Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [356]
8.4 A Second Dawn Man Discovery
Doubts persisted that the jaw and skull of Eoanthropus belonged to the same creature, but these doubts weakened when Woodward (1917) reported the 1915 discovery of a second set of fossils about 2 miles from the original Piltdown site.
Woodward (1917, p. 3) stated: “One large field, about 2 miles from the Piltdown pit, had especially attracted Mr. Dawson’s attention, and he and I examined it several times without success during the spring and autumn of 1914. When, however, in the course of farming, the stones had been raked off the ground and brought together into heaps, Mr. Dawson was able to search the material more satisfactorily; and early in 1915 he was so fortunate as to find here two well-fossilized pieces of human skull and a molar tooth, which he immediately recognized as belonging to at least one more individual of Eoanthropus dawsoni. Shortly afterwards, in the same gravel, a friend met with part of the lower molar of an indeterminable species of rhinoceros, as highly mineralized as the specimens previously found at Piltdown itself.”
Woodward (1917, p. 3) added: “The most important fragment of human skull is part of . . . a right frontal bone. . . . It is in exactly the same mineralized condition as the original skull of Eoanthropus, and deeply stained with ironoxide.” The second fragment was from the occipital, the bone of the lower rear portion of the skull.
The tooth found at what came to be called the Piltdown II site was a left lower first molar, which according to Woodward (1917, p. 5) was “stained brown with iron oxide in the usual manner.”
The report on the fossils found at the Piltdown II site included these remarks by W. P. Pycraft about the molar found there: “If the new tooth be compared with the corresponding molars of a Melanesian, a Tasmanian, and a Chimpanzee, of approximately the same size, it will readily be recognized as essentially human. In the considerable depth of the crown and its gradual passage into the root, it agrees with the human tooth and differs from that of the Chimpanzee, in which the crown is very brachyodont [broad ] and overhangs the root. . . . These comparisons are made because it has been stated that the molar teeth in the Piltdown mandible are those of a Chimpanzee” (Woodward 1917, p. 6).
Gerritt T. Miller, of the Smithsonian Institution, had sent Pycraft a chimpanzee jaw with molars flattened by wear, like those in the original Piltdown jaw. The molars of human beings are generally worn flat, while the surfaces of ape and chimp molars are usually more pointed (Figure 8.2). The flat molars of the otherwise chimpanzeelike Piltdown mandible were taken as a sign that the mandible was not that of a chimpanzee or other member of the ape family. So by presenting a chimp jaw with flattened molars, Miller was implying that the Piltdown mandible might still be that of an ape rather than an early human. This would mean that the Piltdown cranium and jaw belonged to two different creatures, the former to a human and the latter to an ape.
Pycraft replied that the flat molar surfaces on the chimpanzee jaw Miller had sent him were due “not to normal wear, but to some interference in the normal ‘bite.’” Pycraft added: “In no other chimpanzee that the speaker had examined had he ever found anything in the matter of wear comparable with the molars of Mr. Miller’s specimen. These are quite abnormal in this regard, and therefore of no value as evidence that the Piltdown teeth might, even in the wear of their crowns, agree with the teeth of chimpanzees” ( Woodward