Punch ran a cartoon showing Piltdown Man in a dentist’s chair with the dentist saying, “This may hurt, but I’m afraid I’ll have to remove the whole jaw.”
And a motion was put before the House of Commons: “That the House has no confidence in the Trustees of the British Museum. . . .”
Among those trustees were some rather celebrated personagesincluding Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a member of the royal family.
Many scientists regarded the great Piltdown farce as not only an embarrassment but a waste of time. Others disagreed. It did stimulate public interest in anthropology; it did remind professionals of the need for accurate data and improved analytical procedures.
One is entitled to ask, of course, how so many eminent scientists could have been fooled for such a long while. There’s no satisfactory answer. Dr. Louis Leakey suggested that the Piltdown bones were accepted as genuine because they fitted the pattern of what a very early human skullought to look like. And this preconceived image must have been known to whoever contrived the hoax. Leakey himself had been dissatisfied with the skull, yet the idea of a forgery never occurred to him.
Asking himself how he could have been duped, he recalled a day in 1933 when he went to the British Museum. After explaining to the curator that he was writing a textbook on early man, he was escorted to the basement where the Piltdown fossils were kept in a safe. They were removed from the safe and placed on a table, together with reproductions. “I was not allowed to handle the originals in any way,” said Leakey, “but merely to look at them and satisfy myself that the casts were really good replicas.” The originals were then locked up, leaving him with only the casts to study. “It is my belief now that it was under these conditions that all visiting scientists were permitted to examine the Piltdown specimens. . . .”
Two other important questions cannot be answered. First, who was responsible? Second, what was the motive?
Charles Dawson, who died in 1916, is thought to have been the villain. Whoever concocted the fake had known quite a lot about anatomy, geology, and paleontology. Dawson qualified. There were no other suspects. “It is certainly not nice to accuse a dead man who cannot defend himself,” wrote the Dutch geologist von Koenigswald, “but everything points quite clearly to his responsibility for the forgery.”
Besides, Dawson once claimed to have observed a sea serpent in the Channel—although one must admit this is not impossible. Anothertime he was sure he had found a petrified toad. And he seems to have been fascinated by the concept of missing links. He picked up a tooth that he thought must be intermediate between reptile and mammal. He attempted to cross a carp with a goldfish in order to create a golden carp. He said he had unearthed a strange boat—half coracle, half canoe. Furthermore, he is known to have washed old bones with potassium bichromate.
Very well, suppose we ascribe the forgery to Dawson. Next, why did he do it? Why would Dawson, or anybody, go to all that trouble? For the pleasure of humiliating the authorities? To stir up a drowsy neighborhood? To make money? To obstruct and detour the search for knowledge?
And did he plan to reveal the hoax?
Fictional crimes are more gratifying: the author keeps you writhing in suspense, which is his job, but at last he tells you.
So much for cranks, fakes, jongleurs, and fanatics. Dawson, Hull, von Eckhart, M. Denis Henrion—no matter how diverting these testy eccentrics might be, they contributed nothing. They acted out their compulsions, that was all.
At the same time, offstage, a number of earnest men had been at work.
Eugène Dubois, following Darwin’s conjecture that originally we lived in a “warm, forest-clad land,” left Holland for the Dutch East Indies where he served with the colonial military forces as health officer, second class. In 1891 on the island of Java he unearthed some extremely heavy, chocolate-brown bones, harder than marble—remnants of a 700,000-year-old creature whose low skull resembled that of an ape, yet whose legs were adapted to walking erect. That the bones were ancient could not be disputed, but Dubois’ claim that they represented a transitional form of life was not greeted with much enthusiasm. Most professionals who examined these bones in Europe thought he had brought back the top of an ape and the bottom of a man.
A few years later a fossil-collecting German naturalist who was traveling through China noticed a human tooth in a druggist’s shop, where it was regarded as a dragon’s tooth and would soon have been ground up for medicine. This tooth, along with other fossilized scraps ofhumanity, led paleontologists to a hillside near the village of Choukoutien, southwest of Peking, which yielded the remains of some exceptionally old Chinese. But by now the Second World War was gathering and archaeological work became difficult, especially after Japanese forces occupied Choukoutien in 1939. Chinese scientists grew increasingly concerned, and in 1941 they asked that the fossils be taken to America.
It is known that the Choukoutien fossils were packed in two white wooden
