• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1547 0

1913, p. 119). If all the Piltdown fossils are fakes, then why did Woodward not notice something was wrong? There are three possible reasons: (1) the planting was done in an incredibly clever fashion, so as to exactly reproduce the fine stratification and the hard, unbroken consistency of the bed in question; (2) Woodward, supposedly an expert, missed obvious signs of planting; (3) Woodward was involved in the planting. It is also suspicious that Woodward so tightly controlled access to the original Piltdown specimens, compelling all but a select few researchers to examine only casts.

Ronald Millar, author of The Piltdown Men, suspected Grafton Eliot Smith. Having a dislike for Woodward, Smith may have decided to entrap him with an elegant deception. Smith, like Teilhard de Chardin, had spent time in Egypt, and so had access to fossils that could have been planted at Piltdown (Johanson and Edey 1981, pp. 81– 82).

Frank Spencer, a professor of anthropology at Queens College of the City University of New York, has written a book that blames Sir Arthur Keith, conservator of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, for the Piltdown forgery (Wilford 1990). Keith believed that modern humans evolved earlier than other scientists could accept, and this, according to Spencer, impelled him to conspire with Dawson to plant evidence favoring his hypothesis.

Another suspect was William Sollas, a professor of geology at Cambridge. He was named in a tape-recorded message left by English geologist James Douglas, who died in 1979 at age 93. Sollas disliked Woodward, who had criticized a method developed by Sollas for making plaster casts of fossils. Douglas recalled he had sent mastodon teeth like those found at Piltdown to Sollas from Bolivia and that Sollas had also received some potassium dichromate, the chemical apparently used in staining many of the Piltdown specimens. According to Douglas, Sollas had also “borrowed” some ape teeth from the Oxford museum collection (Johanson and Edey 1981, p. 83). According to this view, Sollas secretly enjoyed seeing Woodward duped by the Piltdown forgeries.

But if Piltdown does represent a forgery, it is likely that something more than personal revenge was involved. Spencer said that the evidence “had been tailored to withstand scientific scrutiny and thereby promote a particular interpretation of the human fossil record” ( Wilford 1990).

Possible motivations for forgery by a professional scientist may be sensed when we consider the inadequacies of the evidence for human evolution that had accumulated by the beginning of the twentieth century. Darwin had published The Origin of Species in 1859, setting off almost immediately a search for fossil evidence connecting Homo sapiens with the ancient Miocene apes. Leaving aside the discoveries suggesting the presence of fully modern humans in the Pliocene and Miocene, Java man and the Heidelberg jaw were the only fossil discoveries that science had come up with. And as we have seen in Chapter 7, Java man in particular did not enjoy unanimous support within the scientific community.

Right from the start there were ominous suggestions that the apelike skull did not really belong with the humanlike thighbone found 45 feet away from it. As we have seen in this chapter, a number of scientists in England and America, such as Arthur Smith Woodward, Grafton Eliot Smith, and Sir Arthur Keith were developing alternative views of human evolution in which the formation of a high-browed humanlike cranium preceded the formation of a humanlike jaw. Java man, however, showed a low-browed cranium like that of an ape.

Since so many modern scientists have indulged in speculation about the identity and motives of the presumed Piltdown forger, we would also like to introduce a tentative hypothesis. Consider the following scenario. Workmen at Barkham Manor actually discovered a genuine Middle Pleistocene skull, in the manner described by Mabel Kenward. Pieces of it were given to Dawson. Dawson, who had regularly been communicating with Woodward, notified