by Olivia Laing
It rained in the night, and I woke briefly at dawn to a changed landscape. The valley had filled with mist and only the tops of the Downs were visible above a fog the bleached pink of candyfloss. The cranes of Newhaven docks had vanished and the villages strung along the river were swallowed out of sight. I slipped back into sleep and when I woke again the false sea had receded and the valley returned, though Firle Beacon was still hung with dense white air, like those gusts of dragon’s breath exhaled on cold days. The rain had stopped and a gang of jackdaws were squabbling on the roof, crying ker-ack, ker-ack and jostling for space.
The town museum was just over the road, with the castle hard above it. It seemed like a good place to get my bearings, for the castle commanded the highest views and Barbican House, which I’d visited once before, was full of the archaeological specimens that the people who’d lived in these hills had discarded over the years. Within the castle precinct there were a few fine Regency houses and a bowling green that had apparently been used consistently since the leap year 1640. Opposite it was Castle Lodge, which had once belonged to Charles Dawson, the amateur geologist who discovered the Piltdown man in a bed of ancient Ouse gravels and is now credited with its forgery.
He was good at discoveries, Dawson. He also found, let’s see, the teeth of one of the earliest mammals, his own variety of iguanodon, a Saxon boat, the only known cast-iron Roman statuette, a goldfish-carp hybrid, a petrified toad preserved within a hollow flint the size of a lemon and an entire network of tunnels stuffed with miscellaneous prehistoric, Roman and medieval artefacts. The toad might possibly have been a genuine discovery, but the rest were either fakes or misattributions, as was his tale of seeing a sea serpent while travelling by ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe, its rounded, arched loops rising from the waves.
The story of the Piltdown man is almost the exact antithesis of that of the iguanodon, which makes it rather pleasing that Charles Dawson lived around the corner from Gideon Mantell, though nearly a century later. Like Mantell, Dawson didn’t go to university and had to fit his interests in geology and archaeology around the more prosaic business of a career as a solicitor. But despite this lack of formal education, he had less trouble being accepted by the establishment. At the time of his greatest find he had built up a considerable reputation for the range and quality of his work, being made a Fellow of the Geological Society at the age of twenty-one and of the Royal Society of Antiquarians by thirty-five. The discovery of the Piltdown man came towards the end of his life, and was exactly the big, globally significant find he’d recently complained seemed always to elude him.
Oddly enough, it isn’t clear when the first remains of the Piltdown man were found;though this is also true for Mantell’s iguanodon and does not in itself imply foul play. Dawson’s own accounts are vague and though they’re frequently retold they never seem to settle to a particular date. In the earliest written version – a letter from February 1912 announcing the find to his friend Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum – he simply explained that he’d come by chance across an ancient gravel bed, which he thought was Pleistocene, and found there (the grammar is odd but this seems to be what he means) a portion of what was to all appearances a prodigiously old human skull.
In the official presentation that the two men made to the Geological Society in December of that same year, this account is much elaborated:
Several years ago I was walking along a farm-road close to Piltdown Common, Fletching (Sussex), when I noticed the road had been mended with some peculiar brown flints not usual in the district. On inquiry I was astonished to learn that they were dug from a gravel-bed on the farm, and shortly afterwards I visited the place, where two labourers were at work digging the gravel for small repairs to the roads. As this excavation was situated about four miles north of the limit where the occurrence of flints overlying the Wealden strata is recorded, I was much interested, and made a close examination of the bed. I asked the workmen if they had found bones or other fossils there. As they did not appear to have noticed anything of the sort, I urged them to preserve anything that they might find. Upon one of my subsequent visits to the pit, one of the men handed me a small portion of unusually thick human parietal bone. I immediately made a search, but could find nothing more, nor had the men noticed anything else. The bed is full of tabular pieces of iron-stone closely resembling this piece of skull in colour and thickness; and, although I made many subsequent searches, I could not hear of any further find nor discover anything – in fact, the bed seemed quite unfossiliferous. It was not until some years later, in the autumn of 1911, on a visit to the spot, that I picked up, among the rain-washed spoil-heaps of the gravel-pit, another and larger piece belonging to the frontal region of the same skull.
Having alerted Woodward to his finds, the pair returned to the site when the spring floods had subsided, for it seems the gravel pit was more or less underwater for almost half the year. In the course of their excavations, they turned up more skull fragments, including a chunk of occipital bone and a broken portion of jaw complete with two molars. All were apparently from the original skull, which they decided must have been broken up by a worker’s pick. In addition to this impressive haul they found a few crudely worked flints and an array of tooth fragments from a great variety of early mammals, including a Pliocene elephant, a Pleistocene beaver and horse, a mastodon and a hippo, though whether these were found in spoil heaps discarded by the builders or in the undisturbed bed itself is not clear in either man’s account.
The bed itself, Dawson went on to explain, was about three to five feet deep and ran a few inches below the soil. It was formed from dark brown ironstone pebbles interspersed with angular brownish flints of a variety of sizes, ranging from half a foot to grains as small as sand. The bed was finely stratified, and the deepest layer, lying just above the yellow sandstone bedrock, was darker and more gummy than the rest due to the presence of so much iron oxide that a pick was often needed to prise free the stones. It was in this lower stratum that all the in situ elements were said to be discovered. The pit was situated in a field on the Barkham Manor estate, on a plateau estimated to be about eighty feet above the Ouse, which had worn through the earth over the course of hundreds of thousands of years until it reached its present depth, leaving trails and drifts of river gravels to mark its passage through time.
After Dawson had dealt with the circumstances of the find, Woodward took up the story, turning to the matter of its implications. He performed an elaborate anatomical analysis of the skull before drawing his triumphant conclusion: that the Piltdown man ‘was already in existence in Western Europe long before Mousterian man’ – the old term for a Neanderthal – ‘spread widely in this region’. His announcement was rapturously received. The hunt for the missing link in man’s origins had been quickened when Darwin published The Descent of Man in 1871, and for some time now the British had been lagging in the search. Satisfyingly, the Piltdown Man – officially named Eoanthropus dawsoni, Dawson’s dawn man – was pretty much exactly what the anthropologists had been predicting: namely a creature who had developed man’s substantial brain without yet losing the ape’s prominent jaw.
That this hypothesis should be so absolutely borne out was regarded by several scientists as unlikely, though in that period no one went so far as to suggest forgery, preferring the theory that two fossil creatures had been found, one an early hominid and the other an ancient sort of chimpanzee. In answer to this, Woodward drew attention to the molars, which were worn flat in a way only observed with human use. It was a shame, both camps agreed, that there wasn’t a canine present, since this would clarify for certain how the jawbone worked. What a stroke of luck, then, that just such a canine did turn up in the course of the following year’s dig, conforming almost exactly to Woodward’s predictions and clearly testifying to the creature’s human status.
In 1914, the last find from the Piltdown pit appeared: a massive implement carved from e
lephant bone and looking a little like a cricket bat. And then, the following year, Dawson found another fragmentary skull somewhere on the Sheffield Park estate, though the circumstances and exact location of this are hopelessly unclear. On this private and poorly documented dig he also turned up another Eoanthropus molar as well as a rhinoceros’s tooth that conveniently dated the cache as deriving from at least the early Pleistocene, which is to say the beginning of the ice ages. In some ways, this last molar was the most significant element of all, since it proved almost conclusively that the first jaw and skull must belong together: the double coincidence of their co-burial being too outlandish now to be entertained.
Dawson became ill at the end of 1915 and died on 10 August 1916 at the age of fifty-two. It is often suggested that he hoped to become a Fellow of the Royal Society or achieve a knighthood in recognition for Piltdown man, and that his early death prevented this from taking place; certainly many of the other figures associated with the find and its subsequent analysis were knighted. As for the gravel bed, though Woodward continued to supervise digs and even moved to the area after his retirement, nothing of any discernable antiquity was ever found at Piltdown again.
There was something distinctly fishy about the whole story, but though the Piltdown relics were subject to what seemed like exhaustive testing by anatomists and palaeontologists, and though the Piltdown Man became through the years increasingly anomalous, as subsequent international discoveries revealed man’s evolution had proceeded not with an initial increase in brain size but with the development of a human-looking jaw and teeth, it was not until 1953 that the Piltdown riddle began to be tugged apart. In the July of that year Joseph Weiner, an anatomist and anthropologist at Oxford, was at an academic dinner when a colleague based at the Natural History Museum mentioned to him in passing that there existed no record of the exact location of Dawson’s Sheffield Park finds. This casual statement startled Weiner and by November 1953 he had, in a model of a priori reasoning and the application of the scientific method, proved conclusively that the Piltdown man was a fake. His team performed a battery of tests, many of which had been invented in the intervening years and were unavailable to the original investigators. Fluorine, nitrogen, organic carbon and iron levels were all assessed, and the radioactivity of the samples measured. The results were startling. The skull and jaw fragments were from wholly different specimens, and the jaw and teeth had been deliberately stained with a paint containing iron oxide and bitumen, in all probability Vandyke brown. This was true of both the Sheffield Park and the original Piltdown finds. Furthermore, the molars had been deliberately shaped by a file or similar instrument to give them their distinctively human shape. The Piltdown jaw in fact belonged to a modern ape, probably an orang-utan. As for the mammalian teeth that had served to date the finds, these were indeed of formidable antiquity but not indigenous. It seems they derived from a variety of global sources, perhaps including Tunisia and Malta, and had also been subject to artificial staining to match the ferruginous nature of the gravel.
In his 1955 book, The Piltdown Forgery, Weiner drew back from directly accusing Dawson of being responsible for this sustained act of mischief, which cost the scientific world years of wasted effort, though later he was unequivocal in his condemnation. There has subsequently been an array of lurid conspiracy theories that accuse all manner of prominent scientists. However, the slow debunking of Dawson’s record, much of it carried out quite recently by the archaeologist Miles Russell, goes a long way to identifying him as the culprit. In addition to his impressive tally of false and dubious finds, he was observed by witnesses staining bones and carrying out practical jokes involving the falsification of archaeological relics. Then there’s the matter of Castle Lodge itself, which was leased to the Sussex Archaeological Society on the understanding that they were to have first refusal if it was ever put up for sale. It’s claimed in Lewes that Dawson bought the house by subterfuge, carrying out his correspondence on the society’s headed notepaper to create the illusion that he was working on their behalf, though the first the society knew of this business is when they were served a notice to quit.
What motivated Dawson in these acts is mystifying. He’s frequently said to have been driven by the desire for recognition and acclaim, but this also spurred Gideon Mantell, who never falsified a bone in his life. It struck me that many of Dawson’s finds were attempts to prove a theory already in existence. He specialised in missing links: hybrids that explained the development of one form to another. One of these was the Bexhill boat, which represented an absurd mix between a coracle and a dugout canoe; another Plagiaulax dawsoni, the so-called first Cretaceous mammal. The Piltdown man, though considerably more ambitious, was in the same vein, being fabricated evidence for the already extant hypothesis of Darwin’s transitional ape-man.
Bringing such stories to life must have had a profound appeal for Dawson, and it’s perhaps his most accurate epitaph that he was known as the Sussex Wizard. But though the past is sometimes haphazard or resistant to interpretation, that’s not the same as saying it can simply be made up. Dawson’s work has left a stain. The debunking of the Piltdown story is relayed on the same sort of websites that provide scientific evidence for the existence of Noah’s flood, where it stands as gleeful proof that the evolutionists got it wrong. Which is the sort of afterlife you deserve, I suppose, if you can’t tell a lie from the truth.
I turned from Dawson’s house to the new home of the Sussex Archaeological Society, to which they’d moved in 1904. From the outside Barbican House looked Georgian, though I’d been told that beneath the brick façade it was actually far older. The place was arranged over a couple of floors of what had evidently once been a sizeable townhouse. I wandered through rooms filled with the detritus of previous eras, past cases packed with Roman tweezers and Saxon jewellery; a broken rapier; a collection of porpoise bones found buried in the grounds of Lewes Priory; a tile bearing the smiling face of Edward I, his lazy eye just visible; a finger ring with a charm against fever engraved inside it; and an ice-skate made from the compressed thigh bone of a horse. The information on the displays was equally quixotic. In the medieval period they’d eaten porpoise and oysters at Lewes Priory, and drunk weak beer because the water was unsafe. Wool dealers and tanners had thrived in the town, and the traders who passed periodically through were known as piepowders for the dust that clung to their feet.
In one of the downstairs rooms there was a woman’s skeleton in a glass case, a necklace of orange and green beads slung about her clavicle. Her knees were pulled to her chest, in the foetal position the Saxons used for burials. There were no Roman bones. A display about the afterlife explained that for the Romans:
Spirits of the dead lived on in the underworld known as Hades. The purpose of the burial ritual was to ensure the successful transition from earthly life to the next world. Provisions to help the soul were placed in the grave alongside the urn or the body … The body would be burnt on a funeral pyre which purified and released the soul. The ashes would then be placed in an urn in the grave which would be either a hole in the ground or a cist, an underground structure of stone or tiles. Mourning would continue for nine days after the burial. Romans never neglected to bury their dead as it was believed that the souls of the unburied were left to wander the gloomy marshland at the gates of Hades for a hundred years before gaining entry.
This last was the fate that almost befell Elpenor, the shipmate of Odysseus who died falling drunk from a roof on Circe’s island. His death hadn’t yet been marked when Odysseus descended to Hades, and he pleaded frantically for his body to be burned and buried in a barrow, complete with armour, with an upright oar to mark his grave. Better than the marsh, I guess, that place of desolation, weed-choked, frog-spawning, leaking dank clouds of gas that seem to burn but emit no heat. A marsh would swallow you whole and spit you out after the appointed century tanned bog-oak black and smelling of reed-mace and cat’s tail. Better to be burned; better to be t
ucked in a tiled chamber with your tweezers and your coins; better to go up in sparks than be where water has dominion and frets away even the soil.
The story of Elpenor is translated in one of Virginia Woolf’s Greek notebooks, which she kept to accompany her reading of Homer, Aristophanes, Euripides and so forth. Though she never went to school and was educated largely by her parents, Woolf’s classical education was thorough and exacting. She was taught by a series of private tutors, the last of whom, the suffragist Janet Case, became a lifelong friend. The notebook that describes Odysseus’s encounter with the dead was begun in the winter of 1907; a year after her brother Thoby was taken ill with typhoid and died in the wake of a family expedition to Greece. Thoby had been her fellow traveller through the classics, and it may be that she was thinking of him when she appended her description of Odysseus luring ‘the weak races of the dead’ out of Hades with the exulting words ‘Beautiful! Beautiful!’
The study of Greek intertwines itself strangely through Woolf’s life, appearing unexpectedly in the more dramatic, even mythic, scenes. It was to Janet Case that she confessed her half-brother George Duckworth’s sexually predatory behaviour, which may or may not have gone beyond fumblings and gropings, and which apparently took place, among other locations, during Greek lessons at Hyde Park Gate. This revelatory conversation has been preserved – albeit second-hand – in a letter to Vanessa from 1911 that reads: