Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [357]
In the published summary of the discussion among scientists that took place following Arthur Smith Woodward’s report on the Piltdown II discoveries, it is recorded: “Prof. A. Keith said that these further Piltdown ‘finds’ established beyond any doubt that Eoanthropus was a very clearly differentiated type of being—in his opinion a truly human type” (Woodward 1917, p. 6). In the discussion, Sir Ray Lankester stated: “The present ‘find’ therefore makes it impossible to regard the Piltdown man as an isolated abnormal individual” (Woodward 1917, p. 6).
Figure 8.2. The crown of a human molar (middle) is generally worn flat, while the crown of a chimpanzee molar (right) generally remains pointed. In this respect, a Piltdown II molar (left) resembles a human molar (Woodward 1917, plate 1).
8.5 One Creature or Two?
Keith and Lankester, like Dawson and Woodward, accepted the idea that the humanlike skull and apelike jaw belonged to the same creature, which represented an Early Pleistocene ancestor of Homo sapiens. After all, what were the odds of finding a human skull and an ape’s jaw in such close proximity, with no sign of the matching human jaw and ape’s skull? But two German scientists interpreted the Piltdown finds somewhat differently. Franz Weidenreich said the molar of the Piltdown II specimen was human, indicating Piltdown II was a fully human find. As for the original Piltdown jaw, von Koenigswald (1956, p. 179) informs us: “A pupil of Weidenreich’s wanted to assign the mandible to a new ape, Boreopithecus, the ‘Northern Ape.’ Weidenreich compared it in the first place to the orang-utan, because, like the latter, it lacked certain muscle-attachments on the under margin of the jaw.” If Weidenreich’s view were to have been accepted, this would have left scientists with a fully human skull and an ape jaw, from an ape living at the same time as Piltdown man. Still, H. Weinert thought the original Piltdown jaw could easily be reconstructed as human (Weiner et al. 1955, p. 231). It is interesting to note the widely varying interpretations by professional anthropologists.
So after years of study, debate continued about whether the jaw and skull belonged to the same creature. Ales Hrdlicka, among other American scientists, was convinced they were from different creatures. Eager to resolve the controversy in his own mind, the famous American anthropologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, accompanied by two other scientists, journeyed to England to view the Piltdown fossils. Osborn was no stranger to controversy. Around this same time he proposed a new hominid genus on the basis of a single molar found by a geologist in western Nebraska. The ape-man was named Hesperopithecus (Cousins 1971, pp. 40– 41). In England, Sir Grafton Elliott Smith wrote a threepage article for the Illustrated London News (June 24, 1922), in which there appeared a full-page picture of the brutish creature walking along carrying a club, with his wife preparing food in the background. Later, Dr. W. K. Gregory demonstrated to the satisfaction of the scientific community that the Nebraska tooth belonged to an extinct pig (Cousins 1971, p. 40). Thereafter everyone was silent about Hesperopithecus.
Osborn and his two companions had tended to favor Gerritt S. Miller’s proposal that Piltdown man’s jaw was actually that of a separate chimpanzeelike creature. In his book Ancient Hunters, W. J. Sollas (1924, pp. 189 –190) wrote: “As a consequence, Profs. Osborn, Matthews and McGregor, who had previously been much impressed by Mr. Miller’s observations, took the opportunity when they last visited Europe to make a special pilgrimage to the British Museum in order that they might see and handle the actual bones themselves of the Piltdown man, previously known to them only as represented by plaster casts. The result was eminently satisfactory, the doubts these observers had previously entertained were dissipated and they fully recognised that the jaw and skull had rightly been assigned to a single individual” (Sollas 1924, pp. 189–190).
In his book Man