen. “When it is remembered that Eoanthropus dawsoni and H. heidelbergensis are almost (if not absolutely) of the same geological age,” he wrote, “we are thus led to the interesting conclusion that at the end of the Pliocene Epoch the representatives of man in Western Europe were already differentiated into widely divergent groups” (Dawson and Woodward 1913, pp. 137–138).
In addition, Woodward observed that the humanlike skull of Piltdown man was quite different from the more recent skulls of Java man and Neanderthal man, with their low foreheads and prominent brow ridges.
Woodward believed that in general the evolution of a species mirrored the growth of an individual of that species from birth to adulthood. For example, infant apes have rounded skulls, with high foreheads and almost no brow ridges, whereas adult apes have low foreheads with prominent brow ridges. Woodward therefore predicted that the skulls of adult apes from the early Tertiary, when discovered, would be much like those of modern infant apes.
“Hence,” stated Woodward, “it seems reasonable to interpret the Piltdown skull as exhibiting a closer resemblance to the skulls of the truly ancestral midTertiary apes than any fossil human skull hitherto found. If this view be accepted, the Piltdown type has gradually become modified into the later Mousterian type [the Neanderthals] by a series of changes similar to those passed through by the early apes as they evolved into the typical modern apes, and corresponding with the stages in the development of the skull in an existing ape-individual. It tends to support the theory that Mousterian man was a degenerate offshoot of early man, and probably became extinct; while surviving man may have arisen directly from the primitive source of which the Piltdown skull provides the first discovered evidence” (Dawson and Woodward 1913, pp. 138–139).
Woodward had come up with his own theory about human evolution, which he thus wanted to support by fossil evidence, however limited and fragmentary. Today, a version of Woodward’s proposed lineage survives in the widely accepted idea that Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis are both descendants of a species called archaic or early Homo sapiens. Not at all widely accepted, but quite close to Woodward’s idea, is Louis Leakey’s proposal that both Homo erectus and the Neanderthals are side branches from the main line of human evolution (Section 11.4.3). But all of these proposed evolutionary lineages ignore the evidence, catalogued in this book, for the presence of anatomically modern humans in periods earlier than the Pleistocene.
8.2 Reactions to PiltDown Man
The notes of the discussion following the presentation made by Dawson and Woodward at the meeting of the Geological Society in December of 1912 stated: “Prof. A. Keith regarded the discovery of fossil human remains just announced as by far the most important ever made in England, and of equal, if not greater consequence than any other discovery yet made, either at home or abroad” (Dawson and Woodward 1913, p. 148).
Sir Ray Lankester,