Chapter 56
THE STORY OF A HOAX
‘It’s normal that people suspect finds that do not slot into scientific common sense. Are you familiar with Piltdown man?’ Lundy asked Ennis.
‘I have heard of it but don’t know the details.’
‘Well it’s a good story. About a century ago a man called Charles Dawson, a lawyer, recounted that as he was walking down a farm road close to Piltdown Common, in England, he noticed that the road had been repaired with some unusual brown gravel. He made enquiries and found out that the gravel had been dug from a nearby gravel pit.’
Dawson visited the gravel pit where he found a couple of men digging gravel and asked them if they had found any bones or other fossils. The reply was no so he asked them to keep an eye open and inform him of any interesting finds.
Not long after, a workman told him that he had found part of a skull in the gravel. Dawson announced that it was a small portion of an unusually thick skull bone that looked as if it might be human and that it was about 300,000 years old!
In the autumn of 1911, on another visit to the gravel pit Dawson found another and larger piece of bone, part of the frontal region of a skull lying there partly exposed on the surface. Does that remind you of something?” he laughed.
Soon after in the presence of Arthur Smith Woodward, head of the Department of Geology of the British Museum of Natural History, he found a jawbone.
This was an extraordinary discovery since fossil human bones had been dug up in other places abroad, like at Neanderthal in Germany, but they were much more recent and without any doubt human.
What was needed by scientists was solid evidence to demonstrate their evolutionary theory related to human beings was an ancient fossil that clearly showed the link between apes and men. And that was what this skull and jawbone did and very conveniently in England.
With the help of Arthur Keith, an anatomist, and highly respected scientist, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, Fellow of the Royal Society, President of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Grafton Elliot Smith, a renowned brain specialist, they studied the bones and came to their conclusion.
The problem however was that key parts were missing such as the upper jaw, part of the lower jaw and the lower canine teeth not forgetting the lower jaw articulation. As a result the size of the braincase could not be easily determined. The various pieces could have been made to fit either a larger braincase or a small one. There were different opinions with Keith opting for 1,500 cubic centimetres as the volume of the braincase whilst Woodward estimated it at 1,070 cubic centimetres, which is between an ape and a human. Keith’s opinion was based on the size of the jaw bone which ran against the opinion of the others.
It was then the French Jesuit evolutionist, Teilhard de Chardin, found an apelike canine tooth in the same gravel pit changing Keith’s opinion so that finally the scientists agreed on a brain capacity of 1,200 cubic centimetres.
They publicly announced the long awaited missing link and presented the head of Piltdown Man based on the bones and suitably assembled. It was named Eoanthropus Dawsoni, which means Dawson’s Dawn Man, presenting it at the Geological Society in December 1912. It was a sensation.
In August 1913 Teilhard de Chardon joined Dawson to visit the Piltdown gravel pit and discovered what was declared to be the two missing canine teeth together with a Stegodon tooth, evidence that the Piltdown man was indeed very ancient.
That Stegodon teeth no doubt came from lchkeul in Tunisia that Teilhard de Chardon had lived near when he had lived in North Africa, where Stegodon fossils are in abundance.
Certain scientists argued that the jaw and skull did not belong together. The skull pieces could be arranged in any number of shapes and forms to suit the discoverers theories.
All objections were dismissed by scientific societies and the bones were placed in the British Museum, who dispatched plaster casts of the ape-man to museums all over the world.
It was in 1953, that Kenneth Oakley, a British Museum geologist, together with Joseph Weiner an Oxford University anthropologist and Le Gros Clark professor of anatomy at Oxford with a new technique for determining the relative age of bones by their fluorine content had been recently developed revealed the bones to be modern.
It was another sensation; Piltdown Man was a hoax, a farce that transformed the scientific world and the British Museum into fools. Even such authorities as Louis Leakey had only been allowed to examine the plaster casts of the bones.
As the story unfold it turned out that a couple of amateur palaeontologists had reported they had surprised Dawson in his office staining bones a dark colour so as to make them look ancient, which was confirmed since close examination revealed that the bones had been carefully stained with bichromate.
The canine tooth was found to have been filed and also stained brown with potassium bichromate and packed with grains of sand.
‘It’s amusing as the jaw-bone came from a modern orang-utan,’ Lundy said laughing.
‘Where did that come from then?’
‘Probably from a collector or a dealer in ethnographical material, somebody like you,’ he said pointing his finger. ‘You know that the Dayaks have been known to keep orang-utan skulls as fetishes or trophies in their long-houses for many generations.’
‘That’s right,’ Ennis said sheepishly, ‘I’ve bought them myself…in the past of course today it’s against the law. Some have been kept for generations. In fact one Orang-utan skull with its mandible was in a Dayak long-house seventy miles from Kuching and said to be twenty generations old, about four hundred years.’
‘A nice little story of scientific skulduggery!’
The Lost Forest Page 57