by Colin Wilson
Some time thereafter, Glenn Miller was transferred from his unmarked grave in Ohio to his resting place in Altadena. Helen joined him there in 1966. His friend Niven, one of the few who knew the secret, maintained an entirely uncharacteristic silence about Miller for the rest of his life, not even mentioning him to his second wife. Don Haynes later published his diaries, which appeared to confirm his story that Miller had flown to Paris from Twinwood on the morning of Friday, 15 December, in exceptionally bad weather. Wright’s investigations revealed that the weather was reasonable on that date but that the airfield was closed.
Glenn Miller’s records are as popular as ever, and their smooth, seamless sound is still one of the delights of the swing era. Perhaps, after all, Niven and Haynes were right when they decided that, as far as posterity was concerned, Miller had died in a mysterious airplane accident rather than in an undignified brawl in a Paris brothel.
35
The Missing Link
The Unsolved Mystery of Human Evolution
One day in 1908, an amateur archaeologist named Charles Dawson, who made his living as a solicitor, was walking along a farm road near Piltdown Common in East Sussex, England, when he noted some peculiar brown flints that had been used to mend the road. When he learned that they had been found in a gravel bed on the farm, he went along to take a look at it. Two workmen were digging, and Dawson asked them if they had found any fossils; they said no. But when Dawson returned later, one of them handed him a piece of a human skull. Three years later, in the same place, Dawson found another piece.
In the following year, 1912, Dawson decided to show the pieces to his friend, Dr Arthur Smith Woodward, the keeper of the Department of Geology at the British Museum, and during that summer, Smith Woodward came to look at the site, bringing another geologist, the French priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (who was to become famous four years after his death, in 1955, for his book The Phenomenon of Man). They quickly discovered what Dawson described as a “human mandible” (lower jaw) with two molar teeth. Prehistoric animal bones and primitive human tools in the same gravel pit seemed to date the jaw as being about half a million years old. Part of a human skull also turned up in the pit.
This was a matter of great excitement, for man himself is only about half a million years old. At any rate, the sudden expansion of the brain that has become known as “the brain explosion” began – for reasons no one understands – half a million years ago. (The “first man”, Homo erectus, dates back about one and a quarter million years but had a brain the size of an ape’s.) What was so startling about this find was that the jaw was definitely apelike, yet it fit the cranium. They had apparently discovered something that science had been seeking for almost half a century – what Charles Darwin had called “the Missing Link”, the definitive proof that man is descended from the ape.
It’s hard for us to understand the scandal that had been caused by the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in November 1859. Most of us take the notion of evolution for granted and regard biblical fundamentalism as an absurd joke. In 1859 Darwin’s conclusions seemed to shake the foundations of Christianity, and therefore the foundations of British society. The first edition of the book actually sold out on its first day. And in spite of the caution with which he had phrased his conclusions – that all species emerge through natural selection due to the survival of the fittest – Darwin was soon being accused of atheism and downright wickedness. In 1859 most British people accepted that the account of creation in Genesis was entirely factual, and most accepted Archbishop Usher’s estimate of the date of creation (worked out from the Bible) as 4004 BC.
Admittedly, Sir Charles Lyell had disproved this almost thirty years before in his Principles of Geology, in which he showed that the earth must be millions of years old. But somehow, this did not bother the Church too much – after all, if God created the rocks, he may well have created them with million-year-old fossils, in much the same way that you might stock a new library with old books. But Darwin was saying that man was not the “Lord of Creation”, merely a latecomer descended from the ape. In a speech in Parliament, Disraeli made the famous comment that in the controversy about whether man was an ape or an angel, he was on the side of the angels.
The historic battle – evolutionism’s equivalent of the Battle of Hastings – took place in Oxford on 30 June 1860, and the two leading debaters were Bishop Samuel Wilberforce – known as “Soapy Sam” because of his unctuous manner – and “Darwin’s bulldog”, biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. After Soapy Sam had given a humorous and satirical account of the theory of evolution, he turned politely to Huxley and “begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey”? He sat down to roars of laughter and applause.
It is reported that Huxley slapped his knee and whispered to his neighbour, “The Lord hath delivered him into my hands”. Huxley rose to his feet and spoke quietly and gravely, explaining Darwin’s theory in plain and simple language. He concluded by saying, “I would not be ashamed to have a monkey for my ancestor, but I would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth”. The applause that followed was as thunderous as the applause that had followed Wilberforce’s attack. One woman fainted. And Wilberforce was so stunned that he declined the opportunity to have a final say.
Eleven years later, in 1871, Darwin declared his belief that archaeology would turn up the proof of his theory in “the Missing Link”. Darwinians were eager to have the honour of fulfilling that prophecy. And in 1912 it looked as if Charles Dawson had succeeded triumphantly.
Other finds followed. Teilhard de Chardin found a human canine in the debris that had been thrown out of the pit; it fit the skull. An elephant bone shaped into a club – the earliest known weapon – was also found. And when, in 1915, another “Piltdown cranium” was found two miles away, even the doubters were convinced. This “proved” beyond all doubt that man was the descendant of an ape.
Dawson had only a year longer to live; he died in 1916, at the age of fifty-two, in a glow of celebrity. Woodward had christened his discovery Eoanthropus dawsoni – Dawsonian dawn man. And in due course a statue of Dawson was erected near the gravel pit.
The problem was that Dawson’s dawn man did not seem to fit into the emerging picture of human evolution. For example, Neanderthal man, which had been discovered in 1857, had a receding jaw; so did the much older Heidelberg man, discovered in 1907 (and also dated at about half a million years old). So did Java man, discovered in 1891. But these all looked much more humanoid, less apelike, than dawn man. In short, Piltdown dawn man was far too late to be the Missing Link.
The bubble finally burst in 1953, when the Piltdown skull was subjected to the latest scientific tests at the British Museum by Dr Kenneth Oakley. These included fluorine analysis. (Fluorine accumulates in buried bones, so the older a bone, the more fluorine it contains.) The Piltdown skull proved to be a mere 50,000 years old, while the jawbone proved to be that of a chimpanzee; both had been stained with iron sulphate and pigment. The Piltdown skull, which had figured in so many books on the evolution of man, was a hoax. But who was responsible for it?
The obvious suspect was Dawson himself. Evidence began to accumulate that he was not as honest as everyone had supposed. Dr J. S. Weiner, the author of a book entitled The Piltdown Problem (1955), went down to Sussex, and in a cabinet of fossils belonging to a contemporary of Dawson’s, Harry Morris, found a flint described on its accompanying card as “stained by C. Dawson with intent to defraud”. In fact, Dawson is known to have stained the bones with bichromate to preserve them – or at least that is the reason he gave Woodward. Local historians had criticized Dawson for basing his History of Hastings Castle, without acknowledgment, on an earlier history. And there was a story that he had bought a house that was being considered for the site of the headquarters of the Sussex Archaeological Society by using his membership to snatch it from under the socie
ty members’ noses. Whoever “salted” the gravel pit with primitive tools, and bones of hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and deer, had access to this kind of material. And the same person placed the second “Piltdown skull” two miles away to silence the skeptics. Dawson was certainly in a position to do these things.
On the other hand, Francis Vere, author of The Piltdown Fantasy, is convinced that Dawson did not have sufficient knowledge to carry out the fraud – for example, enough knowledge of dentistry to grind down the teeth. He believes that the hoaxer was one of the many local amateur geologists – like Harry Morris (who is known to have been an embittered man).
But why was it done? If Dawson did it, then the reason may have been either the desire for personal aggrandizement or the desire to prove Darwin right once and for all. Fifty years after the publication of The Origin of Species, the world was still full of fundamentalists who could not accept Darwinism. In 1925 a schoolteacher named John Scopes was put on trial in Dayton, Tennessee, for teaching his pupils the theory of evolution. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100.
In a pamphlet entitled Lessons of Piltdown (published by the Evolution Protest Movement in 1959), Francis Vere even suggests that Teilhard de Chardin could have been responsible for the Piltdown hoax. Vere’s protest is also directed at the notion that man is descended from the ape, and he suggests that what the scientists ought to be trying to explain is the “gift to Man from God – the mind”. Vere’s protest is in the spirit of the complaint of Samuel Butler – another anti-Darwinian – who claimed that the theory of natural selection had “banished God from the universe”. Bernard Shaw took up his protest in the preface to Back to Methuselah, in which he argued that the failure of Darwinism lies in its rigid determinism, its failure to recognize the part played in evolution by the will of the individual.
What, in fact, has happened since the 1950s is that the objections of historians like Vere – and even of the townsfolk of Dayton – have been justified by new discoveries that prove, once and for all, that there is no connection between human beings and apes. Some ninety million years ago, in the age that succeeded the dinosaurs (who lived from about 250 to 150 million years ago), the ancestor of both the apes and man was a tiny insect-eating creature that resembled a mouse or shrew and that lived in the steaming forests that covered the earth. At about this time, these creatures felt confident enough to emerge from the undergrowth and take to the trees, where they ate seeds and tender leaves and a new development called fruit, rather than insects. It was probably as a consequence of living in trees that the “mouse” developed a “hand” with a thumb and four fingers, rather than a paw with all the digits side by side. Many of these creatures were exterminated by their cousins the rodents, who had one major advantage – their teeth never stopped growing and so never wore down. But they survived in Africa – or rather, in the vast continent that included Africa and South America, before they drifted apart forty million years ago. By this time, the tree shrew had turned into a monkey – so in that sense, man is descended from a monkey.
For some reason, monkeys had their eyes in front of their heads, rather than on either side, as rodents have. This enabled them to develop depth perception, which in time would mean that they could handle tools. (If you try driving a car with one eye closed, you will find it far more difficult to judge your distance from the hedge.) As the earth became dryer, and the lush African forests became savannahs, the primates split into two lines, the apes and the monkeys. The earliest ape seems to have been a creature we call Aegyptopithecus, which lived about twenty-eight million years ago. Then came Dryopithecus, a baboonlike creature, which spread out of Africa and across Europe. About fifteen million years ago, one line of Dryopithecus took to the trees and became the ancestor of the modern ape – the kind we encounter in the Tarzan stories.
Next came the ape we call Ramapithecus, found in 1934 in northern India. This was so humanlike that paleontologist G. E. Lewis classified it as a hominid. Ramapithecus seems to date back between eight and fourteen million years and has a claim to be the “first man”.
In 1924, in the part of Africa now called Botswana, miners who were blasting rock discovered fossil bones near a railway station known as Taungs; further investigation revealed the skull of a child; it still had milk teeth and thus was reckoned to be about six years old. The brain case was much smaller than that of a human child, yet the teeth were definitely human. Professor Raymond Dart concluded that this was one of the earliest “true men” yet discovered and called it. Australopithecus africanus, or southern ape man. This creature was a meat eater and is nowadays referred to as a “Dartian”. Another type of Australopithecus was discovered some time later, a vegetarian with a more robust build; he was labeled Australopithecus robustus.
Dart’s fellow scientists were unwilling to accept that his meat-eating ape-man was an important link in the evolutionary chain, but discoveries made by the paleontologist Robert Broom in the second half of the 1930s left no doubt that the “Dartians” were a truly human species that had originated in Africa. Some dated as far back as three million years ago, others a mere three-quarters of a million years. The “Dartians” seem to have given way to the creature we call Homo erectus, the immediate predecessor of Homo sapiens, while robustus seems to have died out.
At some of the australopithecine sites, Dart found baboon skulls with a kind of double depression in the back. And the discovery of antelope front-leg bones (humeri) at these sites suggested to Dart that these early ape-men had used the bones as clubs. It led him to publish, in 1949, a highly controversial paper entitled. “The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man”, which argued that human intelligence had developed through the use of weapons. Wielding a club, Dart maintained, requires a certain degree of coordination between the hand and the eye. In short, Dart was suggesting that man evolved because he was the descendant of some primitive killer ape, while his more peaceful brothers stayed in the trees and developed into modern gorillas, orangutans, and so on. Dartian man went on to develop tools – stones with their edges chipped off to make primitive axes, which could be used to extract marrow from bones – about two million years ago.
Dart’s version of human evolution was popularized in 1961 by the playwright-turned-anthropologist Robert Ardrey, in a book entitled African Genesis. This, briefly, is how Ardrey sees human development: About fifteen million years ago, in the Miocene era, Africa was still covered with lush forests. Twelve million years ago the rains stopped, and the Miocene gave way to the long droughts of the Pliocene era. At some point in the Pliocene era, our human ancestors descended from the trees to take their chance on the savannahs. These became the two types of Australopithecus – the meat-eating “Dartians” and the vegetarian robustus. During this period, Ardrey believes, the “Dartians” learned to use weapons like bone clubs.
Then, about a million years ago, the rains came, and the Pleistocene era began. It was the bad weather, Ardrey thinks, that led man to develop his intelligence. Pebble tools made their appearance. So did hand axes. The gentle robustus vanished as rains gave way to periodic droughts, but “Dartian” man, the “bad-weather animal”, survived. And because his chief evolutionary advantage was his aggression, his killer instinct, he gradually became the most dominant species on earth. This, Ardrey suggests, is why his greatest problem in our modern world is that he will exterminate his own species.
It is a gloomy picture, and it can hardly hold any comfort for antievolutionists who are pleased that we are not descended from the ape. But it is not necessarily the last word. Richard Leakey, son of the eminent anthropologist Louis Leakey (whom Ardrey quotes extensively), has argued that all the evidence shows that our primitive ancestors were peaceable creatures and that it was not until he began to create cities – with their overcrowding and other problems – that man became cruel and destructive. And the Finnish paleontologist Björn Kurtén developed his own views in a book entitled – significantly – Not from the Apes (1972). This, in summary,
is his view:
Our tree-living Ramapithecine ancestors of about fifteen million years ago (in the Miocene era) were furry creatures about the size of a modern-day five-year-old child; but they had forward-looking eyes and human teeth. Kurtén suggests that these highly social creatures developed a “call system” – of warnings and so on – that developed into language. They became capable of “simple thought processes”.
With the coming of the droughts – and the savannahs – of the Pliocene era, these creatures came down from the trees – not because they were driven down but because the savannahs offered a richer way of life. The baboons descended from the trees at about the same time. But the baboons remained four-legged herbivores, while the manlike primates became two-legged carnivores. Their upright posture allowed them to see farther into the distance – an advantage for hunters. The need for periods of violent activity – chasing small animals for example – led to the gradual loss of fur.
Since the wandering life was hard on women and small children, the band was inclined to find itself a semipermanent home. The men went hunting while the women remained behind. Family life developed, and two-parent families became the nucleus of the population. Sex played an increasingly important part in their lives, instead of being a “sideshow” (Ardrey’s phrase), as it is for animals in the wild. Thinner fur made skin contact more sensuous. Because they walked upright, face-to-face mating gradually replaced sex from the rear. Lips became fuller and female breasts developed. (Kurtén acknowledges that he owes this idea to Desmond Morris’s Naked Ape.) And at this point, Kurtén agrees that the ability to manipulate weapons caused a development of intelligence. Something very like speech evolved from the “monkey chatter”.