Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [355]
1955, p. 7; Dawson and Woodward 1913). Waterston felt that connecting the jaw with the skull was akin to linking a chimpanzee’s foot with a human leg (Millar 1972, p. 140). If Waterston was correct, he was confronted with a skull that appeared to be very much like that of a human and was quite possibly from the Early Pleistocene.
So right from the start, some experts were uncomfortable with the seeming incompatibility between the humanlike skull and apelike jaw of the Piltdown man (Figure 8.1). Sir Grafton Eliot Smith, an expert in brain physiology, tried to defuse this doubt. Smith wrote in an appendix to the report by Dawson and Woodward (1913, p. 146) that the cranial cast of Piltdown man “presents more primitive features than any known human brain or cranial cast.” This was quite a remarkable judgement considering the otherwise almost unanimous view that the skull itself was very much like that of a human being. Smith added: “we must consider this as being the most primitive and most simian human brain so far recorded; one, moreover, such as might reasonably have been expected to be associated in one and the same individual with the [apelike] mandible and which so definitely indicates the zoological rank of its original possessor” (Dawson and Woodward 1913, p. 147). But according to modern scientists, the Piltdown skull is a fairly recent Homo sapiens sapiens skull that was planted by a hoaxer. If we accept this, that means Smith, a renowned expert, was seeing simian features where none factually existed.
Figure 8.1. Restoration of the Piltdown skull and jaw by Dawson and Woodward (1914, p. 89).
8.3 A Canine Tooth and Nose Bones
It was hoped that future discoveries would clarify the exact status of Piltdown man. The canine teeth, which are more pointed in the apes than in human beings, were missing from the Piltdown jaw. Woodward thought a canine would eventually turn up, and even made a model of how a Piltdown man canine should look (Bowden 1977, p. 5).
On August 29, 1913, Teilhard de Chardin did in fact find a canine tooth in a heap of gravel from the Piltdown excavation site, near the place where the mandible had been uncovered (Dawson and Woodward 1914, p. 85). The point of the tooth was worn and flattened like that of a human canine. Woodward (Dawson and Woodward 1914, p. 87) stated: “In the upper half of the outer face the thin layer of enamel is . . . marked by the usual faint transverse striations (or imbrications).” Such markings are characteristic of human canines. According to von Koenigswald (1956, p. 159), it was not clear whether the tooth was an upper or lower canine, but the British scientists placed it in the lower jaw discovered at Piltdown.
Some nose bones were also found. Dawson stated: “While our laborer was digging the disturbed gravel within 2 or 3 feet from the spot where the mandible was found, I saw two human nasal bones lying together with the remains of a turbinated bone beneath them in situ. The turbinal, however, was in such bad condition that it fell apart on being touched, and had to be recovered in fragments by the sieve; but it has been pieced together satisfactorily by Mrs. Smith Woodward” (Dawson and Woodward 1914, p. 85). Turbinals are thin, platelike bones with ridged surfaces; they line the nasal chambers.
Also discovered in the 1913 excavations were a tooth of Stegodon (an extinct elephant), an incisor and jaw fragment of a beaver, a fragment of a rhino tooth, and more flint tools (Dawson and Woodward 1914, pp. 84–85). A mastodon bone, apparently intentionally modified to form a pointed tool, was also found.
By this time, Piltdown