A407-Piltdown_Man.txt Graham L. Kendall Modified 6/10/2004 http://www.grahamkendall.net/ Email grahamkendall74135@yahoo.com I am found on IRC Efnet/Undernet/Dalnet as glk http://www.tiac.net/users/cri/piltdown.html Piltdown Man by Richard Harter This is the home page for Piltdown man, a paleontological "man who never was". In April of 1996 there was an extended discussion in the talk.origins news group about the Piltdown man hoax. During the discussion I checked the web and discovered that Piltdown man did not have a home page. I resolved to eliminate this deficiency in the scholarly resources of the world wide web; here, for your delectation, is Piltdown man's home page. Corrections and suggestions for improvement are welcome. This page has been laid out so that it can be read sequentially or so that you can skip around in it using links. It is broken up into sections and subsections. Each section is headed by a list of links to the other sections. Each subsection has links back to the list of sub sections. There are brief biographies and a bibliography with internal links to them through out the text. This page is a self contained, text only, document. However there are links to supporting documents and pictures. Supporting web pages * Tom Turrittin's comprehensive bibliography of Piltdown hoax references, 1953-1996 * Tom Turrittin's overview of the bibliography and of accusations * Gerrell Drawhorn's paper accusing Arthur Smith Woodward Photographs and maps * Photo of the Piltdown men contemplating Eoanthropus dawsonii (135K) * Reconstruction of the Piltdown man skull (168K) * Ordinance Survey Map of the Piltdown region (114K) * Woodward's reconstruction of the skull (62K) * Skull bones (some pieces assembled) (57K) * Outside and inside views of the Jawbone (71K) * Rutot's reconstruction of Piltdown Man (93K) Acknowledgements I am far from being the best qualified person to put together a substantive page on Piltdown man -- they are many others who have a better knowledge of the subject and who command more scholarly resources. However people have been very kind, indeed enthusiastic, in helping to fill in the gaps. Even though I am the original author of the page and its editor-in-chief this page is, in a real sense, a collaborative effort. Special thanks are due to Robert Parson (rparson@spot.Colorado.EDU) and Jim Foley (Jim.Foley@symbios.com) who have made many invaluable suggestions and corrections. I also wish to thank Wesley Elsberry (welsberr@orca.tamu.edu) who found Betrayers of the Truth, David Bagnall (david@pican.pi.csiro.au) who pointed out the Matthews articles in the New Scientist, and Robert B. Anderson (andersons@InfoHouse.com) who has written articles on the hoax. Special thanks are also due to Tom Turrittin (george@uunet.ca) who has created a comprehensive bibliography of references since 1953 to Piltdown man. He has made it available as a pair of web pages and has graciously agreed to let me maintain a mirrored copy at this site. The web sites has links both to the mirrored copy and to the original copy. Finally, I wish to thank Gerrell Drawhorn (piltdown@saclink.csus.edu) who has provided a copy of his 1994 paper for inclusion at this site. Introduction Piltdown man is one of the most famous frauds in the history of science. In 1912 Charles Dawson discovered the first of two skulls found in the Piltdown quarry in Sussex, England, skulls of an apparently primitive hominid, an ancestor of man. Piltdown man, or Eoanthropus dawsoni to use his scientific name, was a sensation. He was the expected "missing link" a mixture of human and ape with the noble brow of Homo sapiens and a primitive jaw. Best of all, he was British! As the years went by and new finds of ancient hominids were made, Piltdown man became an anomaly that didn't fit in, a creature without a place in the human family tree. Finally, in 1953, the truth came out. Piltdown man was a hoax, the most ancient of people who never were. This is his story. My principal source for the original version of this page is Ronald Millar's The Piltdown Men. This book is an account of the entire Piltdown affair from beginning to end, including not merely the circumstances but the general background of the paleontology and evolutionary theory with respect to human ancestry during the period 1850-1950. A number of important books have also been written on the hoax, e.g. works by Spencer, Weiner, Blinderman, and Walsh, and have been valuable resources. The Story Of The Hoax In following the history of the hoax it is useful to have a time line showing the principal events. The time line runs as follows: 1856 -- Neanderthal man discovered 1856 -- Dryopithecus discovered 1859 -- Origin of Species published 1863 -- Moulin Quignon forgeries exposed 1869 -- Cro Magnon man discovered 1871 -- The Descent of Man published 1890 -- Java Man discovered 1898 -- Galley hill "man" discovered [modern, misinterpreted] 1903 -- First molar of Peking man found 1907 -- Heidelberg man discovered 1908 -- Dawson (1908-1911) discovers first Piltdown fragments 1909 -- Dawson and Teilhard de Chardin meet 1912 -- February: Dawson contacts Woodward about first skull fragments 1912 -- June: Dawson, Woodward, and Teilhard form digging team 1912 -- June: Team finds elephant molar, skull fragment 1912 -- June: Right parietal skull bones and the jaw bone discovered 1912 -- Summer: Barlow, Pycraft, G.E. Smith, and Lankester join team. 1912 -- November: News breaks in the popular press 1912 -- December: Official presentation of Piltdown man 1913 -- August: the canine tooth is found by Teilhard 1914 -- Tool made from fossil elephant thigh bone found 1914 -- Talgai (Australia) man found, considered confirming of Piltdown 1915 -- Piltdown II found by Dawson (according to Woodward) 1916 -- Dawson dies. 1917 -- Woodward announces discovery of Piltdown II. 1921 -- Osborn and Gregory "converted" by Piltdown II. 1921 -- Rhodesian man discovered 1923 -- Teilhard arrives in China. 1924 -- Dart makes first Australopithecus discovery. 1925 -- Edmonds reports Piltdown geology error. Report ignored. 1929 -- First skull of Peking man found. 1934 -- Ramapithecus discovered 1935 -- Many (38 individuals) Peking man fossils have been found. 1935 -- Swanscombe man [genuine] discovered. 1937 -- Marston attacks Piltdown age estimate, cites Edmonds. 1941 -- Peking man fossils lost in military action. 1943 -- Fluorine content test is first proposed. 1948 -- Woodward publishes The Earliest Englishman 1949 -- Fluorine content test establishes Piltdown man as relatively recent. 1951 -- Edmonds report no geological source for Piltdown animal fossils. 1953 -- Weiner, Le Gros Clark, and Oakley expose the hoax. In 1856 the first Neanderthal fossil discovery was made and the hunt was on to find fossil remains of human ancestors. In the next half century finds were made in continental Europe and in Asia but not in Britain. Finally, in 1912, the sun rose on British paleontology -- fossil remains of an ancient pleistocene hominid were found in the Piltdown quarries in Sussex. In the period 1912 to 1915 the Piltdown quarries yielded two skulls, a canine tooth, and a mandible of Eoanthropus, a tool carved from an elephant tusk, and fossil teeth from a number of pleistocene animals. There is a certain vagueness about some of the critical events. Dawson contacted Woodward about the first two skull fragments which were supposedly found by workman "some years prior". Exactly when is unknown. Similarly, the discovery of Piltdown II is shrouded in mystery. Supposedly Dawson and an anonymous friend make the discovery 1915; however the friend and the location of the find are unknown. The reaction to the finds was mixed. On the whole the British paleontologists were enthusiastic; the French and American paleontologists tended to be skeptical, some objected quite vociferously. The objectors held that the jawbone and the skull were obviously from two different animals and that their discovery together was simply an accident of placement. In the period 1912-1917 there was a great deal of skepticism. The report in 1917 of the discovery of Piltdown II converted many of the skeptics; one accident of placement was plausible -- two were not. It should be remembered that, at the time of Piltdown finds, there were very few early hominid fossils; Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens were clearly fairly late. It was expected that there was a "missing link" between ape and man. It was an open question as to what that missing link would look like. Piltdown man had the expected mix of features, which lent it plausibility as a human precursor. This plausibility did not hold up. During the next two decades there were a number of finds of ancient hominids and near hominids, e.g. Dart's discovery of Australopithecus, the Peking man discoveries, and other Homo erectus and australopithecine finds. Piltdown man did not fit in with the new discoveries. None the less, Sir Arthur Keith (a major defender of Piltdown man) wrote in 1931: It is therefore possible that Piltdown man does represent the early pleistocene ancestor of the modern type of man, He may well be the ancestor we have been in search of during all these past years. I am therefore inclined to make the Piltdown type spring from the main ancestral stem of modern humanity... In the period 1930-1950 Piltdown man was increasingly marginalized and by 1950 was, by and large, simply ignored. It was carried in the books as a fossil hominid. From time to time it was puzzled over and then dismissed again. The American Museum of Natural History quietly classified it as a mixture of ape and man fossils. Over the years it had become an anomaly; some prominent authors did not even bother to list it. In Bones of Contention Roger Lewin quotes Sherwood Washburn as saying "I remember writing a paper on human evolution in 1944, and I simply left Piltdown out. You could make sense of human evolution if you didn't try to put Piltdown into it." Finally, in 1953, the roof fell in. Piltdown man was not an ancestor; it was not a case of erroneous interpretation; it was a case of outright deliberate fraud. Forging Fossils From the chronology and the later reconstruction of events it is fairly clear that there never were any significant fossils at the Piltdown quarry. It was salted from time to time with fossils to be found. Once the hoax was exposed, Sir Kenneth Oakley went on to apply more advanced tests to find where the bones had come from and how old they were. His main findings were: Piltdown I skull: Medieval, human, ~620 years old. Piltdown II skull: Same source as Piltdown I skull. Piltdown I jawbone: Orangutan jaw, ~500 years old, probably from Sarawak. Elephant molar: Genuine fossil, probably from Tunisia. Hippopotamus tooth: Genuine fossil, probably from Malta or Sicily. Canine tooth: Pleistocene chimpanzee fossil. Originally it had been believed that one skull had been used; later, more precise dating established in 1989 that two different skulls had been used, one for each of the two skull "finds". The skulls were unusually thick; a condition that is quite rare in the general population but is common among the Ona indian tribe in Patagonia. The jawbone was not definitely established as being that of an orangutan until 1982. Drawhorn's paper summarizes all that is currently known about the provenance of the bones that were used. Not only were the bones gathered from a variety of sources, they were given a thorough going treatment to make them appear to be genuinely ancient. A solution containing iron was used to stain the bones; fossil bones deposited in gravel pick up iron and manganese. [It is unclear whether the solution also contained manganese: Millar mentions that manganese was present; Hall, who did the tests for manganese, says that it was not.] Before staining the bones (except for the jawbone) were treated with Chromic acid to convert the bone apatite (mineral component) to gypsum to facilitate the intake of the iron and manganese (?) solution used to stain the bones. The skull may have also been boiled in an iron sulphate solution. The canine tooth was painted after staining, probably with Van Dyke brown. The jaw bone molars were filed to fit. The connection where the jawbone would meet the rest of the skull was carefully broken so that there would be no evidence of lack of fit. The canine tooth was filed to show wear (and was patched with chewing gum). It was filled with sand as it might have been if it had been in the Ouse river bed. How the hoax was exposed With few exceptions nobody suggested that the finds were a hoax until the very end. The beginning of the end came when a new dating technique, the fluorine absorption test, became available. The Piltdown fossils were dated with this test in 1949; the tests established that the fossils were relatively modern. Even so, they were still accepted as genuine. For example, in Nature, 1950, p 165, New Evidence on the Antiquity of Piltdown Man Oakley wrote: The results of the fluorine test have considerably increased the probability that the [Piltdown] mandible and cranium represent the same creature. The relatively late date indicated by the summary of evidence suggests moreover that Piltdown man, far from being an early primitive type, may have been a late specialized hominid which evolved in comparative isolation. In this case the peculiarities of the mandible and the excessive thickness of the cranium might well be interpreted as secondary or gerontic developments. In 1925 Edmonds had pointed out that Dawson was in error in his geological dating of the Piltdown gravels: they were younger than Dawson had assumed. In 1951 he published an article pointing out that there was no plausible source for the Piltdown animal fossils. Millar (p203) writes: The older group of Piltdown animals, he said, were alleged to have been washed from a Pliocene land deposit in the Weald. Edmonds thought there must be some misunderstanding. There was no Pliocene land deposit in the entire Weald which could have produced them. the only local Pliocene beds were marine in origin and lay above the five-hundred foot contour line. In July 1953 an international congress of paleontologists, under the auspices of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, was held in London. The world's fossil men were put up, admired and set down again. But, according to Dr. J.S. Weiner, Piltdown man got barely a mention. He did not fit in. He was a piece of the jig-saw puzzle; the right colour but the wrong shape. It was at the congress that the possibility of fraud dawned on Weiner. Once the possibility had raised it was easy to establish that the finds were a fraud. Millar writes: The original Piltdown teeth were produced and examined by the three scientists. The evidence of fake could seen immediately. The first and second molars were worn to the same degree; the inner margins of the lower teeth were more worn than the outer -- the 'wear' was the wrong way round; the edges of the teeth were sharp and unbevelled; the exposed areas of dentine were free of shallow cavities and flush with the surrounding enamel; the biting surface of the two molars did not form a uniform surface, the planes were out of alignment. That the teeth might have been misplaced after the death of Piltdown man was considered but an X-ray showed the lower contact surfaces of the roots were correctly positioned. This X-ray also revealed that contrary to the 1916 radiograph the roots were unnaturally similar in length and disposition. The molar surface were examined under a microscope. They were scarred by criss-cross scratches suggesting the use of an abrasive. 'The evidences of artificial abrasion immediately sprang to the eye' wrote Le Gros Clark. 'Indeed so obvious did they [the scratches] seem it may well be asked -- how was it that they had escaped notice before?' He answered his question with a beautiful simplicity. 'They had never been looked for...nobody previously had examined the Piltdown jaw with the idea of a possible forgery in mind, a deliberate fabrication.' Why then was the fraud so successful? Briefly, (a) the team finding the specimans (Dawson, Woodward, Teilhard) had excellent credentials, (b) incompetence on the part of the British Paleontological community, (c) the relatively primitive analytical tools available circa 1920, (d) skill of the forgery, (e) it matched what was expected from theory, and (f) as Millar remarks, the hoax led a charmed life. Credentials As a matter of practice, a fraud or hoax is much more likely to succeed if it appears to be validated by an authority. In general, one does not expect a professional in a field to concoct a hoax. Experience teaches that this expectation is not always met. Incompetence Although the team had excellent credentials none was truly competent in dealing with hominid fossils; their expertise lay elsewhere. The British museum people, Woodward and Pycraft, made numerous errors of reconstruction and interpretation. The only expert in the expanded team, Grafton Eliot Smith, was strangely silent about some of the errors. Primitive analytical tools It is hard for us today to fully grasp how primitive the analytical tools available to the paleontologists of that time were. Chemical tests and dating techniques taken for granted today were not available. The analysis of the details of tooth wear was less worked out. The simple knowledge of geology was much less detailed. The importance of careful establishment of the provenance of fossils was not appreciated. In short, the paleontologists of 1915 were an easier lot to fool. Skill of the forgery At the time there were virtually no hominid fossils finds except for some of the early Neanderthal finds. The reconstruction of human evolution was very much an open question. The Piltdown specimens fit one of the leading speculations. The forger knew what anatomical and paleontological tests the specimens would be given. Meeting Theoretical Expectations As Hammond points out, a key reason why the hoax succeeded was because it fit in very well with the theories of the time. Boule had recently (erroneously) discredited Neanderthal man as being close to the main hominid line (1908-1912). Elliot Smith felt that the large brain case would have developed first. Sollas did not, but did strongly support mosaic evolution, i.e., features appearing in patches rather in a smooth transition. It was his opinion that human dentition developed before the human jaw. Woodward and others believed that eoliths (supposed very early stone tools) indicated the presence of an early, intelligent hominid in England. Piltdown man, with his large braincase, his simian jaw, and his near human dentition fit the theoretical picture. Charmed Life The hoax had a charmed life. Features that might have exposed the hoax didn't get caught because of small errors in procedure. For example, the hoax would have been exposed immediately had a test of the jaw for organic matter been made. Tests were made on the cranial fragments, but these were sufficiently well mineralized to pass. The X-rays taken were of poor quality, even for the time. The dentist Lyne pointed out the incongruity between the heavy wear on the canine and its large pulp cavity, a sign of youth. This was interpreted as secondary dentine formation, an explanation that "worked" because of the poor quality of the X-rays. The erroneous wear pattern on the molars, which was obvious when Weiner looked at the casts, was never noticed. Nor were they carefully examined under a microscope -- the abrasion marks would have been seen. Who perpetrated the hoax? Click here to go directly to the perpetrator list Who did it? Who perpetrated the hoax? When the hoax was exposed nobody knew who the perpetrator was. No one confessed to the deed. For forty odd years people have speculated about the identity of the culprit; over time an impressive list of suspects has accumulated. The case against each suspect has been circumstantial, a constellation of suspicious behaviour, of possible motives, and of opportunity. In this section we present summaries of the arguments against the principal candidates. A comprehensive listing of the accusations, when they were made, who made them, and who the accused were can be found in Tom Turrittin's Piltdown man overview; it includes details not given here including the particulars of 30 separate books or papers making accusations. When the hoax was first exposed Dawson, Teilhard, and Woodward were the obvious suspects; they had made the major finds. In 1953 Weiner fingered Dawson as the culprit. Stephen Jay Gould argued that Teilhard and Dawson were the culprits. Woodward generally escaped suspicion; however Drawhorn made a strong case against him in 1994. Grafton Elliot Smith and Sir Arthur Keith were prominent scientists that played key roles in the discovery. Millar argued that Smith was the culprit; Spencer argued that it was a conspiracy between Dawson and Keith. Other candidates that have been mentioned over the years include Arthur Conan Doyle, the geologist W. J. Sollas, and the paleontologist Martin Hinton. This is by no means the end of the list; other people accused include Hargreaves, Abbot, Barlow, and Butterfield. This fraud is quite unique. Most scientific frauds and hoaxes fall into a few categories. There are student japes, students conconcting evidence to fit a superior's theories. There are confirming evidence frauds, in which a researcher fabricates findings that they believe should be true. There are outright frauds for money, fossils that are fabricated for gullible collectors. There are rare cases of fabrication for reputation, done in the knowledge that the results will not be checked. And, upon occasion, there are frauds concocted simply as an expression of a perverse sense of humor. The Piltdown hoax does not seem to fit any of these categories well. This was not an ordinary hoax; it was a systematic campaign over the years to establish the existence of Piltdown man. The early skull fragments were created in advance and salted with the foreknowledge that more extensive finds would be planted later. The hoaxer had to have good reason to believe that the salted fossils would be found. One of the critical factors in any theory is to account for the fact that the perpetrator had to be confident that the salted fossils would be found. That suggests that either Dawson, Teilhard, or Woodward was involved since they alone made the initial finds. At first sight it would seem that Dawson must have been guilty since he made the initial find of the first two skull fragments. However he didn't! They were made by anonymous workmen. The "find" could have been arranged for a handful of coins. As Vere pointed out, the labourer Hargreaves, employed to do most of the digging, was also present at the site. Another critical factor to be accounted for is access to the specimens that were used in the hoax. Likewise the question of skill and knowledge required for the hoax must be taken into account. Below are summaries of the cases to be made against the various possible perpetrators. At the moment this section is very much under construction! The candidates for perpetrator Was it Abbot? Was it Barlow? Was it Butterfield? Was it Dawson? Was it Dawson and Keith? Was it Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Was it Hargreaves? Was it Martin Hinton? Was it Martin Hinton and others? Was it Grafton Elliot Smith? Was it W. J. Sollas? Was it Teilhard de Chardin? Was Woodward the perpetrator? Back to perpetrator list Was Abbot the forger? Lewis Abbot, owner of a Hastings jewelry shop, friend of Dawson, and widely respected for his knowledge of the geology of southern England. He was considered as a possibility by Weiner. Blinderman make a major accusation against Abbot, based on an assessment of personality, requisite knowledge, and probable access to the needed bones. The case, however, lacked any definite substance. Abbot has also been mentioned as a possible co-conspirator in a number of accusations. Back to perpetrator list Was Barlow the forger? Barlow was accused of being a co-conspirator with Dawson by Caroline Grigson, the curator of the Ontodontological Museum. The accusation has not been taken seriously. Back to perpetrator list Was Butterfield the forger? Butterfield, the curator at the Hastings museum, was accused by van Esbroeck of being the forger with Hargreaves planting the forged fossils. The proposed motive is revenge over Dawson's appropriation of some dinosaur fossils. There is no substantive evidence for this charge. Back to perpetrator list Was Dawson the sole forger? Dawson is the obvious suspect. He made the initial find of the two skull fragments and the Piltdown II find. In both of these critical discoveries there is no confirmation by another party. He was the one who made the Piltdown quarry a special object of search. Indeed he is such an obvious suspect (Weiner seems to have taken it for granted that Dawson was the forger) that the question is -- why consider any one besides Dawson? Millar (p 226-7) argues against Dawson as the culprit as follows: One of my main objections to the assumption that Dawson is inevitably the culprit is that as the discoverer he was wide open to suspicion. He is too obvious a culprit... If the bogus fossil excaped detection by his friends at the museum he surely could not have expected that it would withstand scientific enquiry forever. I find it impossible to believe that Dawson would pit his meagre knowledge of anatomy (if it is accepted that he had any at all) against that of any skilled human anatomist... The threat of exposure would be perpetual. As it was Piltdown man had a charmed life. Because of the poor quality of the original X-ray photographs the bogus jaw remained undetected at the outset. Le Gros Clark has emphasized that the forger's crude workmanship on the teeth was there for all to see if only someone had looked for it. Millar's argument sounds plausible but it doesn't stand up well. Dawson was a man of many interests, both antiquarian and paleontological, and had numerous knowledgeable friends and acquaintances. The requisite knowledge could readily have been acquired. The argument that he wouldn't have dared is suspect; there is considerable evidence that Dawson had been involved in a number of forgeries and plagarisms; some of which only came to light after Millar wrote. Walsh discusses a number of incidents: * The Beauport Statuette * The Blackmore flint weapon * The Bexhill boat * The Uckfield horseshoe * The Hastings clockface * The Dene Holes plagarism * The Iron Industry in Old Sussex plagarism * The Old Sussex Glass plagarism * The Hastings Castle plagarism * The Pevensey Brick A critical point, which Walsh emphasizes, was the discovery of the jawbone by Dawson. Most of the other bones were found in spill, dug up gravel which was searched later after having been dug up. The jawbone, however, was found in situ by Dawson. He struck a blow into the hardpacked gravel and the jawbone popped out (this was reported by Woodward). It would have been very difficult to bury the jawbone in the hardpacked gravel convincingly; however no one except Dawson actually observed the purported undisturbed location of the jawbone before it was found. In retrospect it is hard to see how Dawson could not have been involved. Walsh argues strongly that Dawson and Dawson alone was the culprit, that he had both the necessary knowledge and the requisite character, and that his participation was physically necessary. Indeed, one might ask why someone proposing to undertake such a fraud would risk having a co-conspirator. However it happens often enough that people of similar inclinations recognize each other. Back to perpetrator list Were Dawson and Keith conspirators? The following is an excerpt taken from a summary published by Robert Parson in the talk.origins newsgroup. In the late 1970's, Ian Langham, an Australian historian of science, began a comprehensive reevaluation of the events surrounding the forgery. Langham was initially attracted to Ronald Millar's hypothesis that the forger was Grafton Elliot Smith; however he later dropped this hypothesis and settled instead upon Sir Arthur Keith. Langham died suddenly in 1984, before revealing his conclusions, and Frank Spencer, of the Department of Anthropology at Queens College of the City University of New York, was appointed to complete Langham's research. Spencer published his and Langham's conclusions in Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery. The centerpiece of the Langham-Spencer argument is an anonymous article that appeared in the British Medical Journal on 21 December 1912, three days after the formal announcement of the discovery of Piltdown Man at a Geological Society meeting. This article appears superficially to be a mere summary of the meeting, but in fact it contains information (relating to the exact location of the site and to the history of the discovery) that at that time was known only by the people actually involved in the digging. Arthur Smith Woodward found this puzzling and wondered who the author had been and how he had learned about these details, but never found out. 70 years later Ian Langham discovered that the author was Arthur Keith. Moreover, Keith's diary showed that he had written the article three days before the meeting actually took place. Keith was not a part of Woodward's inner circle at this time, and he had not been consulted by Woodward on the discovery; indeed, he had only been allowed to view the specimens two weeks before the official announcement, even though the existence of the find (though not the details) had been an open secret for many weeks beforehand. This discovery (and similar, more ambiguous documents) suggested to Langham a connection between Dawson and Keith. Keith claimed to have met Dawson for the first time in January 1913, but Langham found evidence that they had met at least three times during 1911-1912. He also noticed that Keith had destroyed all of his correspondence with Dawson. Langham proposed that Dawson began to prepare the hoax sometime between 1905 and 1910. In mid-1911 Keith was brought into it, and during the period 1911-12 Keith prepared the various specimens, Dawson planted them, and Dawson's team subsequently dug them up. The case against Keith is discussed in detail by Walsh. According to his analysis the circumstantial evidence all has a natural and innocent explanation. Back to perpetrator list Was Arthur Conan Doyle the perpetrator? The argument for Doyle was made in an article in Science in 1983 by the anthropologist John Winslow. The Spring 1996 issue of Pacific Discovery has an excellent article by Robert Anderson on the Doyle theory. Doyle was a neighbour of Dawson, was an amateur bone hunter, and participated briefly in the digs. The principal arguments for Doyle as the culprit are circumstantial and literary; it has been argued that The Lost World describes the execution of the hoax in veiled terms. Anderson argues that the exact location of the planted fossils is spelled out in The Lost World as a puzzle. The essential weakness of the case against Doyle is that it would not have been possible for him to have planted the bones with any expectation that they would have been found. Walsh analyzes the case against Doyle in detail and finds it wanting. The principal proponent of the Doyle theory,Richard Milner who is a historian of science from the American Museum of Natural History, still holds Doyle was responsible. In a debate staged by the Linnaean Society in March 1997 as part of National Science Week he argued the case for Arthur Conan Doyle and against the case for Hinton. Sir Arthur was a zealous spiritualist, embittered by the exposure and prosecution of Henry Slade, one of his favourite psychics. It is suggested that Doyle sought to discredit the scientific establishment by faking evidence of something they wanted to believe in thereby showing scientists knew less than they thought they did. Back to perpetrator list Was Hargreaves involved? Hargreaves, the laborer who did most of the digging at the Piltdown site, was accused by Vere. There is no direct evidence against him. However, unlike many others, he had real opportunity to plant the fossils. If Dawson and Woodward were not involved he almost must have been involved. Back to perpetrator list Was Martin Hinton the perpetrator? The May 23, 1996 edition of Nature presents the new case and a smoking gun (?) against Martin A. C. Hinton, a curator of zoology at the museum at the time of the fraud. There are two finds of bones stained and carved in the manner of the Piltdown fossils, a canvas travelling trunk marked with Hinton's initials and glass tubes from Hinton's estate (Hinton died in 1961) which contained human teeth stained in various ways. The trunk was found in the mid-1970s, when contractors were clearing loft space in the British Museum. The trunk contained hundreds of vials of rodent dissections (Hinton was a rodent specialist) and a collection of carved and stained pieces of fossil hippopotamus and elephant teeth, as well as assorted bones, that looked as if they belonged in the Piltdown collection. The Nature article claimed that the teeth from the the estate, the contents of the trunk, and the Piltdown remains were stained with the same chemical recipe, a mixture of iron, managanese and chromium. The recipe appears to have been invented by Hinton and is based on a knowledge of post-depositional processes affecting fossils in gravel. Hinton had published a paper in 1899 showing that fossils in river gravels would be impregnated with oxides of iron and manganese, staining them a characteristic chocolate- brown colour. The motive may have revenge in a quarrel about money or it may simply have been that Woodward was irritatingly stuffy. Hinton was fond of and was famed for his elaborate practical jokes. Hinton was a member of a circle of Sussex-based geologist colleagues and was an expert on the Weald geology. In 1954, shortly after the exposure Hinton wrote a revealing letter to Gavin de Beer director of the British Museum (Natural History): The temptation to invent such a 'discovery' of an ape-like man associated with late Pliocene Mammals in a Wealden gravel might well have proved irresistable to some unbalanced member of old Ben Harrison's circe at Ightham. He and his friends (of whom I was one) were always talking of the possibility of finding a late Pliocene deposit in the weald. Andrew Currant, a researcher at the museum and Brian Gardiner, professor of palaeontology at King's College, London, made the investigations into the Hinton evidence. Gardiner presented the case against Hinton in his presidential address to the Linnean Society in London on May 24, 1996. The case against Hinton is not what it seems. The motive suggested by Gardiner (a quarrel about money) does not work because of timing; the incident in question happened in 1911; the first finds were in 1908. More importantly the chemical analyses do not match. The Hinton samples include Manganese; the Piltdown specimens do not. The Hinton samples do not contain gypsum (produced from the organic material); the Piltdown specimens do. [Drawhorn, correspondence]. Walsh notes that there were legitimate reasons for Hinton to have this material, including doing tests for Oakley. In any event it would have been physically impossible for Hinton to have been the sole hoaxer because he did not have the requisite access to the site in the 1912-1914 period. Back to perpetrator list Was it Hinton and others? Although the physical evidence is ambiguous, Hinton's name pops up under a variety of odd circumstances and it seems likely that he knew more that he should have, either by virtue of being a co-conspirator or by virtue of special knowledge not publicly admitted. In 1981 L. Harrison Matthews wrote a series of articles in the New Scientist on the Piltdown hoax. In these article he suggested that Hinton believed the finds to be a hoax and that Hinton and Teilhard manufactured and planted ridiculous forgeries to expose the hoax. In particular the Elephant bone tool was a crude cricket bat, appropriate for "the earliest Englishman". This theory was repeated in 1982 in Betrayers of the Truth by Broad and Wade, and in 1996 in The Common but Less Frequent Loon and Other Essays by Keith S. Thomson. L. Harrison Matthews described informal dinner conversations in the period 1945-51 during which Hinton implied that "Piltdown was not a subject to be taken seriously" from which Matthews surmised that Hinton "knew more about the hoax and the museum's part in it than he ever admitted". Other evidence referred to by Matthews included Hinton's correspondence after the hoax was exposed and subsequent conversations in which Hinton obliquely included himself in a small list of suspects. Matthews was sufficiently confident about Hinton's involvement that he was the first to suggest the oft-repeated claim that the first finds were due to Dawson and that in response, Hinton manufactured and planted ridiculous forgeries to expose the hoax. This is a relatively honorable role for Hinton in comparison with sole hoaxer. It is clear that Matthews respected Hinton, with whom he shared many wide-ranging and interesting conversations during Hinton's retirement. It is likely that Matthews was unable to conceive of his friend being the initiator and solely responsible for the fraud. Back to perpetrator list Was Grafton Elliot Smith the perpetrator? Millar argues that Smith was the culprit. Smith was an expert anatomist, and a paleontologist with ready access to a wide variety of fossils. He was suspiciously quiet when Woodward messed up the construction of the Piltdown I skull. He "failed to recognize" that the cranial bones of Piltdown II belonged to Piltdown I whereas Hrdlicka recognized that the Piltdown II molar came from Piltdown I after a brief examination. Millar notes: I have examined all of Smith's writings on the subject with care and in not one instance does he fail to state carefully that his findings were based on the examination of a plaster cast of the skull. It is quite unlikely that Smith had not examined the actual skull fragments. Smith was in Nubia during most of the discoveries; however he came to England at convenient points. Smith had the right kind of personality. When Millar discussed the possibility of Smith with Oakley, Oakley was not surprised. There is, however, no direct evidence against Smith. As with other "outsider" theories it was physically impossible for Smith to have been the sole hoaxer. Back to perpetrator list Was W. J. Sollas the perpetrator? W. J. Sollas was a Professor of Geology at Oxford and a bitter enemy of Woodward. He was accused in 1978 by his successor in the Oxford chair, J. A. Douglas, in a posthumously released tape recording. The essential difficulty with this theory is to explain how Sollas (or another outsider) could have salted the Piltdown site and be sure the fake fossils would be found. One also wonders why, if Sollas were the perpetrator, he did not expose the hoax and thereby damaging Woodward's reputation. This could have been done behind the scenes easily enough by asking the right questions. Back to perpetrator list Was Teilhard de Chardin the perpetrator? In an essay reprinted in The Panda's Thumb, Stephen Jay Gould argues the case for a conspiracy by Teilhard de Chardin and Dawson. The case is circumstantial. The suggested motive is a student jape (Teilhard was quite young at the time.) It was supposed that Teilhard did not have the opportunity; however Gould shows that this was not necessarily so. Much of Gould's case rests on ambiguous wording in Teilhard's correspondence. Certainly Teilhard is a plausible candidate for the mysterious friend who helped discover Piltdown II. Gould argues that they had intended to blow the gaffe shortly after the initial finds but that they were prevented from doing so by WW I. By 1918 things had gotten out of hand to the point where the hoax could no longer be owned up to. I do not think that Gould's assessment of motive stands up well. It is plausible that Teilhard might have concocted a hoax; that is common for frisky students. However this fraud was planned and prepared years in advance and was executed over an extended period of time; the nature of the execution of the fraud goes well beyond the student jape. The case against Teilhard is considered in detail by Walsh. He argues fairly convincingly that many of the circumstances stressed by Gould have natural and plausible explanations. Teilhard was also accused of being involved by L. Harrison Matthews who claimed that Teilhard planted the fossil canine tooth in collaboration with Martin A.C. Hinton, with Teilhard subsequently "discovering" the tooth. The evidence for this collaboration is that Hinton told his friend Richard Savage that Hinton and Teilhard had visited the site together early in 1913. Matthews commented that Teilhard never mentioned this visit, and subsequent developments have damaged Hinton's credibility regarding these clues. Back to perpetrator list Was Woodward the perpetrator? Woodward seems to have escaped serious consideration, primarily because he was very much a "straight arrow". However there is a strong case to be made against Woodward as a co-conspirator with Dawson. The provenance of many of bones used in the construction of the Piltdown specimens has been established; some were not at all readily available. Woodward, and apparently only Woodward, had professional access to all of them. The main focus of Drawhorn's paper is a consideration of this question of the origin of the specimens and who could have provided them. Woodward had strong motives. He benefitted directly as co-discoverer of a monumental find. During the period in question he was engaged in an ardent campaign for the position of Director of the BMNH, a campaign in which his tactics were distinctly not "straight-arrowish". The finds directly confirmed the orthogenetic theories that he was advocating. Woodward's participation would explain many of the seemingly fortunate circumstances that allowed the hoax to survive. For example, the hoax would have failed immediately if the jawbone had been tested for organic material; it never was. Dawson, as a single hoaxer, could have arranged that only skull fragments be tested initially. However it was Woodward who kept Keith from testing the Piltdown specimens even though he had used Keith's services before and after. It was Woodward who carefully restricted access to the specimens. At no time did Woodward give the specimens the careful physical examination that would have exposed the hoax. The vagueness about the location of the second find is peculiar. At one point he designated the site as being at a particular farm on the Netherfield side of the Ouse; later he "forgot" this and designated it as being on the Sheffield Park side, location unknown. Millar remarked on the "charmed life" of the hoax. Perhaps the charmed life was stage managed. It has been argued that Woodward's correspondence with Dawson establishes his innocence. This is not so. If Woodward were a conspirator their correspondence would have been artifacts, part of the hoax. It should be remembered that copies of Museum correspondence were kept as part of the official record. For many years afterward Woodward returned to the Piltdown site for further digs; nothing was found. This may be the best argument for his innocence. The epilog in Walsh's Unravelling Piltdown draws attention to some of the oddities of Woodward's role. He considers the possibility that Woodward had unacknowledged suspicions that all was not as it should be. Although a strong case against Woodward can be made it is not definite. It is impossible to prove that Dawson did not have access to all of the specimens used to construct the hoax. Woodward's "errors" could have been unfortunate incompetence. Back to perpetrator list Myths and misconceptions Piltdown man has been the focus of many myths and misconceptions, many of which are assiduously repeated by creationists for whom Piltdown man is a popular club with which to assail evolution. They include: [It's all the British Museum's fault] [The hoax was swallowed uncritically] [500 doctoral theses were written on Piltdown man] [This is a good example of Science correcting itself] [The hoax was unimportant] [The hoax was devised to create belief in human evolution] It's all the British Museum's fault Gould and others have criticized the British Museum for keeping the fossils "under wraps". suggesting that the hoax might have been exposed much earlier. It is true that access to the fossils were restricted. This is normal practice for rare and valuable fossils. However it is doubtful that this "security" protected the hoax. The fossils were available for examination. The tests that exposed the hoax could have been performed at any time. The single most important thing that protected the hoax from exposure was that nobody thought of the possibility. However in reading the history of the find it is clear that the leading paleontologists had access to the Piltdown man specimans. For example, Hrdlicka examined them; his rejection of the mandible and cranium being from the same animal was based on direct examination. Following the revelation of the fraud Martin Hinton, Deputy Keeper in the Dept. of Zoology at the British Museum. wrote to the Times: Had the investigators been permitted to handle the actual specimens, I think the spurious nature of the jaw would have been detected long ago. Wilfred Le Gros Clark, a member of the team that exposed the forger, wrote to Hinton reminding him that Woodward had in fact allowed other specialists to examine the originals. The charge seems to have stuck, however. (Frank Spencer, The Piltdown Forgery, p. 149). It does seem to be the case that access to the fossils was quite restricted in later years. In his autobiographical book By the Evidence Leakey said when he saw Piltdown in 1933: I was not allowed to handle the originals in any way, but merely to look at them and satisfy myself that the casts were really good replicas. Then, abruptly, the originals were removed and locked up again, and I was left for the rest of the morning with only the casts to study. In "The curious story of the Piltdown fragments", South African Archaeological Bulletin 8.32 (December 1953): 103-5, A.J.H. Goodwin relates a curious tale as to why access was restricted: "These fragments were exhibited in the 'South Ken' until in 1914 a suffragette, objecting to the attribution of a sex to Piltdown Man, attacked the showcase. They were then removed to a safe in the Director's Room. In 1922, while I was doing post-graduate work at the University of London, Sir Arthur Smith-Woodward was good enough to take an interest in me. On one of my visits ... he drew me away from the Piltdown showcase and said, 'I will show you what few anthropologists have seen'. We went into his room and he reverently produced the true Piltdown fragments, resting on a cotton-wool bed. I was not permitted to touch them, though he turned them over carefully to permit me to see all views." Back to myths and misconceptions The hoax was swallowed uncritically This is a half truth; almost no one publicly raised the possibility of a deliberate hoax. There were rumors circulating, however. William Gregory, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History wrote in Natural History in May of 1914: "It has been suspected by some that geologically [the bones] are not that old at all; that they may even represent a deliberate hoax, a negro or Australian skull and a broken ape jaw, artificially fossilized and planted in the grave bed, to fool scientists." He went on, however, to vigorously deny the charge, concluding "None of the experts who have scrutinized the specimens and the gravel pit and its surroundings has doubted the genuineness of the discovery." In general, however, the finds were accepted as being genuine fossils but were not accepted uncritically as being from an ancient human ancestor. There was an early and recurring doubt that the jaw and the skull were from two different animals, that the jaw was from an archaic chimpanzee and that the skull was from a relatively modern human being. Notable critics include Dr. David Waterston of King's College, the French paleontologists Marcellin Boule and Ernest Robert Lenoir, Gerrit Miller, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian, and Professor Ales Hrdlicka. Initially there were many more critics, e.g. Osborn. However the finding of the second skull converted many of the critics. Finding a jaw from one animal near the skull of another might be an accident of juxtaposition -- two such finds is quite unlikely to be an accident. Some critics, e.g. Lenoir and Hrdlicka remained unconvinced none-the-less. The following quote comes from a "The Evolution of Man", a 1927 book by Grafton Elliot Smith: "Yet it [the skullcap] was found in association with the fragment of a jaw presenting so close a resemblance to the type hitherto known only in Apes that for more than twelve years many competent biologists have been claiming it to be the remains of a Chimpanzee." Franz Weidenreich in 1946, in his book "Apes, Giants, and Men" (Note that Weidenreich was an extremely respected scientist, having done most of the work on the Peking Man skulls): In this connection, another fact should be considered. We know of a lower jaw from the Lower Pleistocene of southern England which is anatomically, without any doubt, the jaw of an anthropoid. The trouble is that this jaw, although generally acknowledged as a simian jaw, has been attributed to man because it was found mixed with fragments of an undoubtedly human brain case. I am referring to the famous Piltdown finds and to Eoanthropus, as the reconstructed human type has been called by the English authors... Therefore, both skeletal elements cannot belong to the same skull. It should also be mentioned that in 1950 Ashley Montagu and Alvan T. Marston mounted major attacks on the interpretation of the Piltdown fossils as being from a single animal. Back to myths and misconceptions 500 doctoral dissertations were written on Piltdown man This claim appears in creationist sources. Gary Parker's pamphlet "Origin of Mankind", Impact series #101, Creation-Life Publishers (1981) makes the claim without qualification or source. Lubenow's Bones of Contention (1992) remarks that it is said that there were 500 doctoral dissertations but does not give a source. This claim is clearly in error. When one considers the small number of PhD's in paleontology being granted currently and the even smaller number 80 years ago and the diversity of topics chosen for PhD theses a figure of half a dozen seems generous; in all probability there were none whatsoever. John Rice Cole notes that in the 20s there were about 2 dissertations per year in physical anthropology in the entire US on ANY topic. Robert Parson made a systematic search of the bibliographies of The Piltdown Forgery by Weiner, The Piltdown Inquest by Blinderman, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery and The Piltdown Papers by Spencer, The Antiquity of Man (1925) and New Discoveries Relating to the Antiquity of Man (1931) by Sir Arthur Keith. Spencer and Keith's works have extensive references and bibliographies of the primary research literature. There are no references to any doctoral dissertations. Likewise Millar's bibliography contains no references to any doctoral dissertation. It is not clear whether this claim is a simple fabrication or whether it is an erroneous transcription from another source. In the introduction to The Piltdown Men (1972), Millar says "it is estimated that some five hundred essays were written about [Piltdown man]". This estimate is credible, the 1920 edition of H.G. Wells' The Outline of History remarks "more than a hundred books, pamphlets, and papers have been written [about Piltdown Man]". W. & A. Quenstedt listed over 300 references in 1936 in Hominidae fossiles. Fossilium Catalogus I: Animalia, 74: 191-197. Millar gives no source, evidently not considering the matter to be important enough to document. However it probably was the editorial in the 10 July 1954 issue of Nature (vol. 274, # 4419, pp. 61-62) which describes a meeting of the Geological Society (30 June 1954) devoted to the exposure of the hoax. The editorial (unsigned) says: "It is agreed that the skull fragments are human and not of great antiquity; that the jawbone is ape; that they have no important evolutionary significance. More than five hundred articles and memoirs are said to have been written about Piltdown man. His rise and fall are a salutary example of human motives, mischief and mistake." By coincidence, Spencer's The Piltdown Papers (1990) contains 500 letters, i.e. 500 items of correspondence between Piltdown principals. However this cannot be the source of the number 500 since The Piltdown Papers appeared well after Parker's pamphlet and Millar's book. The most plausible explanation for this myth is that Millar and Parker both used the same source, the Nature editorial, and that Parker assumed that papers and memoirs were dissertations. In turn Lubenow's source was probably the Parker pamphlet. The truth, however, is unknown. A modern variant of this myth appeared in the February 6, 1998 issue of the New York Review of Books in an article entitled Crooked Bones by Steve Jones: There have been a hundred books on the Piltdown case. Fifty name the Guilty Man (or Men, more than a dozen altogether)." Back to myths and misconceptions This is a good example of Science correcting itself It has been argued that this is a good example of science correcting its errors. This argument is a bit roseate. As the Daily Sketch wrote: Anthropologists refer to the hoax as 'another instance of desire for fame leading a scholar into dishonesty' and boast that the unmasking of the deception is 'a tribute to the persistence and skill of modern research'. Persistence and skill indeed! When they have taken over forty years to discover the difference between an ancient fossil and a modern chimpanzee! A chimpanzee could have done it quicker. Far from being a triumph of Science the hoax points to common and dangerous faults. The hoax succeeded in large part because of the slipshod nature of the testing applied to it; careful examination using the methods available at the time would have immediately revealed the hoax. This failure to adquately examine the fossils went unmarked and unnoticed at the time - in large part because the hoax admirably satisfied the theoretical expectations of the time. The hoax illuminates two pitfalls to be wary of in the scientific process. The first is the danger of inadequately examining and challenging results that confirm the currently accepted scientific interpretation. The second is that a result, once established, tends to be uncritically accepted and relied upon without further reconsideration. Back to myths and misconceptions The hoax was unimportant Robert Parson pointed out in a talk.origins posting that the Piltdown hoax was a scientific disaster of the first magnitude. He said: Piltdown "confirmed" hypotheses about our early ancestors that were in fact wrong - specifically, that the brain case developed before the jaw. The early Australopithecine fossils found by Dart in South Africa in the 1920's failed to receive the attention due to them for this reason. The entire reconstruction of the history of the evolution of humanity was thrown off track until the 1930's. Prominent anthropologists, such as Arthur Smith Woodward, Arthur Keith, and Grafton Elliot Smith, wasted years of their lives exploring the properties of what turned out to be a fake. The lingering suspicion that one of them might have been involved in the forgery will cloud their reputations forever. More than five hundred articles and memoirs were written about the Piltdown finds before the hoax was exposed; these were all wasted effort. Likewise articles in encyclopedias and sections in text books and popular books of science were simply wrong. It should be recognized that an immense amount of derivative work is based upon a relatively small amount of original finds. For many years the Piltdown finds were a significant percentage of the fossils which were used to reconstruct human ancestry. It is a black mark on science that it took 40 years to expose a hoax that bore directly on human ancestry. Creationists have not been slow in pointing to the hoax, the erroneous reconstructions based on the hoax, and the long time it took to expose the hoax. Back to myths and misconceptions The hoax was devised to create belief in human evolution This claim is often made by creationists. It is highly unlikely. We do not know for certain who the hoaxer(s) was and hence cannot speak with certainty about the motive for the hoax. However the motive almost certainly was not to convince people that men evolved from apes. To be accepted the hoax had to convince the scientific community that the find was genuine. The hoax was not needed, however, to convince the scientific community that men had evolved from apes. It already was the consensus in the scientific community at the time that man had evolved from a pre-human ape ancestor, the line of argument being two-fold, (a) the anatomical evidence and (b) the existence of pre-human fossils (Neanderthal Man, Heidelberg Man, et al). The effect of the hoax was to supply support for a particular theory about the course of human evolution, i.e., that large brains appeared early. Support for this theory may possibly have been part of the motive. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Abbot] [Barlow] [Butterfield] [Dart] [Dawson] [Doyle] [Edmonds] [Gould] [Hinton] [Hargreaves] [Keith] [Smith] [Matthews] [Teilhard] [Weiner] [Woodward] Who the players were Lewis Abbot was a jeweler in Hastings. He knew Dawson since 1900 through the Hastings museum. He was an authority on Wealdan flora and fauna and its ancient gravels and, more generally, the geology of southern England. Weiner described him as "fiery, bombastic, inspiring and weird." Frank O. Barlow was a staff member of the British Museum of Natural History. He prepared plaster casts of the Piltdown skull. William Butterfield was the curator at the Hastings museum. Ordinarily of calm and placid temperament, he quarreled with Dawson over Dawson's appropriation of some dinosaur fossils for the British Museum. Raymond Dart held the chair of Anatomy in the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. He discovered Australopithecus (Taung baby) and was the principal early exponent of an African origin for humanity. Charles Dawson was an amateur archaeologist, geologist, antiquarian, and was a collector of fossils for the British museum. He was the original person to seriously search for fossils in the Piltdown quarry. In 1912 he and Woodward discovered the the first Piltdown skull. In 1915 he discovered the second skull. He died in 1916 shortly after the finds. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a neighbor of Dawson's and had an interest in paleontology. At one point he participated in the Piltdown digs. He was the victim of the "fairies in the garden" hoax. Doyle wrote The Lost World and a number of popular mysteries. F. H. Edmonds was a British geologist in the Geological Survey. His papers in 1925 and 1951 cast doubt respectively on the assigned age of Piltdown man and on there being a plausible source for Piltdown animal fossils. Stephen Jay Gould is a paleontologist at Harvard University. Gould and Niles Eldredge introduced the "punctuated equilibrium" theory. Gould is the author of a number of popular collections of essays. He has suggested that Teilhard de Chardin was the author of the hoax. Venus Hargreaves was the workman who assisted Dawson, Woodward, and Teilhard deChardin in the Piltdown digs. Martin A. C. Hinton was a member of the Sussex circle of paleontologists before the hoax and a curator of zoology at the British Museum at the time of the fraud. He was an expert on the effect of deposition of fossils in gravel. Hinton was noted for his practical jokes. Sir Arthur Keith was an anatomist and paleontologist, keeper of the Hunterian collection of the Royal College of Surgeons, and president of the Anthropological Institute. L Harrison Matthews was an eminent English biologist who wrote an influential series of articles in New Scientist in 1981 in which it was postulated that Dawson planted the original finds and Hinton, with the aid of Teilhard, planted the later objects. Matthews was a friend of Hinton. Grafton Elliot Smith was a fellow of the Royal Society and in 1909 became the holder of the chair of anatomy at the University of Manchester. Smith had made a special study of fossil men. He was one of the select crew that participated in the Piltdown dig. W. J. Sollas was a Professor of Geology at Oxford. He was acerbic, ecentric, and a bitter enemy of Woodward and of Keith. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a friend of Dawson, a Jesuit, a paleontologist, and a theologian. He participated in the discovery of Peking man and Piltdown man. He is popular for his theological theories which are considered heretical by the Catholic church. J. S. Weiner was an eminent paleontologist. In 1953 he realized that Piltdown man might have been a hoax. J.S. Weiner, Sir Kenneth Oakley and Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark jointly exposed the hoax. Sir Arthur Smith Woodward was the keeper of the British Museums's Natural History Department and was a friend of Dawson. His specialty was paleoichthyology. His subordinate, W.P. Pycraft, who was in charge of the anthropology section which dealt with fossil humanity, was an ornithologist. Neither was knowledgable about human anatomy, a fact which facilitated the hoax. References This section lists major sources. Tom Turrittin's bibliography page is a comprehensive post 1953 bibliography of Piltdown man material. The Piltdown Inquest, C. Blinderman, Prometheus 1986 Betrayers of the Truth, Broad and Wade, Simon and Schuster, ISBN 0-671-44769-6, 1982, focuses on scientfic frauds and other hanky panky, including a section on Piltdown man. The Panda's Thumb, Stephen Jay Gould, W.W.Norton and Company, New York, contains the essay "Piltdown Revisited" which gives Gould's views on the hoax. A Framework of Plausibility for an Anthropological Forgery: The Piltdown Case, Michael Hammond, Anthropology, Vol 3, No. 1&2, May-December, 1979. The Antiquity of Man, Sir Arthur Keith,2nd edition, 2 vols., Williams and Northgate, London 1925. Volume 2 devotes about 250 pages to Piltdown man, with many references to primary research literature. New Discoveries Relating to the Antiquity of Man, Sir Arthur Keith, Williams and Northgate, London 1931. Page 466 contains the cited material. Bones of contention: a creationist assessment of human fossils, M.L. Lubenow, Grand Rapids, MI, Baker Books, 1992. (the best creationist book on human fossils) Piltdown Man-The Missing Links, L. Harrison Matthews, a series of articles in New Scientist from 30 April 1981 through 2 July 1981. The Piltdown Men, Ronald Millar, St. Martin's Press, New York, Library of Congress No. 72-94380, 1972, 237 pages + 2 appendices + an extensive bibliography. Piltdown: a scientific forgery, Frank Spencer, Oxford University Press, London 1990, ISBN 0198585225, xxvi, 272 p. : ill., ports. ; 25 cm. The Piltdown Papers, Frank Spencer, Oxford University Press, London 1990, ISBN 0198585233, xii, 282 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. The second book is a collection of archival materials that Spencer investigated in his research. His book is based in part on research of Ian Langham; Langham died in 1984 and Spencer was asked to finish the investigation. Unravelling Piltdown, John Evangelist Walsh, Random House, New York 1996, ISBN 0-679-44444-0, 219p, 38p of notes, selected bibliography, index. The Piltdown Forgery, J. S. Weiner, Oxford University Press, London, 1980, is a republication of the 1955 edition. The Earliest Englishman, A. S. Woodward, Watts and Co. London, 1948, is Piltdown man's last hurrah in respectability. Web pages Piltdown man appears in a number of web pages, mostly as an arguing point in pages expounding creationism and in pages refuting creationist claims. Piltdown man apparently also the name of a rock group. Related web pages include: As part of a thesis project Tom Turrittin created a comprehensive bibliography of references to the Piltdown man hoax since its exposure in 1953. He has made this material available on the web in the form of two pages. One page contains the full bibliography; the other contains an overview, including material on "whodunit" theories which is more thorough than the coverage here. The page links are the mirrored copy of the overview, the mirrored copy of the bibliography, the original copy of the overview, and the original copy of the bibliography. These pages were last revised January 27, 1998. The Talk.Origins Archive is a general resource for issues relating to evolution and creationism. Jim Foley's fossil hominids page is an excellent overview of what is known about fossil hominids. There is a page on Piltdown man. The Origins of Mankind Web Links page is a resource page for human evolution. Bonnie Sklar's anthropology pages includes a page on Piltdown man; it's focus is on the anthropological issues. The Piltdown man page appears in The Skeptic's Dictionary, a collection of essays about popular pseudoscience topics. It relies heavily on Gould. The Piltdown Forgery contains a book review of J.S. Weiner's book on the hoax. Donald Simanek has a copy of the May 1996 Nature article about Gardiner and Currant's case against Hinton. Doug Lundberg has a page on the Nature article accusing Hinton. Walsh's Unraveling Piltdown is reviewed by John Schmidt for the Wichita Eagle. It is also reviewed by Orson Scott Card. The Museum of Unnatural Mystery has a Piltdown page briefly covering the major players. It has a photo of Hinton and Dawson. Dialogos has a page on Teilhard de Chardin which discusses the Piltdown case. The fall 1996 page of McGraw Hill's on-line magazine, Physical Anthropology Update, has an update on Gardiner's accusation of Hinton. Andrew Hudson, a resident of Sussex has a page of links to Piltdown man pages. He commends the wines of the Barkham Manor Vineyard which occupies the site of the "discovery". The Barkham Manor Vineyard maintains the historic marker; their page has a small map of the area. The Reader's Corner site has an extensive page on the Doyle theory entitled The Softer Side of Murder, The Strange Case of Piltdown Man which is well worth reading. There is also a short summary of the case against Hinton. There is a web page version of Robert Anderson's article in Pacific Discovery accusing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The July 1998 issue of the Earth and Sky webzine has a long article by Shireen Gonzaga on the Piltdown hoax; it is a nice overview. The following is an incomplete list of sites with links to this page: * Piltdown Man Andrew Hudson * Pretty Polly's list of People who have Chiggers * Creationist Arguments: Piltdown Man * Paleoanthropology Links * Selected Scientists and Inventors * Science Philip R. "Pib" Burns * Piltdown Hoax Robert T. Carrol * Trolls, Hoaxes, Culture Jamming, Poetic Terrorism, Media Hacks * The Creation Concept Douglas Cox * D. Formenti links: ANTHROPOLOGY * Donald Simanek's Page * Piltdown Man (Mirrored Copy) * Neal Thomsen's Home Page * Sites involving Fossil Man and Human Evolution * The Softer Side of Murder, The Strange Case of Piltdown Man * Natural History Exhibits and Resources * Anthropology Links * The Evolutionary Tales: Rhyme and Reason on Creation/Evolution * The Genus Homo: H. Erectus and Early H. sapiens * NM's Creative Impulse ... Prehistory * Prehistoric Cultures, University of Minnesota * Z100--Fakes, Hoaxes, Scams and Forgeries: The Culture of Inauthenticity * Scientific Hoaxes * AntropologĚa y ArqueologĚa * Internet Resources From The Mining Company * The Floorman's Bookmarks * Stu and Andi's Roscoe Page * Nerd World: PALEONTOLOGY * Mac The Knife: Mid-Knife at the Oasis * Don Lindsay's Piltdown Man Page * JonssonĄs & SidwallĄs Surfpage to ScienceNews and Human Origins * The 'Lard Ridges' Pages (links page) * The Ultimate Creation/Evolution Website * Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Literary Agent * ALINKS UTILI PER CORSO DI ANTROPOLOGIA: * WELCOME! ---EBERSOLE'S PAGE * Educational Computing, Year I, skull * JonssonĄs & SidwallĄs Surfpage to ScienceNews and Human Origins * R.V.'sÝ ForensicÝ Anthropology Page * LECTURE 8 - AN OUTLINE OF HUMAN PHYLOGENY * Dinosaurs: Science Or Science Fiction * Tables are easy! * Scientific Hoaxes * The Evolutionary Tales * The Earliest Hominids * Steven Birk's Creation Page Links * History 101:The Ancient World * The Genus Homo: H. Erectus and Early H. sapiens * Ebersole's Professional Page =========== PILTDOWN: Evidence of Smith-Woodward's Complicity by Gerell M. Drawhorn (UC Davis) http://www.tiac.net/users/cri/drawhorn.html This paper was presented in a poster session of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists on April 1, 1994 and is appearing here by the kind permission of the author. The abstract of this paper appears in the February 1994 issue of the AJPA Assessment of the chemical composition of the fossil specimens associated with the Piltdown cranial remains suggests several possible source localities for the introduced elements. While additional evidence supports the Weiner-Oakley hypothesis (1955) that Charles Dawson was involved in the fraud, it remains difficult to explain his access to the unusual paleontological specimens without a scientific accomplice. A review of the excavational/curatorial histories of the source localities indicates that Arthur Smith Woodward had both initimate knowledge of access to all of the requisite specimens. The Ghar Dalam paleofauna, the likely source for Hippopotamus premolar planted at Piltdown, was originally described by Woodward in 1894. The radioactive "Stegodon" molar fragments are plausibly associated with the Upper Biozone at Pikermi where Woodward collected in 1901. Subfossil Pongo specimens were catalogued into the Natural History Museum by Woodward in 1899. Oakley noted that a Patagonian archeological specimen may have served as the "remarkably thick" cranium used in the fraud. Woodward acquired several Ona and Fuegean skulls in 1899. Illustrations of an Ona cranium were found inserted into the pages of Woodward's personal copy of Keith's Antiquity of Man. A Dawson-Woodward nexus is made more plausible by their three decades of regular interaction prior to 1912. The specimens recovered and the timing of their discovery provided support for Woodward's belief that orthogenetic principles could accurately predict "missing links" in human evolution. Woodward's primary motivation may have been an effort to establish himself as the principal candidate for the coveted Directorship of the Natural History Museum. Introduction It has been four decades since the revelation that a human cranium and an orangutan mandible were fraudulently introduced into the Piltdown gravel bed. Since then there have been some twenty-five individuals proposed as instigators of "the greatest scientific hoax of this century". Many of these "suspects" have been identified, not on the basis of physical evidence, but only through the presumption that they had a motive for pursuing the fraud. The late Tom Harrison, Curator of the Sarawak Museum, proposed a less subjective but more discriminating method to identify potential perpetrators: tracing the orangutan mandible used in the episode from its point of origin to those individuals who may have had opportunity to plant it in the Piltdown (Harrison 1959). This study extends Harrison's suggestion to include other materials "salted" in the Barkham Manor gravels. Methods Known chemical compositions of fossils from over 500 Plio-Pleistocene samples (Weiner et al 1967,1971,1975; and other sources) were contrasted with specimens utilized in the Piltdown forgery (Weiner et al). Localities with faunal and chemical characteristics that corresponded with the materials from Piltdown were then evaluated as to (a) date of official discovery and (b) possible access to the antiquarian "gray market". The curatorial histories of collections from localities discovered prior to 1915 were examined in detail (Sherborn 1940, Cleevely 1983, Webby 1989). Individuals involved in the excavation, cataloguing, curation, or scientific evaluation of materials served as a pool from which those with link in the Piltdown discoveries could be identified. Results Domestic fauna: Cervus elaphus, Castor fiber, Dicerorhinus etruscus, Equus sp., Anancus cf. arverensis, Hippopotamus amphibus [E.599 Premolar] A number of the specimens recovered from the Piltdown pit and vicinity are indistinguishable in mineralogical content, coloration, and character from materials derived from several Red Crag and Norwich Crag localities in the United Kingdom. The bulk of these assemblages were known by collectors for decades before the first Piltdown "discovery" and served as a supply pool for Natural History supply houses in London and elsewhere. Although trace-element analyses might generate a more specific signature for the composition of materials at these sites, at present efforts to narrow the roster of potential Piltdown source-localities to particular domestic assemblages has not proven fruitful. Non Domestic fauna: Hippopotamus Molar [E.598] A possible Maltese link was initially noted by Weiner et al (1955) who pointed out Hippopotamus teeth from the John H. Cooke collection excavated at Ghar Dalam in Malta (Cooke 1893), if artificially treated with FeSO4 (iron alum), corresponded with the similarly treated Piltdown lower molar (E.598). The bulk of the Ghar Dalam material remains in Malta, but comparative collections were sent to Bologna and London, where Arthur Smith Woodward (1894) originally described the assemblage. After his assessment Woodward [henceforth ASW] sent a small paratype series to Edinburgh. Elephas cf. africanavus Molars [E.596-97,E.620-621] The broken molar plates from Piltdown have also been variously classified as "Stegodon" (Dawson and Woodward 1913), E. africanavus (Weiner et al; Maglio 1973), E. [Archidiskodon] planifrons (Freudenberg 1915, Matsumoto 1924, Osborn 1943), or diagnosed merely as a "primitive" elephantid close to the Early Pliocene origin of the taxon (Maglio, 1973). Although these teeth are fragmentary in nature, their chemical composition is of extraordinary value in identifying their probable origin. Weiner et al (1955) found both the enamel and cementum of these fragments exhibited extreme radioactivity, although at varing levels. Oakley (1954) believed that radioactive E. africanavus molars from the Ichkeul locality in Tunisia seemed the likely source for the Piltdown fragments, but noted that Ichkeul was not officially discovered until 1947. Oakley surmounted this problem by hypothesizing that a single tooth from Ichkeul might have been acquired in a Tunisian souk and then brought to Britain via agents in the antiquities trade. The tooth would have then been purchased and broken up to provide the several fragments used in the fraud. There is countervailing evidence to this view. Osborn's (1942) analysis of wear and morphology indicates that the Piltdown sample consists of fragments from three distinct specimens. This is also supported by Weiner et al's (1955) own study of the differential levels of absorption of Uranium in the enamel and cementum of E.597, E.598 and E.620. Any perpetrator of the Piltdown fraud must, therefore, have had access to a substantial sample of E. cf. africanavus teeth, an unlikely circumstance if the specimens had been purchased through an antiquities dealer. A more likely source than Ichkeul for the Piltdown specimens would be the radioactive assemblage from the Upper biozone of the Pikermi beds (Theodorou, Karis-teneos and Papadopooulos 1985). This assemblage apparently represents the same biozone as Bethlehem Early Pliocene fauna (which contains a mixture of Pikermi elements and a primitive elephant provisionally assigned to E. africanavus). Although many Continental museums had sent workers to collect at Pikermi, there was an absence of comparable material in British museums until the 20th Century. During the summer of 1901 Woodward (1901) and his wife Maud made extensive excavations at Pikermi and recovered a diverse fauna, including proboscideans. The BMNH collection appears to be the only one in Britain sampling the Pikermi fauna until the fraud unfolded. Elephas sp. femur [E. 615-617] In their third season of fieldwork at Piltdown, Dawson and Woodward (1914) reported uncovering a previously undiscovered yellow sandstone stratum. After the 1914 field season ended this stratum was reported as being "unfossiliferous". They were, however, to soon contradict this assessment. The next season, after having workmen remove a section of a hedge to expand their excavation, Dawson and Woodward (1915) discovered a broken proboscidean femur "implement", smeared with yellow mud, that exactly matched splinters of bone found in the yellow bed the "previous season" (i.e., 1914). This reversal relating that fossil material was actually found in the yellow sandstone was overlooked at the time. The fact that the matrix containing the slivers was a faked composite (Weiner et al 1955) was only discovered scores of years later. Likewise ASW's fanciful explanation of how two articulating fragments of the femur could have been removed from the "newly uncovered" stratum and discarded unnoticed by laborers was unscrutinized. The "artifact" was not found in gravel debris from the pit, as would have been expected if it had been thrown away by the workers, but in a black vegetable loam. The weathering of the surface between the two portions was far in excess of the "whittling" supposedly made by hominids on the ends of the fragments. Since the break must have occurred long before the facets had been cut, the fragments must have been cut later and intentionally placed in close apposition under the burgeoning hedgerow. Woodward seemingly failed to notice these and many other obvious discrepencies in the history of the excavation. Woodward had long been a quiet supporter of the British eolith movement and the femur artifact supported his view that a Pliocene "bone age" would be found to precede the more recognizable lithic industries (Woodward 1912). In 1906 he had sent CH Read (Director of Antiquities and Ethnography, British Museum) a "tusk...rolled in mud for ages" with a sharpened end that he believed provided proof of this. But Read disabused the notion, pointing out the break was "certainly a natural fracture...doubtful as a tool". Nevertheless, the incident is uncannily like that of the Piltdown femur episode. In 1913 ASW was privy to Reid Moir's discovery of small broken bone "implements" from the Red Crag (Moir 1915) that may have encouraged the introduction of the femur. The coincident reports of the Piltdown femur and Red Crag fragments provided mutual support for Woodward's notion of a Pliocene "bone age". Woodward claimed the morphology of the femur "artifact" suggested a form of elephant larger than any other known from the Pleistocene of Britain. This hinted at an earlier chronological placement than the Early Pleistocene association he had publicly allowed in 1912, and lent support to the hominid's association with the earlier fauna in the Piltdown gravel. The morphology of proboscidean femora from the Pleistocene locality of La Cotte de St. Brelade in Jersey (Scott 1986) match the Piltdown specimen in breakage and size. The femur is also consistent with chemical content of materials from La Cotte. At the behest of RR Marrett, Woodward (1911) described the assemblage from La Cotte. He could also have gained access to extremely large "Pliocene" proboscidean femora through his excavations at the Spanish site of Tereul (Woodward 1902, 1903) and at Pikermi (Woodward 1901). Pongo pygmaeus (subfossil mandible) [E.594, E.611, E.648] The Pongo right mandible selected for use in the Piltdown fraud is not fossilized, but sediment was found deep within the cancellous chambers of the ramus (Oakley to Le Gros Clark, in Spencer 1990b) and plugging the mandibular canal (A. Marston to J. Trevor 1967). Slight traces of fluorine indicates the mandible was not a "wild shot", but had ultimately derived from a sedimentary context. Radiocarbon analyses by the Groeningen laboratory generated a date of 500 plus or minus 100 ybp. (Vries and Oakley 1959; Vogel Waterbolk 1964). The Piltdown molars exhibit a pattern of dehiscing characteristic of many of the specimens collected from the Bau limestone cave and Paku Flats auriferous sands in the Everett subfossil collection from Sarawak (Everett, Evans and Busk 1880). These, and later donations from Everett's executors were catalogued as a unit into BMNH Department of Geology collections by ASW in 1899 (Woodward 1904). Although attention has been focused on Everett's extant orangutan collections housed in the Department of Zoology (Spencer 1990), this smaller subfossil collection has gone unnoticed. Although absent from the current collections, it possibly once contained "a skull of Simia Wurmbii in a fossilized state" that Hornaday (1888) reports that Everett had disinterred from Bau Cabe. Woodward had both knowledge of and unhindered access to the BMNH subfossil materials throughout the Piltdown find. A necessary ability to repeatedly exploit this source would be consistent with the discovery of the Piltdown canine a year after the mandible and the left molar from the PII site in 1915. Homo cranial remains Recent C14 analysis of PII frontal supports the view that two distinct thick skulls of medieval age were used in the Piltdown fraud (Spencer and Stringer 1989). One puzzling aspect of the Piltdown episode is the ability of the forger to locate sources for these extraordinarily thick modern human crania. Spencer (1990a) and Tobias (1992) argue a large osteological collection (such as that at the Royal College of Surgeons) would have been necessary to provide the requisite pathologically thickened crania. The accumulation of fluorine in these specimens also suggests they were interred for some time and not from a mortuary derived collection. Although such a pattern of calvarial thickening is extremely rare in most populations, Weiner et al (1955) found that crania with thickend diploe and thin internal and external tables (as Piltdown) are relatively commonplace within the Ona Amerindian population of Patagonia. In 1899 Woodward received several thick "Fuegian" Ona crania from the Argentine anthropologist, F.P. Moreno. Yet until Oakley's observation (on this same Ona series), it was believed no one (other than the hoaxer) had observed any connection between these specimens and Piltdown. Never-the-less, after a review of Woodwards's personal library (held intact in the Special Collections, DMS Watson Library, University College, London) this investigator found ASW had noticed a relationship. In the pages of his personal copy of Arthur keith's Antiquity of Man (1925), Woodward had inserted illustrations of the type specimen of this Ona series opposite his rivals Piltdown reconstruction. It is difficult to conceive of any other plausible explanation of Woodward's interest in drawing this comparison than his implicit knowledge that the Piltdown specimens were drawn from either Moreno's donated series or another set of Ona crania (perhaps collected on either Woodward's 1896 or 1907 visit to Patagonian archelogical sites (Woodward 1897). Other evidence The 1913 Chemical Analysis When questions were first raised regarding the contemporaneity of the Pliocene fauna and the Piltdown cranial fragments and mandible, Ray Lankester and Aubrey Strahn (Spencer 1990a,b) lobbied to have BMNH mineralogist GFH Smith perform comparative analyses. Woodward's failure to properly assess the chemical content of the Piltdown fauna has usually been attributed to the general obscurity and distrust of these methods. But, as Hammond (1988) has suggested, it was only after the widespread acceptance of the antiquity of the large-brained Piltdown specimen that doubts regarding the innovative methods developed by Carnot (1892,1893) and Bemmelen (1896,1897abc,1900) became widespread. In fact, Woodward's ([1892]; Moreno and Woodward 1900) vigorous support of Carnot's technique as a means to determine potential admixture of assemblages has escaped wide notice. Woodward's dramatic reversal on chemical assessment of the specimens coincides with a cautious retreat from his earlier position of Pliocene age of the cranium. It thus seems strange that ASW rebuffed the requests to have GFH Smith, located in the same wing of South Kensington, to assay the remains. At the same time Smith (1908,1912) was not only making great strides in the assaying of small quantities of signature compounds in minerals, but was also an authority on the chemical detection of fraudulent gemstones. Although he had used Smith's services frequently in the past (and would do so subsequently), Woodward instead elected to allow the inexperienced Sussex County Analyst SA Woodhead (Dawson's friend) to undertake this critical study. Woodward examined only the organic content of a small piece of the cranium and one of the fossil bones from the locality. Dawson and Woodward (1913 in comments introduced supplementing their 1912 oral presentation) reported that neither fragment exhibited organic component. This result is strong at variance with modern assessment of the crania suggesting Woodhead (a) failed to analyze the materials properly, or (b) was provided something other than the cranium for assay. Many have pondered why Dawson, if involved in the forgery, openly admitted treating the fragments with potassium dichromate to Woodward (Weiner 1955; Weiner et al 1955). Dawson also noted that the staining of the fossils resulted from the presence of "bisulphide of iron" (iron alum) in the Piltdown gravels (Dawson and Woodward 1914). Both admissions are consistent with his specific knowledge of the compounds used in altering the specimens. While in hindsight these claims appear incriminating, they would also serve as effective alibis had Strahan's and Lankester's objections won out and simple comparative tests had eventually been performed by GFH Smith. Dawson's (1894) use of iron alum on other specimens has finally been documented. His use of dichromate on the Piltdown specimens as a "preservative" later became common knowledge, but was only formally reported much later (Woodward 1933; Hopwood 1955). It may be important that Woodward's announcement followed immediately on the heels of Vayson de Paydenne's renowned book on scientific fraud "Les Faux en Archeologie Prehistorique" (1932). de Paydenne pointed out that Carnot's fluorine and other chemical comparisons established the non-contemporaneity of the Calaveras skull and fossil rhinoceros bone associated with it. This might easily have led to a re-evaluation of the Piltdown fragments. Sonia Cole (1955:134) reported Oakley's surprise when she informed him of this earlier rediscovery of Carnot's work with fluorine analysis. "Why, if Vayson knew this in 1932, did nobody do anything about it?" ASW's subsequent effort to miscarry Smith's examination of the specimens amd retreat from an assuredly Pliocene association of the hominid as well as other actions seem to designed to obscure the composite nature of the Piltdown assemblage. One can only image what Oakley would have proclaimed if he had been aware of Woodward's championing of Carnot's fluorine method. Piltdown II The second "Piltdown" locality was 'discovered' in early 1915, just as questions regarding the association and contemporaneity of the mandible and the cranial fragments were again coming into question. Dawson's "find" of another thick portion of cranium and of a molar tooth resembling those in the Barkham Manor mandible effectively quashed arguments that the original remains belong to two distinct taxa or were referable to distinct depositional phases. Furthermore, the late Pliocene/early Pleistocene dating of the specimens was bolstered by the recovery at "P II" of another molar of Rhinoceros etruscus. Unfortunately, Dawson died in 1916, a year and a half after the discoveries at "P II", but months before Woodward chose to announce these specimens. While not specifically detailing the location of the second site, Woodward (1917) remarked that he had "visited the field with Dawson in the Spring and Fall of 1914 without success". ASW did specifically pinpoint the location of "P II" at John Martin's Netherhall Farm (HJ Osbourne White 1926) and also on a map provided to the Sussex Archaeological Society (Costello 1985). On a section of the Ouse River drainage basin provided to HF Osborn (1921, 1926), Netherhall Farm was identified as situated on the same river terrace as Piltdown. Yet, despite the potential of this new locality providing important material (and even though he he moved to nearby Hayward's Heath in 1924), there is no evidence ASW ever sought to survery or initiate trial excavations at Netherhall. It is clear that after Dawson had reported the specimens to ASW in January 1915 and had brought the human remains to London at least twice that year, showing them to both Lankester (1915) and Arthur Keith (RCS Keith Desk Diary 1915). Woodward had also visited Dawson several times before his death. After Woodward's retirement, Ales Hrdlicka, who questioned the possibility that the cranium and mandible could derive from the same species of hominoid, made inquiries about the provenience of the PII specimens (Spencer 1990b). Responding, Woodward vehemently denied knowing either the specific location of the site (suggesting it may have been at Sheffield Park, on the opposite bank of the Ouse from Netherhall), or of having examined the PII specimens until after Dawson's death. What can explain Woodward's contradictions regarding the PII specimens and why did he allow the Netherhall site to lapse into obscurity? Woodward was aware of the fact that Dawson was the Steward of both Barkham Manor and Netherhall Farm (Weiner 1955; Vere 1955). The probability of Dawson locating similar assemblages, conveniently establishing the contemporaneity of the originally discovered mandible and cranium, on a property which he administered, would surely have brought scrutiny upon the authenticity of the entire Piltdown assemblage. Although Dawon's death may have afforded some protection from direct accusation, both Woodward's discovery and reputation would have been shattered had a fraud been exposed. And there is certainly the risk that evidence contemporary with the events would have brought forth suggesting Woodward's direct involvement. Reconstruction One can easily understand why the hoaxer chose to select a faunal assemblage that was at least as old as that of the Trinil and Heidelberg assemblages. The selection of the Piltdown fauna directly reflected Woodward's (1898) own diagnosis of the "Upper Pliocene". His orthogenetic concepts of evolutionary change were also consistent with the fragments recovered from the Barkham gravel. In 1909 he went on record suggesting that morphological laws provided by embryology could predict the evolutionary history of the human lineage. "When the general features of organic evolution are determined in this manner, it will be much easier to decide where missing links in any particular case are likely to be found" even for "links among the rarest of all fossils, those of the higher apes and man" (Woodward 1909). Woodward's faith in these deterministic principles could have led him to feel secure that later discoveries would entirely vindicate his morphological reconstruction of human ancestry. Some of these "laws" were recapitulation principles widely promoted by American (Cope, Osborn, Hyatt) and German (Eimer) orthogeneticists. Woodward (1909) embraced the idea that more generalized "young" forms eventually became dominant species replacing lineages which develop many "senescent" features in parallel. These degenerating lines were characterized by the accretion of cresting, spines, processes (Beechers model). To Woodward (1914; Dawson and Woodward 1913) the ape-like supraorbital tori and nuchal cresting of Neanderthal and Pithecanthropus were signposts that they were evolutionary cul-de-sacs. This meant the discovery of an equally ancient but smooth-browed rival to these forms was inevitable. "Deliberate malice could hardly have been more successful than the hazards of deposition in so breaking the fossils as to give free scope to individual judgement in fitting the parts together." GS Miller (1915) Removal of portions of the cranium which preserved the sagittal suture and the symphysis of the mandible deleted landmarks which could have identified the midline of the Piltdown skull. This allowed ASW considerable latitude in reconstructing a cranium with a cranial capacity smaller than modern humans and closer to that of the Java specimen. Only later did Woodward (1915) quietly capitulate to Keith's careful cranial reconstruction. And this retreat curiously occurred just before Dawson "reported" the discovery of the PII frontal (which established the midline). The 1912 recovery of the orangutan mandible in association with the cranial fragments forced the scientific community to reject a simple linear model of human evolution in favor of one with parallel hominid lineages. Some weeks prior to the discovery of the mandible Dawson had pointed out to Woodward the primitive aspects of the "chinless" Cheddar mandible, as if fully expectant to both that a jaw with similar features would soon be recovered at the Piltdown pit. The existence in the deciduous dentition of humans of a more "ape-like" canine suggested to Woodward that the actual ancestor of humans would have borne a larger canine than found in Homo heidelbergensis. This he modeled in the dentition of the 1912 reconstruction. A few weeks after Keith produced a rival reconstruction with more human-like teeth in August 1913, an artificially abraded canine mirroring ASW's model conveniently emerged from the pit. Motive Woodward's efforts to obtain the Directorship of BMNH are well documented. In 1909 he gained the testimonials of twelve prominent botanists, zoologists and geologists and even privately commissioned a professionally lithographed application. In a transparent slap at his chief rival for the position, he note "I have always been in robust health so that...I should have the prospect of being able to carry on a definite and consistent policy." Mineralogist Lazarus Fletcher was elderly and had spent most of 1907 hospitalized due to ill health. Nevertheless, possibly due to the desire by the Trustees to award him a larger pension and for reasons of temperament and public reputation, Fletcher was hired over Woodward. ASW might have felt frustration at the politically appointed Museum Trustees ignoring his reputation as the world's authority on fossil fish. Piltdown may have been initiated as a drive to foster public recognition. What better means to obtain public acclaim than discovering the "missing link" on English soil. Woodward may have concluded that, upon Fletcher's (seemingly imminent) retirement, the Principal Trustees would have little choice but to bow to popular as well as scientific pressure. This enterprise was somewhat frustrated with the advent of WWI and Fletcher's decision to remain on at the Museum until hostilities ended. The war, of course, dragged on until 1919, with much of Fletcher's operational activities being assumed by the well respected Museum Secretary, CE Fagan (Stearn 1981). Upon the announcement of Fletcher's retirement, Woodward undertook to undermine Fagan's chances to replace Fletcher (and leave himself an open path) by anonymously promoting the publication of "Memorials" in The Times and Nature opposing the appointment of a non-scientist to the Directorship. The Trustees ultimately recruited the application of Fagan's friend, SF Harmer, the Keeper of Zoology. Woodward's frustration at his failure to acquire the position and bitter departure from the Museum was well-known (White 1945; Simpson 1978; Colbert 1989; Hodgson in Spencer 1990a). He retired to Haywards Heath, and used nearby Piltdown to remain in the public limelight, hosting entourages of celebrities and fellow scientists who wished to visit the English cradle of humankind. Conclusion Given the many possible risks to his reputation and career, Arthur Smith Woodward has been considered an implausible confederate to Charles Dawson in the Piltdown affair. Woodward's seeming lack of motive has distracted many. Yet it is clear that ASW did serve to benefit from the acclaim of the "discovery" and had undertaken many other questionable practices in order to advance his desire to be appointed to the Directorship of the Natural History Museum. Woodward's innocence is seemingly promoted by letters from Dawson retained in the BMNH files. But we should not expect incriminating evidence to openly emerge from these documents. The correspondence in question was very public. The Keeper's correspondence was subject to regular review by the Director and was retained in Deparmental letterbooks as a permanent record. Woodward maintained a thirty year association with Charles Dawson, which suggests a close and compelx relationship beyond that of any other "suspect". Without such ties the trust essential for the conspiracy to occur would have been inexplicable. Dawson had access to the Sussex localities but lacked appropriate specimens and expertise to succeed alone. Woodward's close association with sites that serve as plausible sources for materials used in the fraud provide important physical evidence pointing towrd his involvement. Woodward's participation in the fraud also explains many of the puzzling episodes and "oversights" that surround the discoveries. A Dawson-Woodward nexus appears to draw together all the necessary elements to provide a satisfying resolution of the Piltdown fraud. 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A series of mineralized bone implements of a primitive type from below the base of the Red and Coralline Crags of Suffolk. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia. 2:116-131. Moreno, F.P. and A.S. Woodward. 1989. On a portion of mammalian skin, named 'Neomyodon listai', from a cavern near Consuelo Cove, Last Hope Inlet, Patagonia. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1:144-156. Oakley, K.P. 1954. Solving the Piltdown problem. Archaeological Newsletter 5:163-169. -- 1964. The problem of man's antiquity: an historical survey. Bulletin of the British Museum of Natural History (Geology) 9(5):85-155 -- 1980. Relative Dating of the fossil hominids of Europe. Bulletin of the British Museum of Natural History (Geology) 34(1):1-63. Oakley, K.P., B.G. Campbell and T.I. Molleson, 1967 Catalogue of fossil hominids pt.1: Africa London:British Museum (Natural History) -- 1971. Catalogue of fossil hominids pt.2: Europe. London:British Museum (Natural History) --1975. 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Geological Magazine (4) X, 203-207 -- 1904 "The Deparment of Geology" in The history of the collections contained in the Natural History deparments of the British Museum V 1. London. -- 1909. Opening Addres, Section C, British Association for the Advancement of Scienc, Winnepeg. Nature 2079:290-294. -- 1911. An account of recent excavations in the cavern of La Cotte, St. Brelade's Bay, Jersey. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 67:iii. -- 1912. Palaeolithic man in New Jersey. Nature 88:304. -- 1914. On the lower jaw of an anthropoid ape (Dryopithecus) from the Lower Miocene of Lerida (Spain). Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 70:316-320. -- 1915. A Guide to the fossil remains of man in the Department of Geology and Palaeontology in the British Museum (Natural History). 1st ed. London. -- 1916. The use of the Higher vertebrates in stratigraphical geology. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 72:lxv-lxxv. -- 1917. Fourth note on the Piltdown gravel, with evidence of a second skull of Eoanthropus dawsoni. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 73:1-10 -- 1933. Early man and assoiciated fauna in the Old World. Science 78:89-92. Acknowledgments I express my appreciation ot the archivists and staffs of the Natural History Museum, London; the Royal College of Surgeons, London; the Hastings Public Library; the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery; and the Library of the University of Cambridge. Innumerable favors were granted by Chris Stringer and Robert Kruzynski (Human Origins Group); Ann Lum (Paleontology Library), John Thackery (Archives), Andrew Currant and Jerry Hooker (Departmnent of Paleontology) of the Natural History Museum. Ian Lyle (Library) and Carolyn Grigson (Hunterian Museum) of the Royal College of Surgeons also aided in gaining access to unpublished material of Arthur Keith and others. R.K. and C.B. also provided helpful discussion on the fraud and have me appraised of current developments. Posthumous accolades must go to Joseph Weiner, Kenneth P. Oakley and J.C. Trevor who were cose to establishing Woodward's involvment many years ago; and to my father who encouraged the endeavour to resolve this paleontological mystery. ============ A Piltdown Man Bibliography compiled by Tom Turrittin http://www.tiac.net/users/cri/bibliog.html Notice: Click here for an organized version of this bibliography into categories, as well as other information about the history of the post-1953 Piltdown literature, other Piltdown Web sites, and more! I also have a list of references not shown here that I am currently looking for. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Anonymous, 1953a. "Piltdown Man Forgery", Times (London) November 21: 6. o 1953b. "Piltdown: How Fake Was Found", (London) Observer November 22: 1. o 1953c. "Elaborate hoax of Piltdown skull", Sunday Times (London) November 22: 7. o 1953d. "More Doubts on Piltdown Man", Times (London) November 23: 8. o 1953e. "Experts Red-Faced on Piltdown Hoax", New York Times November 23: 29. o 1953f. "A Jaw Unmasked", Manchester Guardian November 23: 4. o 1953g. "Features of Piltdown skull 'Deliberate fakes'; 50,000 - not 500,000 - years old?", Manchester Guardian November 23: 16. Partly reprinted in Anon 1953p. o 1953h. "Early Man", Times (London) November 24: 9. o 1953i. "When it was Dark", Manchester Guardian November 24: 6. Reprinted in Anon 1953q. o 1953j. "Another Fake?", Manchester Guardian (editorial cartoon) November 24: 7. o 1953k. "The Piltdown Hoax", New York Times November 24: 28. o 1953l. "Motion Tabled on Piltdown Man", Times (London) November 25: 8. o 1953m. Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), Fifth Series, House of Commons Official Report, Session 1953-1964. Vol. 521, pp.528-9. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office. o 1953n. "Piltdown Man Hoax: Protest against 'Attacks', Disclosures Welcomed", Times (London) November 26: 5. o 1953o. "Piltdown Man Echo in Commons", Manchester Guardian November 26: 1. o 1953p. "The 'Piltdown Skull' a Forgery", Manchester Guardian Weekly November 26: 3. Partial reprint of Anon 1953g. o 1953q. "'When It Was Dark'", Manchester Guardian Weekly November 26: 6. Reprint of Anon 1953i. o 1953r. "'Fakes' and 'Old Bones', Merry Interlude in Commons", Manchester Guardian November 27: 1. o 1953s. "Piltdown Skull, The Speaker's Rejoinder", Times (London) November 27: 5. o 1953t. "Status of Piltdown Man Defined", Times (London) December 3: 10. o 1953u. "Flint Tool of Piltdown Man Bogus; X-Rays Reveals Age Was Simulated", New York Times December 12: 23. o 1953v. "Last Home of 'Swanscombe Man'", Manchester Guardian Weekly December 24: 12. o 1953w. "Piltdown Man", Nature 172 (November 28): 981-2. o 1953x. "Piltdown Man", Time and Tide December 5: 1571-2. o 1953y. "Piltdown Man", Time and Tide December 19: 1678. o 1954a. "Alvan T. Marston", Dental Record 74 (January): 15. o 1954b. "The Piltdown Skull Hoax: An Unfair Discrimination", Manchester Guardian January 12: 5. o 1954c. "The Piltdown Flints", Nature 173 (March 20): 525. o 1954d. "Piltdown Man's Canine Tooth", New York Times June 27: Sec.4, p.7. o 1954e. "Piltdown Finds all 'Planted'", Times (London) July 1: 4. o 1954f. "Completing the Hoax", Times (London) July 1: 9. o 1954g. "All of 'Piltdown' is Proved a Hoax", New York Times July 1: 27. o 1954h. "The Piltdown Bones and 'Implements'", Nature 174 (July 10): 61-2, 65. o 1954i. "Piltdown Hoax Clumsy, Fresh Evidence Shows", Science News Letter 66 (July 17): 40. o 1954j. "Gaps in Record of Fossil Man", Times (London) September 4: 2. o 1954k. "Museum Exhibits Discredited", Times (London) November 15: 8. o 1954l. "Piltdown Skull Hoaxer Linked to More Fakes", New York Times November 15: 11. o 1954m. "Archaeological Hoax in Sussex", Times (London) December 15: 5. o 1955a. "Piltdown mystery unravelled", Sunday Times (London) January 2: 1. o 1955b. "The 'Tragedy of Piltdown'", Sunday Times (London) January 9: 1. o 1955c. "Sabre-Toothed Tiger 'Not So Old'", Times (London) January 19: 10. o 1955d. "Investigation into Piltdown Skull", Times (London) January 21: 10. o 1955e. "Mr. Dawson's Mystery", Times (London) February 17: 11. o 1955f. "Palaeontology and Detection", Times Literary Supplement February 18: 100. o 1955g. "Piltdown Exposure", Times Literary Supplement April 29: 220. o 1955h. "Results of Piltdown Forgery - Future Deception Impossible", Times (London) May 21: 10. o 1955i. "The Piltdown Man Exposure", Manchester Guardian May 31: 3. o 1955j. "The skull at Swanscombe", Times (London) August 6: 8. o 1955k. "New Discovery at Swanscombe, Kent", Nature 176 (August 13): 287. o 1969. "The Famous Piltdown Hoax", Chemistry 42.9 (October): 21-2. o 1970a. "Atticus: Skull duggery", Sunday Times (London) November 29: 11. o 1970b. "Ariadne", New Scientist 48 (December 10): 471. o 1971. "Chronique de la chambre ý bulles", La Recherche 2 (11): 367. o 1972a. "The Piltdown Men, by Ronald Millar", Times (London) August 10: 10. o 1972b. "Monkey business", Times Literary Supplement 3682 (September 29): 1136. o 1975. "The Piltdown Man Hoax", Palaeontology Leaflet No. 2. London: British Museum (Natural History). o 1978a. Untitled. New York Times October 30: 30. o 1978b. "Piltdown man won't lie down", New Scientist 80 (November 2): 343. o 1980a. "Frenchman 'helped in Piltdown Man hoax'", Times (London) July 14: 6. o 1980b. "Piltdown Puzzles", New York Times July 15: C2. o 1980c. "Holy Hoaxer?", Time July 28: 73. o 1983a. "Arthur Conan Doyle is Piltdown Suspect", New York Times August 2: C1, C6. o 1983b. "Doyle's Quarrel with Science". The Baltimore (Sunday) Sun August 7: K6. o 1987a. "Q.E.D.", Television listings, Sunday Times (London) March 29: 62. o 1987b. Television listings, Times (London) April 1: 41. o 1987c. Television listings, Manchester Guardian April 1: 35. o 1990a. Untitled photograph with caption. Times (London) June 14: 36. o 1990b. "American detective finds fresh clues to Piltdown mystery", New Scientist 126 (June 16): 26. o 1990c. "Piltdown claim cuts no ice", Times (London) September 24: 12. o 1990d. "Skull-duggery at a Royal College?", The Lancet 336 (October 13): 933. o 1994. "The oldest European", Times (London) May 18: 17. o 1996. "Bat and boule", Times (London) January 4: 16. * Andrews, P.B.S., 1953. "Piltdown Man", Time and Tide December 12: 1646-7. o 1974. "A Fictitious Purported Historical Map", Sussex Archaeological Collections 112: 165-7. * Ashmore, Malcolm, 1995. "Fraud by Numbers: Quantitative Rhetoric in the Piltdown Forgery Discovery", South Atlantic Quarterly 94.2 (Spring): 591-618. * Austin, M.R., 1970. "The innocent man of Piltdown", Sunday Times (London) December 6: 12. * Baines, J. Manwaring, 1986 (orig. 1955). Historic Hastings. St. Leonards-on-sea, East Sussex: Cinque Port Press, pp. xii, 164, 346, 386 fn. 7. * Baker, John R., 1955. "The Piltdown Skull", Sunday Times (London) January 16: 6. * Ball, H.W., 1974. "The Piltdown forgery", Times (London) April 29: 17. o 1990. "Foreword", in Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery, by Frank Spencer. London: Oxford University Press, pp. vi-vii. * Barwick, Sandra, 1997. "Scientist rake over bones of Piltdown Man", Daily Telegraph (London) March 21. * Baynes-Cope, A.D., 1955. "The Fluorimetric Determination of Uranium in the Piltdown Fossils", in J.S. Weiner et al., 1955, pp. 283-4. * Berger, Meyer, 1953. "About New York", New York Times November 25: 18. * Bernstein, Richard, 1996. "The Real Piltdown Man Stands Up", New York Times September 11: C17. * Blanc, M., G. Chapouthier & A. Danchin, 1980. 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"Premature Discoveries in Science with Especial Reference to Australopithecus and Homo Habilis", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 140.1 (March): 49-64. * Tobias, Phillip V. & K.A.R. Kennedy, 1993. "On Arthur Keith's Cover: In Other Words", Current Anthropology 34.1: 67-8. * Townshend, G.L., 1981. "Piltdown Puzzle", New Scientist 91 (Sept. 24): 823. * Trigger, Bruce G., 1992. "Comments", Current Anthropology 33.3: 274-5. * Turrittin, Thomas H., 1995. The Recurring Tale of Piltdown Man. Unpublished undergraduate thesis (B.A.Hon.). Department of Anthropology, McGill University, MontrČal, Canada. Dr. Michael S. Bisson, academic advisor. * Vallois, Henri V., 1953. "La solution de l'Čnigme de Piltdown", L'Anthropologie 57: 510-1, 562-7. o 1954. "Encore la fraude de Piltdown", L'Anthropologie 58: 353-6. o 1955. "Movement Scientifique", L'Anthropologie 59: 297-300. * van Esbroeck, Guy, 1972. Pleine LumiËre sur l'Imposture de Piltdown. Paris: Šditions du CËdre. * Vere, Francis (pseudonym, real name Bannister), 1955. The Piltdown Fantasy. London: Cassell. o 1959. Lessons of Piltdown: A Study in Scientific Enthusiasm at Piltdown, Java and Pekin. London: The Evolution Protest Movement. * Vogel, J.C. & H.T. Waterbolk, 1964. "Groningen Radiocarbon Dates V", Radiocarbon 6: 349-69. * von Koenigswald, G.H.R., 1981. Letter in "Piltdown in Letters", Natural History 90.6: 21-5. * Wade, Nicholas, 1978. "Voice from the Dead Names New Suspect for Piltdown Hoax", Science 202 (December 8): 1062. o 1990. "New Light on an Old Fraud", New York Times [Book Review, section 7] (November 11): 14. * Walsh, John Evangelist, 1996. Unraveling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and Its Solution. New York: Random House. * Walton, Rob, 1997. Ragmop (comic book), issue 10 and surrounding issues. Toronto: Planet Lucy Press. * Washburn, Sherwood L., 1953. "The Piltdown Hoax", American Anthropologist 55: 759-62. o 1954. "Reply: An Old Theory is Supported by New Evidence and New Methods", American Anthropologist 56: 436-41. o 1979. "The Piltdown Hoax: Piltdown 2", Science 203 (March 9): 955-8. o 1981. Letter in "Piltdown in Letters", Natural History 90.6: 12-6. o 1992. "Comments", Current Anthropology 33.3: 275-6. * Watson, John, 1954. "The Piltdown Hoax", New Statesman and Nation November 27: 696-7. * Weiner, J.S., 1955a. "Outline of the Piltdown Problem", in J.S. Weiner et al., 1955, pp. 229-33. o 1955b. "Piltdown Mystery", Sunday Times (London) January 23: 2. o 1955c. The Piltdown Forgery. London: Oxford University Press. Reprinted in 1980/81, New York/Chicago: Dover, and Oxford University Press. o 1960. "The Evolutionary Taxonomy of the Hominidae in the Light of the Piltdown Investigation", in Men and Cultures, Selected Papers of the Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Philadelphia, September 1-9, 1956. Ed. by Anthony F.C. Wallace. 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"The Piltdown Fraud: Available Evidence Reviewed", American Journal of Physical Anthropology 12: 1-7. * Weiner, J.S., K.P. Oakley & W.E. Le Gros Clark, 1953. "The Solution of the Piltdown Problem", Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) Geology 2.3: 139-46 and Plates 8 and 9. * Weiner, J.S., W.E. Le Gros Clark, K.P. Oakley, G.F. Claringbull, M.H. Hey, F.H. Edmunds, S.H.U. Bowie, C.F. Davidson, C.F.M. Fryd, A.D. Baynes-Cope, A.E.A. Werner, R.J. Plesters, 1955. "Further Contributions to the Solution of the Piltdown Problem", Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) Geology 2.6: 225-87 and Plates 27-31. * Weinert, Hans, 1954. "Zur neuen angeblichen L–sung des Piltown-Problems", Zeitschrift f¸r Morphologie und Anthropologie 46.2 (Juni/June): 304-15. * Wendt, Herbert, 1956. In Search of Adam. Translated by James Cleugh. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. o 1972. From Ape to Adam. London: Thames and Hudson. * Werner, A.E.A. & R.J. Plesters, 1955. "The Black Coating on the Piltdown Canine", in J.S. Weiner et al., 1955, pp. 271-2. * West, Anthony, 1959. "Darwinitis: A Literary Complaint", New Yorker October 10: 176-89. * West, R.G., 1996. "Opening for Sussex", Times (London) January 10: 17. * Wilford, John Noble, 1990. "Mastermind of Piltdown Hoax Unmasked?", New York Times June 5: A1, C6. * Williams, James, 1993. "Fakes, fraud, and fluorine", School Science Review 74 (No. 268, March): 41-6. * Wilson, Angus, 1956. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes: A Novel. New York: Viking. * Winslow, John Hathaway, 1983. "Winslow Replies to Critics". The Baltimore Sun September 5: A6. * Winslow, John Hathaway & Alfred Meyer, 1983a. "The Perpetrator at Piltdown", Science 83 (Washington, 1979 series) vol. 4.7 (September): 32-43. o 1983b. "Winslow, Meyer reply", Science 83 (Washington, 1979 series) vol. 4.9 (November): 23-6. * Wright, R.V.S., 1992. "Comments", Current Anthropology 33.3: 276-7. * Wymer, J., 1971. "A Further Fragment of the Swanscombe Skull", in Adam or Ape: A Sourcebook of Discoveries About Early Man, ed. by L.S.B. Leakey, Jack Prost & Stephanie Prost. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, pp. 349-51. Originally submitted to Nature, September 1955. * Ziman, J.M., 1970. "Some Pathologies of the Scientific Life", Nature 227 (September 5): 996-7. * Zuckerman, Solly, 1971. "Art and Science in Anatomical Diagnosis" in Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Frontiers of Public and Private Science. New York: Taplinger, pp. 61-74, 222-3. Originally in Manchester University Medical School Gazette, 1954, vol. 33. o 1972. "The Piltdown Men", Times Literary Supplement 3686 (October 27): 1287. o 1973. "Sir Grafton Elliot Smith", in Concepts of Human Evolution, ed. by S. Zuckerman. Symposia of the Zoological Society of London 33: 3-21. o 1990a. "A new clue to the real Piltdown forger?", New Scientist 128 (November 3): 16 o 1990b. "A Phony Ancestor", New York Review of Books November 8: 12-6. o 1991. "The Piltdown Mystery: An Exchange", New York Review of Books January 17: 58-9. =========== A Mostly Complete Piltdown Man Bibliography (an organized reference) by Tom Turrittin http://www.tiac.net/users/cri/piltref.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hello and welcome to this attempt to present post-1953 literature on Piltdown Man in some sort of organized manner! Once you've located the references here that you wish to explore, jot them down, and then click here for the full bibliography. This web page was created in September 1996, although it had been originally compiled on paper in July 1995. This page was last updated in January 1998, and you can e-mail me by clicking here. Other Piltdown Man Web Pages: * The Piltdown Man home page by Richard Harter, a basic resource * Bonnie Sklar's anthropology pages * The Skeptic's Dictionary * Andrew Hudson's page of links * Jim Foley's fossil hominids page has an entry on Piltdown, and is part of the much larger and excellent Talk.Origins Archive. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The organized bibliography I've divided it into several parts, which are: Introductory Notes: Important information about this bibliography (now on a separate page) Section A: Initial Piltdown forgery discussions, 1953-55 Section B: Piltdown whodunit literature (big!) Section C: Post-1953 scientific tests and questions of origin Section D: Other forgeries besides Piltdown Section E: Fraud and forgery literature Section F: General science literature Section G: Anti-evolutionist / Pseudo-scientific literature (for and against) Section H: Media and entertainment and the bibliography itself, which has its own separate page. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Introductory Notes The introductory notes have been moved to a separate page. If you're a researcher, please read it; if you're a casual web-surfer, you won't find it as interesting, although I do have a link to what my favourite articles are. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section A - Initial Piltdown forgery discussions, 1953-55 I have re-edited this section to make it more chronological and less confusing. A "~" sign means that the date is approximate. A lot of the dates in this section are based on newspaper announcements, and in many cases the "real" event happened earlier. There was also a great deal of letter-writing going on in scientific circles which is not documented here (but see Spencer 1990b: 196-251). Most of the newspaper articles in this section are from The Times of London and The New York Times. A number of other missing articles from this period can be seen in my wishlist. 1953 July 30 Weiner conceives of the forgery hypothesis while returning from the Wenner-Gren "Early Man in Africa" conference. ~August 6 (and onwards) Weiner takes his theory to Clark, his professor, along with a chimpanzee mandible he has experimentally altered. Clark contacts Oakley by phone and later that day Oakley agrees they need to investigate, and that the affair should be kept secret within the BMNH until they can do more research and come forward with an exposure. Oakley begins a series of new tests on the bones with other scientists. August 17 (and onwards) By this time, Weiner has made two excursions to Sussex to investigate the people originally involved with the discovery of Piltdown Man. Woodward and Keith are never considered as suspects. Most of the information that Weiner uncovers relates to Dawson and his suspicious practices, so most of Weiner's research focuses in that direction. His investigations continue for several months with the help of other colleagues. Aside from Dawson, Weiner investigates Teilhard, and Sussex locals such as Abbott. Although during his interviews Weiner tried to avoid voicing his own suspicions, some could tell he was implicating Dawson (Spencer 1990b: 220), while others could not (Spencer 1990b: 6.3.58). Weiner has stated "quite unequivocally that before the public announcement of the hoax in November 1953, I had ... carried out my main inquiries ... without any prejudice whatever against Dawson. In fact until all the scientific work had been done I had not concerned myself with a possible perpetrator at all" (Weiner 1973: 25). This statement is probably inaccurate. Many of Weiner's interviews definitely focused around Dawson; although not out of prejudice but most likely because they were the "hottest leads". The scientific work on Piltdown continued well into 1954, and Weiner's suspicions about Dawson were quite strong before then. ~September Weiner and Oakley meet in person for a preliminary anatomical re-examination of the Piltdown bones. November 21 (Saturday) Weiner, Oakley and Clark release their article, The Solution of the Piltdown Problem (Weiner, Oakley & Clark 1953), officially announcing the forgery along with The Times (Anon 1953a) and BBC broadcasts. Other newspapers quickly picked up on the story which was soon heard across the world (Anon 1953b; Hillaby 1953). Oakley and Weiner visited Sir Arthur Keith in person that same afternoon to discuss Piltdown with him (Spencer 1990b: 207, 219). He was 87 years old and, along with Teilhard, was one of the few remaining individuals still alive who had been involved with Piltdown Man as it had first been discovered. Teilhard only gave a brief statement to the press (Anon 1953n) and entered into correspondence with Weiner and Oakley. Hinton wrote to The Times shortly afterwards (Hinton 1953). The journal Nature was bitter at The Times, because the editors of Nature had been in on the secret of the forgery before it got announced and yet "the scoop" had not been granted to them, nor had a general press conference been called (Anon 1954b; Spencer 1990b: 203). Nature's article appeared a few days later (Anon 1953w). When the Piltdown forgery was first announced, it is important to keep in mind that at that point the only publicly proven facts were that Piltdown Man's jaw and canine had been forged. The skull, on the other hand, was still considered to be a genuine fossil, of about 50,000 years of age. However, over the course of the November 21st weekend it was revealed that bones from the Piltdown II site were also forgeries, and that the flint tools and the bone implement were also suspicious (Anon 1953d). These latter thoughts received more confirmation the following month (see below). The newspapers immediately seized upon Dawson as the most likely culprit behind the forgeries. Although Weiner, Oakley and Clark claimed they were keeping their personal opinions about the forger out of their published work at this point, their articles kept repeating that Dawson had been staining bones, and that some of the bones could not have become stained after they fell into Woodward's possession. The implication was obvious. The press had many responses to the forgery. Numerous authors pointed out that other scientists such as Miller and Weidenreich had considered the Piltdown bones to be spurious well before 1953. People were also suspicious of Oakley's fluorine method, which although had now been made more refined and exact, it had not detected the forgery when it had been first applied to the bones in 1949. The public in general was unfamiliar with scientific dating methods. Others, especially scientists, argued about how incomplete human fossils could be more objectively interpreted in the future. There were also arguments about how accessible the Piltdown collection had been in the past for examination, and what the human evolutionary tree currently looked like, and the role of scientists. (See Anon 1953bcdefghkpwxy; Andrews 1953; Baker 1955; Berger 1953; Daniel 1953; Ehrich & Henderson 1954; Heizer & Cook 1954; Hillaby 1953; Hinton 1953; Hooton 1954; Lighthill 1953ab; Ovey 1953; Shapiro 1953; Stearn 1954a; Vallois 1953; Washburn 1953, 1954.) The focus of research on human evolution had already switched to Africa some years before 1953, and the debunking of Piltdown had no discernible effect on that. The "presapiens" paradigm which Piltdown had once helped to support was on a decline, although it still had its followers such as Vallois. Zuckerman used Piltdown to argue for statistical analysis in human palaeontology, which since 1947 had been his ongoing method of rejecting Australopithecus (Zuckerman 1971 [orig. 1954]). Only a small number of people were negative towards the news of the forgery. Among these were the zoologist W.C. Hill (Hill 1954: 148), and the American physical anthropologist E.A.Hooton, who was skeptical but willing to concede and move on (Hillaby 1953: 28; Hooton 1954; Spencer 1990b: 215). A few people denied the forgery entirely. One of these was Hans Weinert, a German scientist who had studied the bones in 1933 and who now thought that the mandible was human. I have an article by Weinert (Weinert 1954; mentioned in Vallois 1954: 353), but since it is in German I am unable to read it - I hope to put a copy of it online here at some point. The other dissenter was Alvin T. Marston, a 65-year-old dentist who had discovered the remains of Swanscombe Man in 1935 and 1936 (which had now become Britain's oldest human skull, Anon 1953v). Convinced from early on that the Piltdown bones were those of two creatures, man and ape, and not a single combination of the two, Marston (who had harassed the scientific community before) embarked on a quest to prove that Dawson was not a forger and that the Piltdown bones were still genuine. Marston got his opinions presented in a large number of newspapers (Anon 1953cn, 1954a; Marston 1954ab; Spencer 1990b: 205 fn.1; Picture Post December 19, 1953: 41-3) and quickly embittered Weiner, Oakley and Clark towards him, especially Oakley. F.J.M. Postlethwaite also defended Dawson, who was his stepfather (Postlethwaite 1953.) There were a number of anti-evolutionists at this time who used Piltdown Man's downfall to support their cause (Drummond 1955; Himmelfarb 1959; Time and Tide December 12: 1646; Vere 1959; with reactions in Anon 1953y; Oakley 1955b; A. West 1959). On the literary front, Weiner had briefly considered whether the Rudyard Kipling short story "Dayspring Mishandled" was a tangential reference to Dawson (Spencer 1990b: 249-50). Some publishers considered using the wave of interest in Piltdown to re-publish an earlier work of fiction called When It Was Dark, but then abandoned the idea (Anon 1953iq). However, the plot of a new novel called Anglo-Saxon Attitudes may have been inspired by Piltdown (Wilson 1956). November 25 This was the first of three meetings concerning Piltdown which were held at the Geological Society of London. Marston caused some sort of disruption during the meeting, but the various reports of this have only vague and sometimes contradictory details (compare Anon 1954i with Weiner 1955c: 69). For reports of the meeting, see Anon 1953n; Cole 1955: 158-60; Marston 1954a; Weiner & Oakley 1954: 4-7; Vallois 1954: 353-4; Wendt 1956: 416. In more recent literature, the events of the meeting are discussed in Blinderman 1986a: 112-3; Millar 1972: 218-9; Spencer 1990a: 135, 229 fn.20; Spencer 1990b: 205. ~November 26 Six members of the British House of Commons try to table a motion using Piltdown to affect the reputation of the trustees of the British Museum. (Anon 1953lmors; Ovey 1953). On November 27th, a member of parliament is interviewed about Piltdown on the BBC radio show "Any Questions" (Anon 1954a). The Nature Conservancy is also nervous around this time about receiving criticism for having formally recognized and preserved the Piltdown site in 1952 (Spencer 1990b: 6.2.8,9,13). December 2 Punch publishes a cartoon of an ape-man sitting in a dentist's chair as the dentist tells him, "This may hurt, but I'm afraid I'll have to remove the whole jaw" (Illingworth 1953). Other jokes and political cartoons around this time can be seen in Anon 1953j; Kramer 1953; Spencer 1990a: 140. December 3 The Natural History Museum in South Kensington opens a Piltdown Man exhibit (Anon 1953t). ~December 5 or 8 Vere speaks in a BBC broadcast called "Was Dawson Guilty?" in which he defends that Dawson was not the forger (Spencer 1990b: 226; Vere 1955: 11-2; Vere 1959: 16). December 12 (and onwards) Weiner's investigations into Piltdown Man's history during August had uncovered an accusation that the Piltdown flint tools had been chemically stained. Experiments proved this to be the case, and this was announced in Nature (Anon 1953u; Oakley & Weiner 1953; the article provoked a new attack from Marston the following February). Suspicion next turned to the other man-made Piltdown artifact, the elephant thighbone implement (or "cricket bat") which had been considered to be strange for many years (Montagu 1954; Reeve 1953). Investigations proved that this too had been faked. As the months went by, it was learned that many of the Piltdown finds had been altered and that none of them could have originally come from Piltdown - the whole site was a sham. 1954 February 24 Marston confronts Oakley at a second meeting of the Geological Society of London, arguing about the Piltdown flints (Anon 1954c). March Weiner and Oakley make their first official statement on Piltdown for an American journal, (Anon 1954d; Weiner & Oakley 1954). There had been earlier reports by other authors in American journals, see Washburn 1953 (with reactions in Ehrich & Henderson 1954; Heizer & Cook 1954; Washburn 1954); Straus 1954a. June 30 Eleven months since Weiner first thought of the forgery, a third meeting of the Geological Society of London declares that the entirety of the Piltdown site was a hoax. Marston was permitted to make a presentation at the beginning, but the speakers and exhibits that followed pretty much closed the book on the forgery (Anon 1954efgh; Oakley 1954; Straus 1954b; Vallois 1954: 354-6). The substance of this meeting later became Weiner et al. 1955, published in January of 1955. Piltdown Man was a very significant event at this point because it proved how modern scientific technology could be successfully used in archaeology, especially for dating purposes. This was in agreement with the general post-WWII trend of encouraging scientific research and development. Among the techniques used on Piltdown Man were Oakley's improved fluorine analysis, two different X-ray methods, tests for organic content, and the presence of uranium and radioactivity. Although these methods had been in development before 1953, Piltdown helped to draw attention to them. Radiocarbon dating existed at this time but was not refined enough to use on the Piltdown bones; this did not happen until several years later. August Weiner has finished a rough copy of his book, The Piltdown Forgery. Teilhard visits England and discusses Piltdown with a number of British scientists, including Oakley and Weiner. November 15 J. Manwaring Baines, the curator of the Hastings Museum, accuses Dawson of plagiarizing The History of Hastings Castle, as well as faking other artifacts. One response to this came from Downes, who was investigating Dawson's artifacts; and an anonymous suggestion appeared that Arthur Conan Doyle was behind the Piltdown forgery (Anon 1954kl; Downes 1954; Thorne 1954; Watson 1954; also see Salzman 1955; Weiner 1955b). Baines published the book Historic Hastings the following year, but his comments about Dawson have only reappeared in the 1986 edition (Baines 1986). (For more information about Dawson and forgeries, consult Section D.) 1955 January 7 Sir Arthur Keith dies. Almost immediately a letter is published in which Keith had said he thought Dawson was behind the forgery (Anon 1955b; Hampton 1955). January 9 (and onwards) A three-week series of articles begin in the Sunday Times (Emerson & Weiner 1955abc) to promote Weiner's upcoming book, in which he openly accuses Dawson of being the most likely candidate behind the forgery. See Anon 1955a; Baker 1955; Drummond 1955; Hampton 1955; Oakley 1955b; Salzman 1955; Weiner 1955b. January 21 The final conclusions of the scientific tests on the Piltdown assemblage are released in an article entitled Further Contributions to the Solution of the Piltdown Problem, under the name of 12 authors (Weiner et al. 1955). These are essentially the conclusions that were announced on June 30 in 1954. See Anon 1954m, 1955d; Burkitt 1955; Spaulding 1955; Vallois 1955: 297-8. A summary of this article appeared later in an American journal in October (Oakley & Weiner 1955, 1957). mid-February Weiner's book, The Piltdown Forgery (Weiner 1955c), is released. See Anon 1955ef; Burkitt 1955; Eiseley 1956; Hawkes 1955; Shapiro 1955, Vallois 1955: 298-300. Responses were mainly positive, but Mabel Kenward had some disagreements with Weiner (Spencer 1990b: 246-7). April 10 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin dies on Easter Sunday in New York. late April Vere releases his book, The Piltdown Fantasy (Anon 1955g; Vere 1955). May 20 Clark makes a definitive speech to the Royal Institute of Great Britain about Piltdown Man (Anon 1955h; Clark 1955bc). Oakley and Clark had given a number of lectures on Piltdown, see Anon 1954j, 1955c; Spencer 1990b: 6.3.26. After this point, Clark's speeches and publications only give brief, passing references to Piltdown without much discussion. Oakley and Weiner would occasionally talk about Piltdown as the years went by. ~May Sir Gavin de Beer proposes that the official entries for Piltdown Man be removed from the indices of Latin zoological nomenclature (de Beer 1955b). Marston had become quiet at this point but remained very disgruntled (see Spencer 1990a: 229 fn.20). May 30 Weiner and Oakley appear on Glyn Daniel's show, Buried Treasure, on BBC Television (Anon 1955i; Pound 1955). Summer Robert Essex accuses Teilhard of being the forger (Essex 1977). August 6 It is announced that the right parietal bone of the Swanscombe skull has been found, fitting in perfectly with the parts that Marston had found twenty years earlier in 1935 and 1936. The importance of the Swanscombe site was formally recognized in 1954 when the Nature Conservancy made it a National Nature Reserve, as it had done to the Piltdown site in 1952 (Anon 1953v, 1955jk; Wymer 1971). November 1955 Sonia Cole releases Counterfeit, a book about great cases of fakery, including a section on Piltdown (Cole 1955; Crawford 1956). Piltdown ceases to be a news item (until the 1970s) and for the next 15 years is referred to mostly in textbooks, usually briefly (some good exceptions are Howells 1967 [orig. 1959]; Wendt 1956: 405-17). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section B - Piltdown whodunit literature Because post-1953 literature on Piltdown Man is most often concerned with discussing who the forger could have been, a chronological table of Piltdown forger accusations serves to organize the evolution of the discussion. Some of the accusations listed below are fairly "small" and unnoticed, but caught my attention. Author Year Accuses Weiner 1955 Dawson Vere 1955 Labourer at the Piltdown site Essex 1955 Teilhard Vere 1959 Teilhard Trevor 1967 Woodward & Dawson W.R. Thompson 1968 Teilhard Leakey 1969 Teilhard & Dawson Miscellaneous 1956-71 articles ------- ------------------ van Esbroeck 1972 Butterfield & Hargreaves Millar 1972 Elliot Smith Krogman 1973 Dawson Bowden 1977 Teilhard Langham 1978 Elliot Smith & Woodward Douglas & Halstead 1978 Sollas, Hinton, Dawson & other BMNH staff Gould 1980 Teilhard & Dawson Matthews 1981 Dawson & Abbott, then Hinton & Teilhard Winslow & Meyer 1983 Arthur Conan Doyle Costello & Daniel 1985 Woodhead & Hewitt Booher 1986 Teilhard Blinderman 1986 Abbott Grigson 1990 Barlow & Dawson Langham & Spencer 1990 Keith & Dawson Zuckerman 1990 Hinton Thomson 1991 Dawson, then Hinton & Teilhard Langdon 1991 Dawson Tobias 1992 Keith & Dawson Clermont & Thackeray 1992 Teilhard Drawhorn 1994 Woodward & Dawson Anderson & Milner 1996 Arthur Conan Doyle Gardiner & Currant 1996 Hinton Walsh 1996 Dawson The dates on this table are not absolute. In many cases, the authors had been building their theories for several years, and sometimes had published it before the date indicated, but it went unnoticed. Although many of the authors seem to be accusing the same victims, they often suggest different motives and use different evidence to substantiate their claims. Where there are several people accused at once, I have tried to list them in decreasing order of alleged participation. Aspects of this table are subjective as a result. There are also many vague accusations which have been made that are not listed on this table. Glyn Daniel's personal list of people who he had seen accused has some of the above names, as well as A.S. Kennard, Horace de Vere Cole and his circle of expert hoaxers, and an unnamed person on the staff of the BMNH (Daniel 1961; 1972: 263; 1974); a comment which had been made both by Hallam L. Movius and Herbert J. Fleure (see Daniel above, and Anon 1953e; Spencer 1990b: 211). For similarly vague reports, see Anon 1978b; Cave 1973; Daniel 1986: 59; and Spencer 1990a: 178, 237 fn.86; Spencer 1990b: 234. Chronological bibliography: "Announcement(s)" refers to the article or book which contained the Piltdown accusation which received the most attention. "Previews" are any articles which foreshadowed or promoted the announcement before it happened. In some cases, the Preview receives responses from other authors. Lastly, "Reactions" contains all articles which appeared in the wake of an announcement. This includes re-reporting of the announcement, reviews, and debates. I make little attempt to discuss the details of the various whodunit theories, but I have tried to identify the profession of the accusers where possible. For brief descriptions of the people who have been accused, see Spencer 1990a: xix-xxvi. Note that the chronological "groups" presented here are partially subjective. I have not mentioned every single time that an author has discussed someone's previous theory. Instead, I have grouped articles together according to the theory they were primarily concerned with. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Weiner (1955) accuses Charles Dawson Weiner's book was the culmination of his research to find the Piltdown forger ever since he uncovered the forgery in 1953, and served as a springboard for all future accusations. It remains a standard reference work. Weiner has admitted that he wrote the book hastily (Blinderman 1986a: 105), to scoop Vere (see below). Previews: Dawson had been implicated by the media right from the very beginning (Anon 1953a), but suspicion was not officially declared until January of 1955, immediately after the death of Sir Arthur Keith. See Anon 1955ab; Emerson & Weiner 1955abc. Reactions in Baker 1955; Drummond 1955; Oakley 1955b; Salzman 1955; Weiner 1955b. Announcement: The Piltdown Forgery became available on February 17, 1955, published by Oxford University Press (Weiner 1955c), and was republished in 1980/81. Reprinted passages can be found in Weiner 1963, 1971. Reactions: Weiner's book created very little published discussion, aside from book reviews. See Anon 1955ef; Burkitt 1955; Eiseley 1956; J. Hawkes 1955; Shapiro 1955; Vallois 1955: 298-300. It is interesting to note that when Weiner was conducting research for his book, he was assisted by a colleague, Geoffrey Ainsworth Harrison, an Oxford professor in physical anthropology, who often went with Weiner during his interviews (see Spencer 1990b: 215, 217, 238-40). Harrison has occasionally reappeared in the Piltdown literature, but no author has mentioned how his interest in Piltdown originated. See Harrison 1983, 1990, 1992. Weiner began collecting evidence in Sussex within two weeks of first realizing the Piltdown bones were fraudulent. By August of 1954 he had a rough draft of the book finished (Spencer 1990b: 219, 250), and he wrote the preface in October. The Piltdown story appeared again in 1955 in Counterfeit, a book by Sonia Cole, who later went on to be a biographer of Louis Leakey. See Cole 1955: 136-73; reviewed in Crawford 1956. Weiner, in his later years, had been thinking of re-writing his book, but died before he could do so. Oakley and Daniel commented that Weiner was going to take into consideration the new data that had appeared over the years (Daniel 1982b; Oakley 1976: 13), but from his own words Weiner's opinions had remained very much the same (Weiner 1974). Weiner's last comments on the subject were recollections of how he had thought of the forgery, the reactions when he approached Clark and Oakley with the idea, and some of their early tests (Harrison 1983). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Vere (1955) accuses a labourer at the Piltdown site Francis Vere entered the Piltdown debate originally to defend Dawson's name, but Vere was a pseudonym for his real name, which was Bannister (see Spencer 1990a: 239 fn.36). Vere's first appearance was in a BBC broadcast he made on December 5th or 8th, 1953, called "Was Dawson Guilty?" (Spencer 1990b: 226; Vere 1955: 11-2). After that point, a race ensued between Weiner and Vere to finish writing their books before the other did. Vere seems to have finished his earlier, but Weiner's managed to be the first to get published. Announcement: Vere 1955. Vere's book, The Piltdown Fantasy, was a point-by-point refutation of Weiner's The Piltdown Forgery. Vere's choice of the forger was one of the labourers who had worked at Piltdown, and he may have been implying Venus Hargreaves. Reaction: Anon 1955g. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Essex (1955) accuses Teilhard Robert Essex, like Vere, wrote to defend Dawson. Essex was a biology schoolmaster who had taught at Uckfield Grammar School during the time when Piltdown Man was found. Essex had approached Oakley and Weiner with his theory as early as January-February of 1954, but had been dismissed (see Spencer 1990b: 231-2, 235, 241). He went on to publish his suspicions anyway, but named Teilhard as "Mr. X". Essex's theories have since reappeared erratically in many Piltdown whodunit articles. Announcement: Originally appeared as "The Piltdown Plot: A Hoax That Grew", published in the Kent and Sussex Journal, July-September 1955, vol. 2.4: 94-5. Reprinted later, see Essex 1977. This appeared not long after Teilhard's death on April 10 of 1955. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Vere (1959) accuses Teilhard Vere made a second unexpected appearance in 1959 with the publication of a small book, Lessons of Piltdown. This was essentially a book promoting Creationism, as it was published by The Evolution Protest Movement. Vere again defended Dawson, but changed his Piltdown accusation, placing the blame this time on the scientists who had been involved in Piltdown, especially Teilhard. The book also criticized Teilhard's work in Java and Peking. Announcement: Vere 1959. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Trevor (1967) accuses Woodward & Dawson According to Spencer, a mostly unknown accusation had been made against Arthur Smith Woodward and Dawson by Trevor in 1967. "Jack" C. Trevor worked in the Duckworth Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, and died in the same year he was considering his theory. His work contained many suspicions regarding W.J. Lewis Abbott, the jeweler; Wynfrid L.H. Duckworth, a Cambridge anatomist and physical anthropologist; and Teilhard. Announcement: Unpublished, although he communicated his ideas to Oakley and was evidently planning to publish his theory in Nature. See Spencer 1990a: 232 fn.78, 240 fn.41; Spencer 1990b: 6.2.20. Marston had also been in contact with Trevor during 1967 (Drawhorn 1994a). Reactions: None; neither Oakley nor Weiner took Trevor's case seriously. But coincidentally, around the same time, the British author Ernest Raymond wrote a defense of Woodward, who had been his neighbour. Raymond accused Dawson. See Raymond 1969: 139-44. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- W.R. Thompson (1968) accuses Teilhard Thompson, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, made an accusation against Teilhard in 1968 in the context of discussing philosophy and evolution. This followed a period when Teilhard's philosophies had gained popularity during the late 1950s and 1960s. Thompson's theory bears close resemblance to that in Booher 1986. Announcement: W.R. Thompson 1968: esp. p. 367-78. Reactions: None; but it was brought to attention later in Dodson 1981a. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leakey (1969) accuses Teilhard & Dawson Louis Leakey, the famous palaeontologist, had had suspicions for many years that Teilhard was behind the Piltdown forgery. Although in his published works he never said so directly, he did not go to any great length to hide his beliefs in other circles. Announcements: Leakey & Goodall 1969: 90-100, 152-6, esp. 154-5; Leakey 1974: 22-3. Reactions: In 1970 it was leaked to the press that Leakey would be publishing his theory in an upcoming book. Strangely, the articles identify him under the name of James Leakey, see Anon 1970ab, 1971; Austin 1970. The articles brought back a consideration of Essex's theories, see Head 1971. The subject came up briefly again in response to Millar (see below), in Thuillier 1972: 1002; followed by Russo 1974 and Schreider 1973. Leakey's suspicions were well-known enough that when he was invited to speak at a U.S. symposium in honour of Teilhard in 1971, he was not sure if his attendance would be appreciated; but he ended up going (contrary to the claims made in Johansen & Edey 1981: 80). Leakey later died in 1972. He had been working on a book about his theory, but after his death his wife Mary thought it best that it went unpublished. See Cole 1975: 374-7, 399; Daniel 1972: 263; Daniel 1975. Leakey's hypothesis was later brought back by Gould. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- For other miscellaneous articles written about Piltdown around the 1956-71 period, see Anon 1969; Cockburn 1970; Cohen 1965; Daniel 1961; Oakley & Groves 1970; Oakley 1965: 12-4; Oakley 1971; and Weiner 1967. There are other articles from this time period - it's just that I wasn't able to easily categorize the ones in this section. After the 1953-55 heydey on Piltdown was finished, Oakley's fluorine method for the relative dating of fossil bone established a firm place for itself in most archaeological textbooks, especially those dealing with chemistry (see Oakley 1963ab). Oakley went on in the 1960s to promote the study of prehistoric stone tools in Africa ("Man the Toolmaker"). Weiner occasionally wrote articles on human evolution during this time, but for the most part returned to his studies on human physiobiology and its relation to the environment, especially under conditions of high heat. For some of his statements on human evolution in the light of Piltdown's removal, see Weiner 1960: 741-6, 751; and (1962) "The Pattern of Evolutionary Development of the Genus Homo", in Ideas on Human Evolution: Selected Papers, 1949-1961, ed. by William Howells, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 522-5, 529-30. (Originally in South African Journal of Medical Science, 1958, vol 23: 111-20.) Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark died in 1971, as did Alvan T. Marston. Martin A.C. Hinton died on October 3, 1961. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- van Esbroeck (1972) accuses Butterfield and Hargreaves Guy van Esbroeck was a professor emeritus at the University of Gand (Gent) in Belgium, and was also an anti-evolutionist (see Thuiller 1972: 1002). His book, Pleine LumiËre sur l'Imposture de Piltdown (roughly, 'Full Light on the Piltdown Deception'), published in France, received little attention. His theory was that the Piltdown forger had been William Ruskin Butterfield (given the incorrect initials of C.S. in Weiner 1955c), the past curator of the Hastings Museum, who had the assistance of Venus Hargreaves, a labourer from Uckfield who had worked at the Piltdown site. The book relies heavily on letters written by Teilhard, and spends a fair amount of time attacking Teilhard's character. Announcement: van Esbroeck 1972. Reaction: Thuillier 1972 (see below). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Millar (1972) accuses Sir Grafton Elliot Smith Although the Piltdown debate had been relatively absent and unnoticed by the public from 1956-71, Ronald Millar broke the ice on the silence in 1972 with the publication of The Piltdown Men. Millar identifies himself as a layman (Millar 1972: 11), but I believe his true profession may have been that of a playwright (see Anon 1972a; and "Parents' Day", The Times, July 13, 1972, p.11). Millar's accusation came just in time for the celebrations of the centennial of Elliot Smith's birth (1871) in honour of the Australian neuroanatomist. Elliot Smith's reputation was defended by a number of eminent scientists. Oakley allowed Weiner to do most of the rebuttal (see Spencer 1990a: 234 fn.41), and commented neutrally on the Piltdown affair (Oakley 1973, 1976). Millar admitted to not having much concrete evidence (Millar 1972: 233-7). W.M. Krogman, having an interest in forensic anthropology, examined Millar's argument but concluded that Weiner's accusation of Dawson was more convincing. With the renewed interest in Piltdown started by Millar, the palaeontology division of the BMNH put out a small leaflet on Piltdown in 1973 (later reprinted, see Anon 1975). Others took up the cause to discover other forgeries that Dawson may have created (listed later in Section D). Announcement: Millar 1972, published by Gollancz. Republished in 1974 and 1979 by different publishers in England and New York. Reactions: Anon 1972ab; Cave 1973; Daniel 1972; Krogman 1973 (later expanded in Krogman 1978); Swinton 1976; Thuillier 1972 (followed by a discussion about Teilhard, see Russo 1974; Schreider 1973); Weiner 1973; Zuckerman 1972; Zuckerman 1973: 20. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bowden (1977) accuses Teilhard Malcolm Bowden's book, Ape-Men - Fact or Fallacy? used Piltdown to attack both Teilhard and the scientific theory of evolution. Bowden is an English civil engineer and creation scientist. His theory was inspired by Essex's claims in defense of Dawson, and he also briefly considered the case against Woodward. Announcement: Bowden 1977, especially pp. 3-43. Reprinted in 1981. Bowden has more recently published another book (which I have not yet read) in which he has given Piltdown Man further discussion, called Science vs. Evolution, for which he has a web page. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Langham (1978) accuses Sir Grafton Elliot Smith Ian Langham, a lecturer in the history and philosophy of science at Sydney University in Australia, was inspired by Millar's theory. Langham considered whether Elliot Smith had been unethically involved not only with Piltdown, but with the Australian Talgai skull, possibly with the assistance of other members within the BMNH such as Woodward. He was planning a book on the subject (Langham 1978: 183); however, a few years later Langham abandoned his theory in favour of accusing Sir Arthur Keith, but died tragically in 1984 before being able to publish his research. Frank Spencer, who had also been considering Keith as a suspect since the mid-1970s, took up Langham's work and published the Langham-Spencer case against Keith in 1990, which had been foreshadowed several years in advance (Bowler 1987; Spencer 1984: 21; Spencer 1988: 86, 115). Announcement: Langham 1978. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Douglas & Halstead (1978) accuse Sollas, Hinton and others This accusation was the first major media-frenzy on Piltdown since the 1950s, partially due to its melodrama and the rapid spread of the news through the Associated Press. Professor James Douglas, who had been head of the Geology department at Oxford University, died at age 93; but in a tape recording played after his death accused his predecessor, William Sollas, of being the Piltdown forger. L.B. Halstead of the University of Reading presented the tape and then supported Douglas' theory, in which the Piltdown forgery had involved Sollas, Martin A.C. Hinton, Dawson, and possibly others within the BMNH (Hinton, a zoologist and palaeontologist, had died in 1961). The ensuing debate took place mostly in two places, in the letter columns of The Times and Nature, and included a side-discussion of the Sherborne Horse's Head forgery, which for some implicated Woodward in the Piltdown affair. (The Sherborne forgery was finally verified in 1995.) Previews: Anon 1978a; R. Parker 1978. Announcements: Halstead 1978ab, 1979. Reactions: Anon 1978b; Browne 1979; Farrar 1979ab, 1981; Gibb 1978; N. Hawkes 1995; Langham 1979; Molleson 1981; Oakley 1978, 1979ac; Pearce 1995; A. Sieveking 1980, 1981; Stringer et al. 1995; Wade 1978; Washburn 1979; Weiner 1979. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gould (1980) accuses Teilhard & Dawson Stephen Jay Gould, a teacher at Harvard, well-known as a scientific columnist and speaker, and for his studies in biology, evolution and the history of science, brought back Leakey's suspicions against Teilhard from the 1970s and thereby achieved even more media attention than Douglas and Halstead. Gould voiced his claim in his monthly column in Natural History in 1979, but it failed to attract attention until he published a more thorough accusation the following year. Like Douglas & Halstead, the news spread rapidly throughout international newspapers, in late July of 1980. Gould received responses from two main groups of dissenters. The first group consisted of scientists and Piltdown historians, including the first appearance of Peter Costello. The second group was what Gould referred to as the devotees of the "Teilhard cult" (Gould 1983b: 201), whose comments appeared mostly in journals devoted to discussing Teilhard. Gould's accusation occurred around the centennial of Teilhard's birth (1881), for which a symposium was being held. The speakers at the symposium included Richard Leakey and Weiner, who spoke in Teilhard's defense. While Gould's theory was being debated between 1979-83, a number of deaths occurred. Oakley died on November 2, 1981 (Daniel 1982a); Sonia Cole in May of 1982 (Daniel 1982b); and Weiner on June 13, 1982. (Daniel 1982b; Harrison 1983.) Commenting on Gould's article, Weiner had continued to believe in only Dawson's guilt. Oakley, however, was open to the Teilhard-Dawson theory (N. Hammond 1980; Oakley 1980b), which he had apparently expressed in the past (Smoker 1997), but in the course of the Gould debate Oakley changed his position and rejected the idea (Oakley 1981). Previews: Daniel 1979; Gould 1979a, reprinted in shorter version in Gould 1979b, and in edited form with postscript in Gould 1980a: 108-24. Received one reaction, Oakley 1979b. Announcement: Gould 1980b. Reprinted with footnotes in Gould 1983b: 201-26. Reactions: Anon 1980abc; Costello 1981a; Daniel 1981, 1982b; Dodson 1981a; N. Hammond 1980; King 1983a: 159-69; King 1983b; King & Salmon 1983: 1-4, 56, 172; Le Morvan 1981; Lukas 1981ab; Lukas & Lukas 1983; McCulloch 1981; Oakley 1980b, 1981; Schmitz-Moormann 1981ab. Another series of reactions (Dodson 1981b; Gould 1981; von Koenigswald 1981; Washburn 1981) was heavily re-edited to become Gould 1983b: 227-40. For lingering comments by Gould about Teilhard, see Gould 1983b: 241-50. A few years later in 1985, the United Nations held a Teilhard colloquium at which Mary Lukas had her last words to say on the subject (Lukas 1985). Other speakers included Ellen Lukas, Dodson, Thomas Berry, and Schmitz-Moormann. There is a web page by Mark Midbon that refers to the colloquium. A number of the Teilhard authors often made reference to Peter Medawar and George Gaylord Simpson, both scientists, and that they had spoken in Teilhard's defense regarding Piltdown, even though they had criticized his evolutionary philosophy. Unfortunately the authors failed to provide references, but I believe I have tracked down the Medawar reference, or something that could be re-interpreted as one (Medawar 1982: 210). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Matthews (1981) accuses Dawson & Abbott, Hinton & Teilhard L. Harrison Matthews, a former scientific director of the Zoological Society of London, wove a complex theory that the Piltdown forgery had been started by Dawson along with W.J. Lewis Abbott, a jeweler and amateur scientist. Matthews proposed that Hinton and Teilhard had discovered their scheme and created further forged artifacts to thwart and expose them, but the plan backfired. Matthews' theory, appearing gradually in 10 consecutive issues of New Scientist, was related in the form of a story and relied heavily on artistic license, which weakened its validity for many future authors. It received little attention at the time, but was brought back later by Keith Stewart Thomson (Thomson 1991a, see Spencer below), President of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, who changed Abbott's role from a co-conspirator to being a dupe. Solly Zuckerman, a primatologist and once the chief scientific advisor to the British government, was also inspired to accuse Hinton because of Matthews' theory (see Spencer below). Announcement: Matthews 1981. Reactions: Costello 1981b; Daniel 1982a; Oakley 1981; Townshend 1981. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Winslow & Meyer (1983) accuse Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The accusation made against the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories followed in the wake of Gould, but received less attention. The main instigator was John Hathaway Winslow, an American scholar and scientist whose exact qualifications were never clearly explained. He had been researching Piltdown for seven years, and had taught at the University of California and at Trinity College in Dublin. Retired and living near Ellicott City (a suburb of Baltimore), Winslow was described as: "among other things...a professor, researcher, museum preparator, and national park-ranger archaeologist" (Winslow & Meyer 1983a: 43), and having "a Ph.D. in geography from Cambridge University, earlier graduate work in archaeology and anthropology, and an abiding interest in the history of science" (Schrier 1983). Winslow claimed to be working on a book about Piltdown, along with Alfred Meyer, an editor of Science 83 magazine, where the accusation appeared. Confusingly, this magazine was started in 1979 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and changed its name each year (Science 79, Science 80, Science 81, etc.), and ceased publication in 1986; but should not be confused with the more well-established AAAS journal of the same name, Science. Among the responses that the theory received were the most recent comments about Piltdown from Gould and Langham. There were also reactions from other scientists and authorities on Conan Doyle. A number of comments were made to the effect that Winslow was looking for publicity for his book; but Winslow remained mostly silent except for a brief reply in Science 83 and The Baltimore Sun. Previews: None; although the idea had been proposed before, see Watson 1954. Announcement: Anon 1983a; Winslow & Meyer 1983a; introduced by Schrier 1983. Reactions: Anon 1983b; Cox 1983; Doyle & Costello 1987; Edwards 1983; Elliott 1988; Erlandson 1983; Gould 1983a; Hansen 1983; Horton 1983; Jenkins 1987; Langham 1984; Moriarty 1983; Speck 1985; Winslow 1983; Winslow & Meyer 1983b. Glyn Daniel also made commentary in an interview with the Daily Telegraph (August 3 & 4, 1983), but I have yet to get a copy of this article. The question of Arthur Conan Doyle's guilt caused a flurry of reaction in fan clubs and small press publications devoted to Doyle's work, a number of which I have listed above and which may be difficult for others to track down. For these I have to thank the curators of the Arthur Conan Doyle Reading Room in the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library. A bibliography for further discussion on this accusation can be found in De Waal 1994. I have also found an article in Spanish (Fern·ndez 1987) which looks as if it is accusing Doyle, but I am unable to read Spanish so I can't be sure. The article mentions Winslow & Meyer, but whether it is re-hashing their argument or adding a new twist to it, I don't know. Click here to read my transcription of it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Costello & Daniel (1985) accuse Woodhead & Hewitt Peter Costello, a biographer and literary historian from Dublin, entered the fray with an accusation of Samuel A. Woodhead, a chemistry instructor and later a college principal. This was contested by Woodhead's surviving son, Lionel, on the BBC television show Newsnight on November 22, 1985. Glyn Daniel, the editor of Antiquity, then received additional evidence that John Theodore Hewitt, another chemistry professor, could also have been involved in the forgery with Woodhead. Both Daniel and Costello had been long-term observers of the Piltdown debate, especially Daniel. Costello was working for many years on a book detailing his theories, but it has not appeared. Daniel died in December of 1986. Preview: Daniel 1985a. Announcements: Costello 1985, 1986; Daniel 1986. Reaction: L. Thompson 1986. Daniel might have been interviewed by the Observer and the Daily Telegraph (Daniel 1986: 6), but I haven't been able to verify this. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Booher (1986) accuses Teilhard This accusation has gone unnoticed by other Piltdown authors, but it bears close similarities to W.R. Thompson's 1968 accusations. Harold R. Booher had been a psychologist on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington D.C., but had recently become a senior executive for the Department of the Army. (See Booher 1986; as well as the front cover and p.496 of the same issue.) Announcement: Booher 1986. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Blinderman (1986) accuses Abbott Charles S. Blinderman, a professor of English and Biology at Clark University with an interest in the history of Darwinism and Thomas Henry Huxley, published The Piltdown Inquest in 1986, the first book exclusively on Piltdown to come out since 1972. For his victim he chose Abbott, the jeweler, but admitted his case was circumstantial and could be poked full of holes (Blinderman 1986a: 102, 214). Although he received almost no newspaper coverage, he did get a number of book reviews. Unfortunately a number of the reviewers (such as Spencer) incorrectly identified Blinderman's choice of victim. Blinderman's book was at the end of the slowing 1980s heyday on Piltdown. Blinderman's book follows one of his other interests besides Piltdown: anthropological controversies as they relate to the Evolution-Creationism debates; see Blinderman 1985; 1986a: 235-42. Blinderman abandons the whodunit debate completely at the end of his book and uses Piltdown to try to prove the ultimate rationality of science. Previews: Blinderman 1983, 1986b (both amusing). Announcement: Blinderman 1986a. Reactions: Boaz 1987; Bowler 1987; Jenkins 1987; Levine 1989; Spencer 1987. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Grigson (1990) accuses Barlow & Dawson Caroline Grigson, the curator of the Odontological Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, proposed that the Piltdown forgery had been made by Frank O. Barlow, a staff member of the BMNH who had made the plaster replicas of the Piltdown skull, and who had conspired with Dawson. Unfortunately her theory was immediately eclipsed by the release of the Langham-Spencer hypothesis which accused Sir Arthur Keith, also of the Royal College of Surgeons (see below). Grigson debated with Spencer, but did not mention her own theory. Note that another member of Royal College, A.E.W. Miles, also took part in the discussion (see below). Announcement: Grigson 1990a. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Langham & Spencer (1990) accuse Keith & Dawson In 1990, Frank Spencer, a palaeontologist in Anthropology at Queens College in New York finished his work on Langham's accusations of Sir Arthur Keith and Dawson (see Langham and Grigson above), and published two large books, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery (Spencer 1990a) and The Piltdown Papers 1908-1955 (Spencer 1990b). Most of the former book is concerned with an excellent detailed history of the theoretical and paradigmatic debates which surrounded Piltdown, only turning to discuss the whodunit towards the end (Spencer 1990a: 141-208), but Spencer also wanted to do justice to the role that Weiner had played in the uncovering of the forgery. The latter book is an organized and annotated selection of letters between the people involved in Piltdown, which Spencer provides as a reference guide for future research. Both books are large and thorough, but hide significant extra details in labyrinthine notes and footnotes. Still, regardless of drawbacks, they rank as the best reference material available, especially for any Piltdown literature published before 1953. Spencer had been interested in Piltdown and Keith for fifteen years: early aspects of his books can be seen in Spencer 1984, 1988. Previews: Anon 1990ab; Greig 1990; Nuttall 1990; Stringer 1990a; Wilford 1990. For reactions to the previews, see Anon 1990c; Keith & Smith 1990; Levin 1990 (reprinted in Levin 1992; Levin's knowledge of anthropology was criticized in Daniel 1985b); Stringer 1990b. Spencer's books were touted from June 5 onwards, four months in advance of their release on October 2. Most of the discussion and repeated plugging at this stage was in The Times. Announcement: Spencer 1990ab; Tait 1990. Foreward and Introduction by Ball 1990; Tobias 1990. Reactions: Anon 1990d; Bowler 1990, 1991; Boxer 1990; Chippindale 1990; Costello 1990; Grigson 1990b, 1991; Harrison 1990; Keith 1990; Kennedy 1991; Langdon 1992a; J. Marks 1992; A. Miles 1991; Murray 1994; Salter & Kolar 1993; Saunders 1990; Shipman 1990; Spencer 1991b; Wade 1990. Among the various counter-arguments made in the discussions, there was a resurrection of Matthews' (1981) suspicions about Hinton, put forward separately by Thomson and Zuckerman, both of whom received reactions from Spencer. See Spencer 1991ac; Thomson 1991ab (reprinted in Thomson 1993); Zuckerman 1990ab, 1991. Thomson's theory was a slight modification of Matthews', while Zuckerman proposed that Hinton alone had been behind the forgery. Matthews had died in 1986, and Zuckerman died later in 1993. Lastly, John H. Langdon, a biologist at the University of Indianapolis argued against Spencer and reiterated the strength of the theory against Dawson (Langdon 1991). Tim Murray's 1994 book review of Spencer appeared quite late; this is the same Tim Murray who was a colleague of Langham at the University of Sydney who invited Spencer to help salvage Langham's research after his death (Spencer 1990a: xv). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tobias (1992) accuses Keith & Dawson Phillip V. Tobias, a professor of anatomy, human biology and palaeoanthropology at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, added more fuel to the Langham-Spencer fire. His theory was that if Keith had been behind the Piltdown forgery, it explained why he had refused to accept the validity of Raymond Dart's find of the australopithecine Taung child. The question produced a flurry of debate (thankfully confined to the pages of Current Anthropology), as well as two more accusations of Teilhard being the forger by J.F. Thackeray, a palaeontologist at the Transvaal Museum in South Africa, and Norman Clermont, an anthropologist at the University of Montreal. Tobias' main purpose for talking about Piltdown is to remind the scientific community that Dart (his predecessor) had been right all along about Australopithecus and as such needs to be recognized for that fact. More recently, Tobias has been re-using the same arguments to prove to the scientific community that he himself has been right all along about Homo habilis and as such also needs the recognition (Tobias 1996). Previews: Tobias 1985: 36-8; Tobias 1992a: 1, 11-3. Announcement: Tobias 1992b: 243-60. Reappeared in a much shortened form in Tobias 1994a. Reactions: Bowler 1992; A.T. Chamberlain 1992; Chippindale 1992; Clermont 1992; Dennell 1992; Drew 1994; Fedele 1992; Graves 1992; Grigson 1992; Harrison 1992; Harrold 1992; Kennedy 1992; Munizaga 1993; Nickels 1992; Rolland 1992; Runnels 1992; Spencer 1992; Stringer 1992; Tappen 1992; Thackeray 1992; Tobias 1992b: 277-93; Tobias 1993, 1994b; Tobias & Kennedy 1993; Trigger 1992; Washburn 1992; Wright 1992. Tobias also delivered the 1992 John Irvine Hunter Memorial Lecture at the University of Sydney, which was entitled "The Piltdown hoax and human evolution : new light on the impact of Sir Arthur Keith, Ian Langham, Raymond Dart and Australopithecus". ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Drawhorn (1994) accuses Woodward & Dawson On March 31 of 1994, a case against Arthur Smith Woodward was presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Denver, Colorado. The paper was by Gerrell M. Drawhorn, a physical anthropologist from the University of California at Davis (although as of 1996 he is now with California State University in Sacramento). Announcement: None, although a brief abstract to the paper may be found in Drawhorn 1994b. A full version of the paper (Drawhorn 1994a) can be read by clicking here. Reactions: None, but Walsh has commented on it briefly (Walsh 1996: 257), and there has been an unrelated recent comment about Woodward (Garner-Howe 1997). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Anderson & Milner (1996) accuse Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Robert B. Anderson and Richard Milner, from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, renewed the case against Conan Doyle that was started by Winslow & Doyle in 1983. Announcement: The Spring 1996 issue of Pacific Discovery (Journal of the California Academy of Sciences), pp. 15-20, 32-3. I have not read this yet, so I have no commentary. Anderson made the 1996 accusation, and Milner, his associate, renewed it again in March of 1997 in a debate staged by the Linnean Society as part of National Science Week. Anderson's father has portions of the original article on the web which can be seen here, and an additional comment by Anderson can be read at the bottom of this page. Reactions: Barwick 1997; Elliot & Pilot 1996; Highfield 1997; McGrory 1997. There is also a web page review located here. The 1997 debate not only included Milner's case for Conan Doyle, but other competing theories as well. Grigson presented her case for Barlow; Currant (see next entry) argued for Hinton; and Herbert Thomas, from the Laboratoire de PalČonthropologie, argued for Keith. There might also have been two other theories presented; and the BMNH was intending to mount a new Piltdown exhibition. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gardiner & Currant (1996) accuse Hinton In the mid-1970s, a trunk belonging to Hinton was discovered in one of the towers of the BMNH and was brought to the attention of Andrew Currant, a specialist there in fossil rodents, who then brought it to the attention of Brian Gardiner in 1988. Why this took so long to happen has not been explained. Gardiner, a professor in palaeontology at King's College in London and President of the Linnean Society (of which Currant is also a member), then conducted studies on the stained bones found inside and determined they were stained in the same chemical proportions as the Piltdown fossils. Gardiner went public with this information (eight years after learning of the trunk) in his presidential address to the Linnean Society on May 24. Although touted as a "smoking gun", there have been a number of skeptical responses. Gardiner has not yet published any chemical data from his experiments, and the Nature article has some inconsistencies with the rest of the Piltdown literature. This development failed to produce the media excitement reached previously by Spencer and Gould. Previews: None, although a fascinating comment appears in Costello 1981b: "Even so [Matthews] misses some items: he makes no mention of the stained bones found in Martin Hinton's office at South Kensington after his retirement [in 1945 -ed.], along with all those old tobacco tins. As nothing is thrown away at the museum, they are still preserved by Theya Molleson." So it looks like someone might have known something about it well before 1988, which makes it strange that no one acted upon it, since that was the most intensive period of the whodunit debate. Announcements: The day before Gardiner's speech, the news was announced officially in Nature (Gee 1996), and in The Times (Hornsby & Jones 1996). Reactions: Dempster 1996; Hall 1996; Highfield 1996; Lutes 1996; Lyall 1996; Menon 1997; Musty 1996 (with reactions concerning other suspects in Clements 1997; Garner-Howe 1997; Smoker 1997); Sharp 1996; P. Sieveking 1996. Gardiner also appeared on National Public Radio for five and a half minutes to talk about his theory. A 1997 telephone interview with Gardiner by Roy Goss Jr. (Goss 1997: endnote no.9) revealed the following: the exact date and circumstances behind the discovery of the trunk are not known. The trunk was not catalogued when it came to the attention of the museum, and it was stored for a period of ten or more years in an unsecured storage area. Andrew Currant, who opened the trunk and removed its contents, did not make a record of the trunk's contents, nor how they were situated. The trunk has been discarded and does not exist today. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Walsh (1996) accuses Dawson John Evangelist Walsh, an American historian/biographer, renewed the case against Dawson as the sole perpetrator with the publication of the book Unraveling Piltdown. A significant portion of the book sheds light on Dawson's career, and Walsh closely examines the many other forgeries attributed to Dawson (see Appendix D). Most illuminating is Walsh's use of a long-unavailable text by D.L. Downes. In 1953, Downes was a graduate student at Birmingham University who began researching Dawson's career upon hearing of the Piltdown hoax. Downes passed on his research to Weiner to add to the book The Piltdown Forgery, but Weiner only used a small portion of it. Downes then began turning his research into a book of his own, but was unable to attract any publishers. His materials eventually ended up with the Sussex Archaeological Society where they became available for study in 1993. Announcement: Walsh 1996. The book was released during the Fall. Reactions: Bernstein 1996; N. Hammond 1996; S. Jones 1997. There are also reviews on the web by Orson Scott Card and John Schmidt. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section C - Post-1953 scientific tests and questions of origin The original scientific tests made on the Piltdown materials, their results, and discussion can be seen in: de Vries & Oakley 1959; Hall 1955; Harrisson 1960; Hoskins & Fryd 1955; Montagu 1960a; Oakley 1954, 1955c, 1960; Oakley & Weiner 1953, 1955, 1957; Oakley, Weiner & Clark 1953; Vogel & Waterbolk 1964: 368; Weiner & Oakley 1954; Weiner et al. 1955. An analysis of these tests for numerical has appeared in Ashmore 1995. More recent tests and commentary are: Hall 1996; Harrison 1983; Lowenstein 1985: 545; Lowenstein et al. 1982; Spencer & Stringer 1989: 210. Oakley has spoken of how he had applied the fluorine method in many of the above articles as well as in Oakley 1963ab, 1980a. Another dentist (besides Marston and Lyne) had once concluded that there was something amiss with the Piltdown jaw and teeth, and republished his findings (Taylor 1978 [orig. 1937]). Occasionally authors have offered ideas on where the source materials for the Piltdown hoax could have originated from, in Clements 1997; de Vries & Oakley 1959; Drawhorn 1994a; N. Hammond 1997; Harrisson 1960. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section D - Other forgeries besides Piltdown There has been considerable debate over fraudulent items or unethical activities that Dawson and his associates may have been involved with besides Piltdown, either independently or in collusion with one another. This began when Weiner was researching the negative relations between Dawson, the Sussex Archaeological Society, and the Castle Lodge incident. Additionally, in 1954 it was announced that Dawson (amongst other things) might have committed plagiarism when writing The History of Hastings Castle. The plagiarism claim has been repeatedly challenged by later authors, and the debate has continued to the present (see Lutes 1996; Walsh 1996: 84, 92-3, 186-7, 250). On this topic, one article that should be consulted is by Peter Miles (1993), a bibliographer who examined some of Dawson's long-lost source materials and annotation methods that he used in preparation for the editing and publishing of Hastings Castle. Miles concludes: "The annotations also testify to a certain energy if also a limitation in the depth of Dawson's methods of working, and to some problems caused, arguably, by over-ambition and by loose scholarly method. While they suggest no fraud on the scale of Piltdown, they do perhaps suggest a man not afraid of taking a short-cut or two. Admittedly, as far as his role at Piltdown was to be concerned, such a characteristic qualified Dawson as much for the role of hoaxed as for the role of hoaxer." (P. Miles 1993: 370) Dawson, however, may have created a number of suspicious artifacts; one of the more complete listings of them can be found in M. Jones 1990: 93-6. But for full detail on Dawson's artifacts and career, consult Walsh 1996, especially pp. 169-98, 246-53. Also, consult Section A and Walsh, above. Aside from Charles Dawson, other people involved in unethical activities who have been suggested are W.J. Lewis Abbott, George Bristow, William Ruskin Butterfield, John Lewis, Edward Simpson (a.k.a. "Flint Jack"), and Henry Willett. The original claims made by Baines and Weiner, and further comments and reactions can be seen in Anon 1954kl; Baines 1986; Cole 1955: 162; Emerson & Weiner 1955ab; Rieth 1967: 48, 77-80; Salzman 1955; Weiner 1955b; Weiner 1955c: 169-88. For various defenses against these claims, see Blinderman 1986a: 110-1; Downes 1954; Kermack 1974; P. Miles 1993; Spencer 1990a: 231 fn.70; Thorne 1954; and Vere 1955: 99-110. There is also the case of the Sherborne bone, a British fossil bone with an engraving of a horse on it, which several people had considered to be a forgery. Since one of the original people who inspected and interpreted it was Woodward, some authors have tried to make a link between Sherborne and Piltdown. For articles on this debate, consult Section B: Douglas & Halstead. Recent tests in 1995 have verified that the bone is genuine, but the carving is indeed a forgery. In August of 1962 it was revealed that a significant portion of exotic and rare birds which had been "collected" in the Hastings area between 1903 and 1916 were forgeries, in the sense that they had been secretly imported from all over the world in refrigerated conditions and then claimed to have been locally shot. Various people implicated in the affair may also have been involved with Piltdown. See The Times for August 10, 1962 (p.8), August 11 (p.4) and August 15 (p.11); British Birds 55.8 (August 1962): 281-384, and 55.10 (October 1962): 425-7, 453-9; mentioned in Blinderman 1986a: 119; A.P. Chamberlain 1968; Rieth 1967: 31-3, 48; and van Esbroeck 1972: 48-50. With the development of the Thermoluminescence dating technique in the early 1970s, Glyn Daniel took an interest in the method and allowed Antiquity to publish articles on forged Roman brick-stamps which Dawson had "found". See Peacock 1973. Around the same time, a claim was made that Dawson had also made a fraudulent map (Andrews 1974). This led to a heated debate in the letter columns of The Times on Piltdown and Dawson. See Howard 1974; with reactions in Ball 1974; Daniel 1974; Kermack 1974; Scheuer 1974ab; Steer 1974; Weiner 1974. It is interesting to note that this sudden resurgence of interest in Dawson took place shortly after the silence on Piltdown had been broken by Millar's book (Millar 1972). Since then, the most recent wave of Dawson-forgery claims has been in 1977-81; see Combridge 1977. After an article by Heal (1980); and other independent articles (Holden 1980, 1981; McCann 1981); a response came from Combridge (1981). John Clements, a member of the Hastings Museum Association, has recently proposed a theory about where Dawson could have acquired his materials from if he was the culprit (Clements 1997; N. Hammond 1997). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section E - Fraud and forgery literature Piltdown occurs in books and articles about fraud and forgery, of two general types. This is not an exhaustive list, but gives a wide variety of examples. Type 1: Fraud/forgery in Art, Antiquities, and Archaeology. Cole 1955: 136-73 (reviewed in Crawford 1956); M. Jones 1990: 93-6; Mills & Mansfield 1979: 28-31; Rieth 1967: 38-49. Type 2: Fraud/forgery in the Scientific discipline. Blanc et al. 1980: 858, 864-6; Bobys 1983: 44; Broad & Wade 1982: 108, 119-22, 228; de Mille 1979; Kohn 1987; Rosen 1968 (with reactions in A.P. Chamberlain 1968; Oakley 1968); S. Jones 1997: 24; Ziman 1970: 996. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section F - General science literature Please note that the books in this section are NOT a definitive list, as a mentioning of Piltdown can be found in almost any book on human evolution, the history of palaeoanthropology, or physical anthropology. The lists below are semi-subjective groupings of books and articles which offer a wide variety of examples of the emphasis and meaning that authors have chosen to ascribe to Piltdown. During the 1956-71 period, the only real place that Piltdown ever got mentioned was in books. Many authors, including Le Gros Clark, preferred to give Piltdown only a brief passing reference, usually ignoring the role it had played in shaping theories for decades. Other books gave a more thorough description of Piltdown. Most authors completely avoided the question of the whodunit, while the few who did bring it up mentioned the possibility of Dawson's guilt but left room for doubt. For examples, see: * Brace & Montagu 1965: 154, 165-71; Howells 1967 (1st ed. 1959): 249-63; Leakey & Goodall 1969: 90-100, 152-6; Montagu 1960b: 220-30; Moore 1967: 357-77; Wendt 1956: 405-17 (which inadvertently caused a strange discussion in Boswell 1963; Durrenberger 1965). After 1972, when the subject of Piltdown was being discussed more frequently, some books still gave it surprisingly little attention, and like their predecessors delegated the subject to a short paragraph or a footnote. But with the growing number of finds of fossil man in Africa, there was now a better awareness of the role that Piltdown had played in shaping the scientific evolutionary paradigms from 1912-1953, especially as it had related to Africa. Piltdown has also figured in various histories and biographies. See: * Bowler 1986: 35-8, 91-100, 239-44; Johanson & Edey 1981: 48-53, 77-83, 95-6; Lewin 1987: 60-75, 132-7; Reader 1981: 55-82, 130-2; Spencer 1997; Stearn 1981: 188-9, 235-6, 244-7; Wendt 1972: 149-55. Aside from books, the importance of Piltdown in the context of historical paradigms can be examined in a number of articles, the ones most recommended being by Michael Hammond and Frank Spencer. See: * Boaz 1981: 397-400; M. Hammond 1979, 1988; M. Hammond 1982: 1-2, 23-7; Spencer 1984: 21-3, 33-4; Spencer 1988: 84-6, 102-10; Tobias 1985: 34-8; Weiner 1982. The 1994 fossil tibia discovery of "Boxgrove Man" caused a resurgence of British nationalistic pride (at least, in the editorial staff of The Times; they broke the story without permission one week before the official press conference), pride which was frighteningly similar to the announcements of the discovery of Piltdown 80 years earlier. This time around, however, the attitude has been thoroughly criticized by the public. See: * Anon 1994, 1996; Dennell 1994; N. Hammond 1994; S. Jones 1996; Musty 1994; R. West 1996; as well as The Times for May 19 1994 (p.17) and May 23 1994 (p.15) Many authors have commented on how hyper-nationalism in Europe around the turn of the century had caused British scientists to look for a major discovery of fossil man on their own soil. Piltdown Man fulfilled that desire perfectly. Roy Goss Jr. (royg@pixi.com), an anthropology major at the University of Hawaii at West Oahu, has taken this one step further. Not only did the British scientific community want a discovery, but the British people as a whole were looking for a new source of nationalistic pride for themselves. In 1895 Britain's empire had been at its height, but upon entering a conflict with the United States (a frontier dispute between British Guiana and Venezuela), Britain began a long and gradual period of political decline. The disagreement with the U.S. was quickly interrupted by the Boer War in South Africa, in which British soldiers suffered high casualties. In 1901, Queen Victoria had died; and in 1912 the British explorer R.F. Scott lost the race to be the first to reach the South Pole - dying in the attempt along with his entire expedition. Coupling these facts with the lack of British human fossils and the atmosphere of nationalism that blanketed Europe, shows that Piltdown Man came just in time to cheer up the British populace (Goss 1997: section IV). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section G - Anti-evolutionist / Pseudo-scientific literature (for and against) Again, this is not a comprehensive list, but just some examples. Almost any book by Creation Scientists discussing human evolution has a discussion of Piltdown Man or Nebraska Man. For some examples which use Piltdown, see Bowden 1977: 3-43; Gish 1974: 91-2; Himmelfarb 1959: 355-7 (but see A. West 1959); Lubenow 1992; G.E. Parker 1987: 153-60; Sanderson 1961: 62-3, 354, 363-5; van Esbroeck 1972: 55-69; Vere 1959. Nickell & Fischer (1992) included a section on Piltdown in their book which discussed paranormal, historical and forensic mysteries. There are also Piltdown-using retaliations to anti-evolutionist and pseudo-scientist claims, as well as articles that deal with Piltdown as an example of the scientific process. See Blinderman 1986a: 235-42; Feder 1990a: 40-56; Feder 1990b; Langdon 1992b; Ostrom 1994 (an article questioning the reliability of the HIV antibody test); Williams 1993. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section H - Media and entertainment These are rather difficult to track down and find references for, so I'm pretty sure this list is not a great reference guide. In most cases I have very few details and have not been able to verify content. Television I'll start this with the documentaries, and then work down towards the smaller material. * Weiner and Oakley appeared on Glyn Daniel's BBC Television series, Buried Treasure, on May 30 of 1955 to talk about Piltdown (Anon 1955i; Pound 1955: 1044). * Blinderman has cited that the BBC had made two television documentaries about Piltdown (Blinderman 1986a: 4), but he did not say what they were. One of them might have been for the BBC Television show, Chronicle, some time around 1973 (see Oakley 1976). * Blinderman's 1986 accusation may have inspired a BBC television episode of Q.E.D., aired on April Fool's Day in 1987. Entitled, "Murder on the Bluebell Line", it examined the Piltdown whodunit in Sherlock Holmesian style (see Anon 1987abc; Jenkins 1987). It was written by John Lynch. * Do Scientists Cheat? (1988), a videotape in the Audiovisual Archive of the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center, at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). A production of the Documentary Guild in association with WGBH/Boston for NOVA, WGBH Educational Foundation. An investigation into the ethical requirements of scientists involved in research. It describes earlier fraudulent scientific work, including Piltdown Man. * On October 15 of 1992 there was a "science-fiction" program shown on Yorkshire Television called Sherlock Holmes and The Case of the Missing Link. The subject was about Arthur Conan Doyle and Piltdown, but it apparently contained a number of inaccuracies (Crombie 1992). * I have been told that the science documentary series Missing Links (1996?) may have had an episode entitled "Skull Wars: Search For The Missing Link" which was primarily about the discovery and eventual scientific acceptance of the Taung Child skull. I was told that Piltdown Man figured prominantly in the documentary, including some old television footage; and that Tobias was interviewed at length (see the Tobias section on why he talks about Piltdown). I think that The Discovery Channel (U.S.) holds the broadcast rights. * Jack Palance talked about Piltdown for a few minutes on Ripley's Believe it or Not. * In the comedy series Fawlty Towers, in "The Psychiatrist" episode, Basil Fawlty (John Cleese) takes a disliking to a young male hotel guest who wanders around with his shirt unbuttoned. One of the remarks that Basil makes under his breath is to refer to him as "the Piltdown ponce". * When Peter Costello accused Samuel A. Woodhead of being the Piltdown forger, he was contested by Woodhead's surviving son Lionel on the BBC Television show Newsnight on November 22, 1985. * L.B. Halstead talked about his accusation of Sollas in a BBC External Service broadcast on Novermber 14, 1978. Actually, I don't know if this was on television or on radio. Which brings us to... Radio * The BBC broke the news of the Piltdown forgery on Saturday, November 21, 1953. * On November 27 of 1953, a member of the British parliament gave his opinions about Piltdown on the BBC show Any Questions (Anon 1954a). * Vere spoke in a BBC broadcast on December 5th or 8th, 1953, called, Was Dawson Guilty? in which he defended that Dawson was not the Piltdown forger (Spencer 1990b: 226; Vere 1955: 11-2; Vere 1959: 16). * Brian Gardiner was on National Public Radio for five and a half minutes to be interviewed about his accusation of Hinton. See the first hour of Weekend Edition Saturday for June 1, 1996, hosted by Scott Simon. Fiction This section is in chronological order. * Arthur Conan Doyle's story, The Lost World, may have been partially inspired by Piltdown Man's discovery. * Weiner considered at one point whether the Rudyard Kipling short story Dayspring Mishandled was a tangential reference to Dawson (Spencer 1990b: 249-50). * When the Piltdown forgery was announced in 1953, some publishers considered using the hype to re- publish an earlier work of fiction called When It Was Dark, but then abandoned the idea (Anon 1953iq). The book was written by C. Ranger Gull under the pseudonym of Guy Thorne in the early 1900s. * A novel called Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (Wilson 1956) may have been inspired by the announcement of the Piltdown forgery. * Fans of Sherlock Holmes briefly discussed the hypothetical question of whether Holmes could have been behind the Piltdown forgery, or if he could have exposed it (Boswell 1963; Durrenberger 1965). * The subject of Piltdown Man appeared briefly in a 1981 book called Mask of the Jaguar (North 1981: 137-8). The name of the author, Jessica North, is a pseudonym for an ex-anthropology lecturer. * A word of warning about Skullduggery: A Novel, by Peter Marks (1987). This is a poorly written book pretending to be historical fiction, incorporating Oakley, Weiner, Dawson, Woodward and Conan Doyle as some of its characters. Although there is evidence of some degree of research into Piltdown (inspired by Winslow & Meyer), the author takes "artistic" license a little too far when he details Dawson as a womanizer, Oakley having erotic musings about fellow train passengers, and Woodward as a bisexual with a taste for bondage and young French men. This book is best avoided. * Ralph Lombreglia wrote a short story in 1993 called Piltdown Man, Later Proved to Be a Hoax, which was reprinted a year later (Lombreglia 1993; 1994: 103-26). * Irwin Schwartz wrote a book in 1994 that seems to exist under three different titles: The Piltdown Conspiracy, The Piltdown Affair: Memoir of a Hoaxer, and The Piltdown Confession: a novel. It does an excellent job of pretending to be a true story; the book also explores a religious subtext within the plot. * Milner Place published a poem in 1994 called "Piltdown man and bat woman", in a British poetry magazine called Spout. Other media Anything else that didn't fit. Most of these are minor miscellanea. * The department of anthropology at the University of California (Riverside) once published something called Piltdown Newsletter. I have found out from someone there that it's just a plain anthropology newsletter, and that for some reason Piltdown ended up being chosen for the title. === "The only known PhD thesis discussing the Piltdown hoax is ANCESTORS OR ABERRANTS: STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN PALEOANTHROPOLOGY, 1915-1940 (HUMAN EVOLUTION) by DESIMONE, ALFRED AUGUST, JR., PHD UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, 1986, 802 pages AAT 8612030 " === Piltdown Man is the most famous scientific fraud of the last hundred years. In 1912, it was announced that the skull and jaw of a pre-human had been found in Britain. Similar fragments were found nearby in 1913 and 1915, by the same people. In 1953, chemical tests proved that the fossils were frauds. Someone had taken a slightly odd "modern" human skull, and the jaw of an orangutan. They had been stained, filed, smashed, and so on, in a fairly clever way. Was the scientific community shown to be gullible, or stupid? The fraud led a charmed life. A few prominent British scientists failed to perform tests that they really should have done. And, they more or less kept others away from the fossils. Some historians go so far as to believe that these men were co-conspirators. Or, maybe they just blew it. At first, fraud wasn't even suspected. The fossils were, after all, cleverly done, and no money was involved. There were other European finds - Neandertal, Cro-Magnon, and Heidelberg - so another European "missing link" wasn't too surprising. After the first publication, many scientists commented that the jaw seemed to be from a chimpanzee. They expressed strong doubt that the skull and the jaw were from the same species. The hoaxer(s) solved this by planting a second jaw and second skull at a second location. After that find, some of the doubters were satisfied. Wasn't it dumb to take 40 years to expose the fraud? The chemical test was done shortly after the test was invented. Until then, there wasn't any obvious way to get actual proof. However, suspicions had been growing for years. During those years, there were five other hominid discoveries. Increasingly, Piltdown Man just didn't fit in, and by 1950, some prominent authors did not even bother to include it in lists. Was scientific knowledge tainted? Is it still? Piltdown man used to be mentioned in all lists of fossils, but other than that, it was pretty much ignored by (say) American scientists. Today, it isn't in the lists. Piltdown man used to be used as evidence that early Man developed intelligence before developing in certain other ways. More recent discoveries, such as Lucy, have pretty well trashed that argument. Were there "over 500 doctoral dissertations" on Piltdown Man? This claim has appeared in various Creationist works. The earliest reference I have is: Parker, Gary E., "Origin of Mankind," Impact No. 101, Creation-Life Publishers, 1981 p.4 Searches through Piltdown bibliographies haven't turned up even one single dissertation. So, 500 of them is just completely impossible. The number 500 does turn up in an editorial written shortly after the hoax was exposed: More than five hundred articles and memoirs are said to have been written about Piltdown man. Nature vol. 274, #4419 (10 July 1954) pp. 61-62 The most plausible explanation is that Parker heard this quote, and somehow turned "articles and memoirs" into "dissertations". Parker is not a careful scholar. ======= http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3264025.stm Fossil fools: Return to Piltdown The fossil remains of early humans are exceptionally rare. Scientists trying to reconstruct the evolutionary history of our species often have to draw long, dotted lines between a few key fossils. Piltdown reconstruction: The face of a fraudSo introducing a bogus ancestor into our family tree can throw the entire study of human evolution off course. This is exactly what happened on 18th December 1912, when the Piltdown skull was thrown into the spotlight before a crowded meeting of the Geological Society in London. The discovery generated frenzied excitement. Piltdown man was argued to be 500,000 years old and therefore an irrefutable "missing link" between humans and apes. Only one fossil of such great antiquity was accepted by British scientists of the day - the Heidelberg jaw found in 1907. But Piltdown, named after the Sussex village where it was discovered, was more complete - and English to boot. Practical joke Plaudits were heaped on the amateur geologist Charles Dawson and his friend Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of geology at the British (now Natural History) Museum, who had unearthed the fossil together. Piltdown had a large, human-like braincase, but its jaw was ape-like, fitting predictions about how our ancestors looked. Bones from a beaver, rhino and hippo were also found, along with supposed stone tools known as eoliths. In 1914, a curious elephant bone implement was found under a hedge at Piltdown. One unidentified wag suggested that it looked like a cricket bat. Piltdown is a piece of nonsense which has used up a phenomenal amount of good time Andy Currant In fact, Piltdown man was a modern forgery and not even entirely male. The jaw belonged to a female orang-utan. The skull was human. Much of the material had been stained brown to make it look fossilised. "The cricket bat was a joke - though Dawson and Woodward obviously didn't get it," says Dr Andy Currant, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Piltdown was accepted as genuine until 1953, when scientists from Oxford University and the British Museum used chemical testing to prove it was a fake. The high forehead and heavy jaw of Piltdown had reinforced misconceptions that human brains grew large at an early stage in our species' evolution. In 1925, a genuine fossil ancestor from South Africa was dismissed in England because it didn't look like Piltdown. Missing artefacts The hoaxers made other anatomical gaffes. They filed down molars in the jaw to remove obvious orang-utan dental traits, but were blissfully ignorant of the way human teeth wear down. "Human teeth wear more on the buccal [cheek] side of the crown and not as much on the lingual [tongue] side," says Professor Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley. The joke: The "first Englishman" had a "cricket bat"Where the hoaxers obtained their specimens is a mystery. One possible trail leads to the Natural History Museum. In 1911, the British Museum bought a collection of animal remains from Borneo. An original inventory appears to list the lower jaw of an orang-utan as missing. Radiocarbon dating showed the human skull from Piltdown was less than 1,000 years old. Its unusual thickness suggests the owner suffered from Paget's disease, a hereditary thickening of bone. A similar skull reportedly disappeared in the 1900s from Hastings Museum, an institution with which Charles Dawson had strong connections. Dawson has long been prime suspect as the forger. But a clever piece of scientific detective work has implicated another character in the saga. Suspects list In 1976, an old canvas trunk belonging to Martin Hinton, a volunteer in Smith Woodward's geology department at the time of Piltdown, was found in the Natural History Museum. It contained mammal bones and teeth stained a similar mahogany brown as the Piltdown material and carved like the cricket bat. PILTDOWN MAN IN TIME 1911 - first skull fossils found 1912 - discoveries publicised 1914 - cricket bat surfaces 1915 - Charles Dawson dies 1949 - Piltdown ages queried 1953 - Fossil fakes unmasked Palaeontologist Brian Gardiner has subjected the Piltdown bones and the Hinton items to a technique called flame atomic absorption. The chemical signature of the Piltdown material matches Hinton's bones and teeth, suggesting they were stained using the same methods. Gardiner believes this lays the blame squarely at Hinton's door. But not everyone is convinced. The continuing fascination with Piltdown, 50 years after it was exposed, stems partly from its status as an unsolved case. The list of suspects is long and constantly expanding. One investigator has even accused Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - creator of Sherlock Holmes - of conceiving the hoax. Many hands Professor Chris Stringer, palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum and Andy Currant believe Charles Dawson was the main culprit, planting everything except perhaps the cricket bat. Dawson was no stranger to archaeological forgeries. He exhibited bizarre phoney fossil toads and almost certainly forged two Roman tiles with rare inscriptions. Many suspect Hinton was behind the fraud - but was he?"Ninety-nine per cent of the evidence points towards Dawson. But Hinton might have been behind the cricket bat," says Currant. "Whoever planted the cricket bat wasn't part of the original hoax and had a different message, namely: 'We're on to you and we're going to mess your site up,'" says Stringer. This may have prompted the original forger to plant more human bones at a site nearby called Piltdown II. Dawson discovered these in 1915. \ "Piltdown II was an attempt by the original forger to throw people off the original site. It was a reaction to the discovery of odd material they hadn't planted," adds Currant. Wasted time Whether Hinton planted all the material, or just some, he had a motive. He quarrelled with Smith Woodward over payment he said he was owed for an academic contract. He may have wanted to humiliate his boss as an act of revenge. But Smith Woodward's arrogance and aloofness had made him many enemies in the British Museum, raising the possibility that others assisted Hinton in his vendetta. At a dinner party in 1975, Kenneth Oakley, one of the team that exposed Piltdown in 1953, allegedly named Charles Chatwin as a conspirator. Chatwin was an assistant for Smith Woodward in the geology department at the time of Piltdown. If the hoaxers could see the fuss still generated by their handiwork, they would no doubt be amused. "Piltdown is a piece of nonsense which has used up a phenomenal amount of good time," says Currant. "I'd like to see the 50th anniversary commemorated by the crushing of all the material and the burning of the Piltdown archive." Piltdown Man: The Context And Exposure Of A Scientific Forgery is an exhibition that runs at the Natural History Museum from 25 November. The fraud is also the subject of the Pfizer Annual Science Forum at the museum on the same date. Fossil fools: Return to Piltdown The fossil remains of early humans are exceptionally rare. Scientists trying to reconstruct the evolutionary history of our species often have to draw long, dotted lines between a few key fossils. Piltdown reconstruction: The face of a fraudSo introducing a bogus ancestor into our family tree can throw the entire study of human evolution off course. This is exactly what happened on 18th December 1912, when the Piltdown skull was thrown into the spotlight before a crowded meeting of the Geological Society in London. The discovery generated frenzied excitement. Piltdown man was argued to be 500,000 years old and therefore an irrefutable "missing link" between humans and apes. Only one fossil of such great antiquity was accepted by British scientists of the day - the Heidelberg jaw found in 1907. But Piltdown, named after the Sussex village where it was discovered, was more complete - and English to boot. Practical joke Plaudits were heaped on the amateur geologist Charles Dawson and his friend Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of geology at the British (now Natural History) Museum, who had unearthed the fossil together. Piltdown had a large, human-like braincase, but its jaw was ape-like, fitting predictions about how our ancestors looked. Bones from a beaver, rhino and hippo were also found, along with supposed stone tools known as eoliths. In 1914, a curious elephant bone implement was found under a hedge at Piltdown. One unidentified wag suggested that it looked like a cricket bat. Piltdown is a piece of nonsense which has used up a phenomenal amount of good time Andy Currant In fact, Piltdown man was a modern forgery and not even entirely male. The jaw belonged to a female orang-utan. The skull was human. Much of the material had been stained brown to make it look fossilised. "The cricket bat was a joke - though Dawson and Woodward obviously didn't get it," says Dr Andy Currant, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Piltdown was accepted as genuine until 1953, when scientists from Oxford University and the British Museum used chemical testing to prove it was a fake. The high forehead and heavy jaw of Piltdown had reinforced misconceptions that human brains grew large at an early stage in our species' evolution. In 1925, a genuine fossil ancestor from South Africa was dismissed in England because it didn't look like Piltdown. Missing artefacts The hoaxers made other anatomical gaffes. They filed down molars in the jaw to remove obvious orang-utan dental traits, but were blissfully ignorant of the way human teeth wear down. "Human teeth wear more on the buccal [cheek] side of the crown and not as much on the lingual [tongue] side," says Professor Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley. The joke: The "first Englishman" had a "cricket bat"Where the hoaxers obtained their specimens is a mystery. One possible trail leads to the Natural History Museum. In 1911, the British Museum bought a collection of animal remains from Borneo. An original inventory appears to list the lower jaw of an orang-utan as missing. Radiocarbon dating showed the human skull from Piltdown was less than 1,000 years old. Its unusual thickness suggests the owner suffered from Paget's disease, a hereditary thickening of bone. A similar skull reportedly disappeared in the 1900s from Hastings Museum, an institution with which Charles Dawson had strong connections. Dawson has long been prime suspect as the forger. But a clever piece of scientific detective work has implicated another character in the saga. Suspects list In 1976, an old canvas trunk belonging to Martin Hinton, a volunteer in Smith Woodward's geology department at the time of Piltdown, was found in the Natural History Museum. It contained mammal bones and teeth stained a similar mahogany brown as the Piltdown material and carved like the cricket bat. PILTDOWN MAN IN TIME 1911 - first skull fossils found 1912 - discoveries publicised 1914 - cricket bat surfaces 1915 - Charles Dawson dies 1949 - Piltdown ages queried 1953 - Fossil fakes unmasked Palaeontologist Brian Gardiner has subjected the Piltdown bones and the Hinton items to a technique called flame atomic absorption. The chemical signature of the Piltdown material matches Hinton's bones and teeth, suggesting they were stained using the same methods. Gardiner believes this lays the blame squarely at Hinton's door. But not everyone is convinced. The continuing fascination with Piltdown, 50 years after it was exposed, stems partly from its status as an unsolved case. The list of suspects is long and constantly expanding. One investigator has even accused Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - creator of Sherlock Holmes - of conceiving the hoax. Many hands Professor Chris Stringer, palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum and Andy Currant believe Charles Dawson was the main culprit, planting everything except perhaps the cricket bat. Dawson was no stranger to archaeological forgeries. He exhibited bizarre phoney fossil toads and almost certainly forged two Roman tiles with rare inscriptions. Many suspect Hinton was behind the fraud - but was he?"Ninety-nine per cent of the evidence points towards Dawson. But Hinton might have been behind the cricket bat," says Currant. "Whoever planted the cricket bat wasn't part of the original hoax and had a different message, namely: 'We're on to you and we're going to mess your site up,'" says Stringer. This may have prompted the original forger to plant more human bones at a site nearby called Piltdown II. Dawson discovered these in 1915. "Piltdown II was an attempt by the original forger to throw people off the original site. It was a reaction to the discovery of odd material they hadn't planted," adds Currant. Wasted time Whether Hinton planted all the material, or just some, he had a motive. He quarrelled with Smith Woodward over payment he said he was owed for an academic contract. He may have wanted to humiliate his boss as an act of revenge. But Smith Woodward's arrogance and aloofness had made him many enemies in the British Museum, raising the possibility that others assisted Hinton in his vendetta. At a dinner party in 1975, Kenneth Oakley, one of the team that exposed Piltdown in 1953, allegedly named Charles Chatwin as a conspirator. Chatwin was an assistant for Smith Woodward in the geology department at the time of Piltdown. If the hoaxers could see the fuss still generated by their handiwork, they would no doubt be amused. "Piltdown is a piece of nonsense which has used up a phenomenal amount of good time," says Currant. "I'd like to see the 50th anniversary commemorated by the crushing of all the material and the burning of the Piltdown archive." Piltdown Man: The Context And Exposure Of A Scientific Forgery is an exhibition that runs at the Natural History Museum from 25 November. The fraud is also the subject of the Pfizer Annual Science Forum at the museum on the same date.   See long article at http://www.clarku.edu/~piltdown/map_prim_suspects/Teilhard_de_Chardin/ Chardin_defend/sciencefraud.html == Charles Dawson: 'The Piltdown faker' On the 50th anniversary of the unmasking of the Piltdown Man hoax, archaeologist Dr Miles Russell explains why he believes local solicitor Charles Dawson was the man behind it all In his life Charles Dawson achieved recognition as the greatest British antiquarian and amateur palaeontologist. Within the social circles of his home county, his discoveries earned him the title "the Wizard of Sussex". He was also a well-respected solicitor, doing much to benefit his local community. Hard to believe then that this is the same man accused of being the mastermind of the most infamous scientific fraud in history. Did the outwardly genial "Dr Jekyll" persona of Charles Dawson really mask an intrinsically evil and scheming "Mr Hyde"? Unlike his brothers, Charles pursued a modest early career. He never went to university, opting instead to follow his father into the legal profession. From his earliest days, however, Dawson possessed an interest in the natural world, collecting a variety of fossils from around Hastings. Thousands of text books would have to be revised because of the hoax, said the Daily Mirror Amongst these fossils he found teeth from a previously unknown species of mammal, later named Plagiaulax dawsoni in his honour. In 1885, he was elected a fellow of the Geological Society, an amazing achievement for a man who then was only 21. His interest in archaeology developed and his uncanny knack of making spectacular discoveries continued. In 1893 he found a Roman statuette made, uniquely for the period, of cast iron. Serpent discovery Other discoveries followed, including a unique hafted stone axe and a unique form of ancient timber boat. In recognition of his work Dawson was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries London in 1895. He was now Charles Dawson FGS, FSA. PILTDOWN MAN IN TIME 1911 - first skull fossils found 1912 - discoveries publicised 1915 - Charles Dawson dies 1949 - Piltdown ages queried 1953 - Fossil fakes unmasked From 1895 he began to write extensively on all aspects of Sussex history and archaeology. He found evidence for the final phases of Roman occupation at Pevensey Castle. He investigated toads petrified inside flint nodules, sea-serpents in the English Channel, "incipient horns" in cart horses, a new species of modern human and a strange cross between the goldfish and the carp. Dawson's greatest claim to fame, however, was the discovery of the "missing-link": Piltdown Man. Since the 1950s discussion has swung for and against Dawson as perpetrator of the Piltdown forgery. Most of the arguments suggest that Piltdown was a "one off", a single, elaborate hoax designed to fool the scientific community or embarrass key establishment figures. Under such circumstances any number of people may plausibly be held responsible. Like Piltdown Man's jaw, many of Dawson's so-called discoveries were forged It has become apparent, however, through analysis of Charles Dawson's career, that all is not as it seems. Of his discoveries, at least 38 are fakes: from the teeth of P. dawsoni and Blackmore's hafted stone axe to the "Roman" statuette and the Brighton "Toad in the Hole". The only suspect in each of these frauds is Charles Dawson himself - the same man who uncovered the remains of Eoanthropus dawsoni, the Piltdown Man. In March 1909 Dawson wrote to his friend Arthur Smith Woodward complaining that he was "waiting for the big 'find' which never seems to come along". CHARLES DAWSON (1864-1916) Qualified solicitor in Lewes An amateur fossil hunter Dubbed 'Wizard of Sussex' A little while later, apparently inspired by a meeting with local author Arthur Conan Doyle, Dawson conceived his greatest hoax; one that would hopefully gain him a Fellowship of the Royal Society and, almost certainly, earn him a knighthood. Piltdown Man, in its various incarnations, generated academic interest like no other discovery. Using the skills honed over the previous decades (such as the filing of Plagiaulax teeth and the whittling of the Bulverhythe antler with a steel knife), Charles Dawson gave British palaeontology what it had craved for so long: A British ancestor; a missing link from the home counties. Charles Dawson FGS, FSA never received his knighthood, though many others associated with the Piltdown "find" were to. He was never elected to the Royal Society. He died in 1916 before receiving such great honours. As he died, so did Piltdown Man; no further discoveries ever being made at the dig site in Sussex Dawson had the means, motive and opportunity to fake Piltdown Man. He had no need for an accomplice and we can dispense with any theories concerning conspiracy within the scientific establishment. Piltdown was not a "one-off" hoax, more the culmination of a life's work. Piltdown Man: The Secret Life Of Charles Dawson by Miles Russell is published by Tempus Stroud (ISBN 0752425722). == END A407-Piltdown_Man.txt