Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [367]
Oakley, who played a big role in the Piltdown exposé, himself wrote (Boule and Vallois 1957, p. 3): “The Trinil [Java man] material was tantalizingly incomplete, and for many scientists it was inadequate as confirmation of Darwin’s view of human evolution. I have sometimes wondered whether it was a misguided impatience for the discovery of a more acceptable ‘missing link’ that formed one of the tangled skein of motives behind the Piltdown Forgery (1912).”
Weiner also admitted the possibility: “Behind it all we sense, therefore, a strong and impelling motive. . . . The planning . . . must betoken a motive more driving than a mere hoax or prank. . . . There could have been a mad desire to assist the doctrine of human evolution by furnishing the ‘requisite’ ‘missing link.’. . . Piltdown might have offered irresistible attraction to some fanatical biologist to make good what Nature had created but omitted to preserve” (Weiner
1955, pp. 117–118).
Unfortunately for the hypothetical conspirators, the discoveries that turned up over the next few decades did not support the evolutionary theory represented by the Piltdown forgery. The discoveries of new specimens of Java man and Peking man, as well as the Australopithecus finds in Africa, were accepted by many scientists as proving the low-browed ape-man ancestor hypothesis, the very idea the high-browed Piltdown man was meant to discredit and replace.
Time passed, and the difficulties in constructing a viable evolutionary lineage for the fossil hominids increased. At a critical moment, the remaining insiders in the British Museum chose to act. Perhaps enlisting unwitting colleagues, they organized a systematic exposé of the forgery the Museum had perpetrated earlier in the century. In the course of this exposé, perhaps some of the specimens were further modified by chemical and physical means to lend credence to the idea of forgery.
The idea of a group of conspirators operating out of the British Museum, perpetrating a forgery and then later exposing the same is bound to strike many as farfetched. But it is founded upon as much, or as little, evidence as the indictments made by others. Doubt has been cast on so many British scientists individually, including some from the British Museum, that this conspiracy theory does not really enlarge the circle of possible wrongdoers.
Perhaps there were no conspirators at the British Museum. But according to many scientists, someone with scientific training, acting alone or with others, did carry out a very successful forgery.
Gavin De Beer, a director of the British Museum of Natural History, believed the methods employed in uncovering the Piltdown hoax would “make a successful repetition of a similar type of forgery virtually impossible in the future” (Weiner et al. 1955, p. 228). But a forger with knowledge of modern chemical and radiometric dating methods could manufacture a fake that would not be easily detectable. Indeed, we can hardly be certain that there is not another Piltdownlike forgery in one of the world’s great museums, just waiting to be uncovered.
The impact of Piltdown remains, therefore, damaging. But incidents of this sort appear to be rare, given our present knowledge. There is, however, another more insidious and pervasive kind of cheating—the routine editing and reclassifying of data according to rigid theoretical preconceptions.
Vayson de Pradenne, of the Ecole d’Anthropologie in Paris, wrote in his book Fraudes Archéologiques (1925): “one often finds men of science possessed by a pre-conceived idea, who, without committing real frauds, do not hesitate to give observed facts