Aztec Treasure House

by Evan S. Connell

  “Several years ago I was walking along a farm-road close to Piltdown Common, Fletching, when I noticed that the road had been mended with some peculiar brown flints not usual in the district. On enquiry 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. . . .”

  So begins the account of Mr. Charles Dawson, a rotund Uckfield lawyer and amateur antiquarian who discovered the famous skull. He told his story in 1912 at a meeting of the London Geological Society, to which he had been invited by Dr. Arthur Smith-Woodward of the British Museum, and his remarks later were printed in the society’s journal. Several renowned scientists were present when Dawson spoke, and for many years a painting titled Discussing the Piltdown Man hung on the staircase of the society’s headquarters.

  Dawson said that after coming upon fragments of a skullcap he got in touch with Smith-Woodward, who examined the bones and considered them so important that he joined the search. Together they turned up quite a lot. According to Dawson: “Besides the human remains, we found two small broken pieces of a molar tooth of a rather early Pliocene type of elephant, also a much-rolled cusp of a molar of Mastodon, portions of two teeth of Hippopotamus, and two molar teeth of a Pleistocene beaver.”

  From an adjacent field they recovered bits of deer antler and the tooth of a Pleistocene horse. All the specimens, including those of Piltdown Man, were highly mineralized with iron oxide.

  The Piltdown cranium did not quite fit the Piltdown jaw, which made a few scientists uneasy. Yet they had been excavated at the same level, and despite the apelike lower jaw the molars were flat, indicating that the jaw worked with an acceptably human rotary motion. Then too, it would be exceedingly strange if, side by side, a prehistoric man had left only his skullcap while a prehistoric ape left only its jaw. Therefore they must belong to the same beast.

  So excited was Dr. Smith-Woodward that he built a little house near the gravel bed, and when visitors arrived he could talk about nothing else.

  A few more specimens were picked up: small bones from the nasal bridge and some delicate turbinal bones which support the membrane inside the nasal cavity. These turbinal bones were quite fragile; they fell apart when lifted out, but the shards were collected and glued together. And one hot August day Father Teilhard de Chardin, who had become interested in the project, was seated on a dump heap beside the pit idly running his fingers through the gravel when he noticed a canine tooth.

  This tooth caused further debate at the Geological Society. It was very large, perhaps too large, and it appeared to be the tooth of a relatively old man whereas the jaw was that of a young man. Did this tooth come from another skull?

  Piltdown Man eventually was accepted by English scientists, not without discomfort, as certain applicants for a social club may be accepted; but among friends and relatives, so to speak, he was admitted to the evolutionary tree. Elsewhere his credentials were not approved. Giuffrida-Ruggeri in Italy, Mollison in Germany, and Boule in France all thought the jaw belonged to an ape. American experts, too, looked skeptically at the reconstruction.

  Against their doubts stood the simple argument of the discovery: fossil remains taken from Pleistocene gravel, much of it excavated under the meticulous supervision of Dr. Smith-Woodward of the British Museum.

  Year after year the dispute simmered.

  Then in 1953 the skull got a new custodian, Dr. Kenneth Oakley, who subjected it to a fluorine test. Buried bones gradually absorb fluorine from water in the earth; the longer the burial, the more fluorine.

  Results of Oakley’s tests were astonishing and puzzling. On the basis of fluorine content the jaw and skullcap did indeed belong together, yet they held less fluorine than animal bones taken from the same stratum. The contradiction so exasperated Dr. Oakley that he abruptly told a colleague: “This thing is bogus!” But his intuitive thrust was ignored, perhaps because the skull had been in the museum such a long time—almost forty years. One hesitates to denounce an old acquaintance.

  A few months later an Oxford anthropologist named J. S. Weiner was driving home at night when he clearly understood that Piltdown Man was a fake. And it is curious how often an insight such as Weiner’s is accompanied by actual physical movement. The astronomer Kepler, while drawing a figure on the blackboard for his students, was seized by an idea which led to our modern concept of the universe. The mathematician Poincaré reported that just as he was getting aboard an omnibus, just as his foot touched the step, a brilliant realization unfolded: “that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.” Beethoven, writing to his friend Tobias von Haslinger: “On my way to Vienna yesterday, sleep overtook me in my carriage. . . . Now during my sleep-journey, the following canon came into my head. . . .” A. E. Houseman: “Two of the stanzas . . . came into my head, just as they are printed, while I was crossing Hampstead Heath. . . .” And we have the testimony of Bertrand Russell who says that while walking toward Cambridge, capriciously tossing a tin of pipe tobacco and catching it—at the exact instant a ray of sunlight reflected from the metal surface of the tin he understood the basis of a certain philosophical argument. Goethe, too, experienced a swift flowering of knowledge while out for a walk, just as he noticed the whitened skull of a sheep on a hillside.

  So it happened with the anthropologist, driving alone at night from London.

  Weiner mentioned his startling thought to Sir Wilfred Le Gros Clark at Oxford. Then he took a chimpanzee jaw and spent a while filing down the molars. He was surprised by how quickly the teeth could be redesigned to look like human teeth. He dipped the chimp’s jaw in permanganate until it acquired a suitable brownish hue and when it was dry he laid his new fossil on the desk of Le Gros Clark. He is said to have remarked with a look of innocence: “I got this out of the collections. What do you suppose it is?” And Sir Wilfrid, who knew immediately, exclaimed: “You can’t mean it!”

  They decided to have a conference with Oakley.

  Soon after that conference Piltdown Man started falling apart. Those distinctively human molars had been artificially flattened; close inspection revealed that their surfaces were not quite on the same plane, as though the counterfeiter had altered his grip when he moved from one tooth to the next. The delicate turbinal bones were not what previous investigators had presumed them to be; they were merely a few bone splinters of indeterminate origin. The canine tooth found by Teilhard de Chardin was X-rayed and discovered to be a young tooth that had been ground down until the pulp chamber was almost exposed, which would not happen to a living tooth.

  New chemical tests showed a nitrogen concentration of 3.9 percent in the jaw, 1.4 percent in the skullcap. There was also, on this occasion, a discrepancy in the fluorine content.

  Details were noticed that should have been noticed earlier. Stone “tools” from the pit had been superficially stained with iron salts—except for one that had been colored with bichromate of potash. An elephant-bone pick, when examined under a glass, revealed uncharacteristic marks. This implement, said Oakley, was probably obtained from a Middle Pleistocene brick-earth or sandy formation: “The ends were whittled with a steel knife. . . .”

  Various bones taken from the pit were given a newly developed test for uranium salts. If the bones had come naturally to their ultimate resting place the Geiger counter should have clicked along at more or less the same speed, but Oakley noted a wide spectrum, including one “fossil” so radioactive that when left on a photographic plate it took its own picture.

  Thus, after forty years, the walls came tumbling down. The pit had been salted from top to bottom. The skullcap was old, perhaps even Neolithic; the jaw was recent and apparently belonged to a female orangutan. Of eighteen specimens collected by Dawson and Smith-Woodward ten unquestionably were fraudulent. As to the other eight, they are not held in high esteem.

  Punch ran a cartoon showing Piltdown Man in a denti
st’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 personages including 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 skull ought 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. Another time 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 of humanity, 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 boxes, labeled A and B, destined for the port of Chingwangtao where they were to be put aboard the SS President Harrison. A detachment of U.S. Marines was assigned to guard them.

  Almost certainly these boxes left the Peking Union Medical College in a car which was going either to the U.S. Embassy or to the Marine barracks.

  Beyond this point the journey of the prehistoric Chinese is obscured by swirling mist. Their bones are said to have been scattered and lost when Japanese soldiers stopped a train carrying the Marines. They are said to have disappeared from a warehouse in Chingwangtao which was twice ransacked by the Japanese. They are said to have been aboard a barge that capsized before reaching the President Harrison—although this sounds unbelievable because the President Harrison ran aground at the mouth of the Yangtze, quite a long distance from Chingwangtao. Then there is the possibility that an enterprising chemist may have gotten hold of them, in which case we must assume they were pulverized and swallowed.

  Even now, decades later, the search for these bones goes on. Considering how much evolutionary evidence has accumulated since 1941, we might ask why anthropologists are so anxious to locate one particular batch of fossils.

  There has never been a loss of such magnitude, says Dr. Harry Shapiro of the American Museum of Natural History, “for these ancient bones represented a veritable population of at least forty individuals—men, women and children—from a stage of human evolution previously unknown. . . . Although a few additional representatives of this ancient population have recently been discovered as a result of renewed exploration by the Chinese, it is unlikely that anything approaching the original sample will ever be restored.”

  Conceivably a few men might still be alive who know exactly what happened. If so, the inscrutable old Chinese could reappear. But more probably, somewhere between Peking and Chingwangtao, they passed from the hands of those who knew their scientific value into the hands of those who either didn’t know or didn’t care. And it is this last thought that appalls Dr. Shapiro, who reflects upon the dismay and sadness we would feel if we heard that Shakespeare’s manuscripts had been found, only to be burned by a maid who looked at them without comprehension.

  In Africa it’s a different story, less tragic but more incredible because here we are concerned with men who supposedly knew what they were doing. The first important fossil turned up in Africa was contemptuously dismissed.

  Momentous news is greeted like this more often than you would suspect. Einstein’s germinal bolt of lightning did not attract much notice for eight years. Francis Bacon anticipated Newton’s law of gravity by half a century, but the times were out of joint. The linguist Grotefend correctly deciphered an obscure cuneiform script and published his evidence in three reports, all of them ignored. Olaus Roemer, a seventeenth-century astronomer, discovered that light traveled at a fixed rate instead of propagating instantaneously, yet academic scientists rejected this idea for fifty years.

  It happened again in 1924 when a Johannesburg anatomy professor named Raymond Dart reported on a miniature skull found in a limestone q
uarry near a railroad station called Taungs.

  Two crates of fossil-bearing rock had been delivered to Professor Dart while he was getting dressed for the wedding of his friend Christo Beyers—“past international footballer and now senior lecturer in applied anatomy and operative surgery at the University of Witwatersrand.” Dart immediately opened both crates. The first was a disappointment; he saw nothing but petrified eggshells and turtle shells.

  The second crate held a gem: nearly enclosed by rock was the skull.

  Dart returned to it as soon as Beyers had been legally committed. With a hammer, a chisel, and one of Mrs. Dart’s knitting needles he set to work, delicately, because the little creature he meant to release had been imprisoned for almost a million years.

  “No diamond cutter ever worked more lovingly or with such care on a priceless jewel,” he later wrote, “nor, I am sure, with such inadequate tools. But on the seventy-third day, December 23, the rock parted. I could view the face from the front, although the right side was still embedded. . . . What emerged was a baby’s face, an infant with a full set of milk teeth and its permanent molars just in the process of erupting. I doubt if there was ever any parent prouder of his offspring than I was of my ‘Taungs baby’ on that Christmas.”

  The skull seemed to be that of a young ape, yet its cranium was too large—implying a large brain, a brain in which for the first time intellect might outweigh instinct—and its roundness suggested that the creature had walked erect. Dart estimated that when fully grown the baby would have been perhaps four feet tall and would have weighed about ninety pounds.

  Cautiously he named it Australopithecus, Ape of the South; but in a paper for the British scientific journal Nature he pointed out certain human characteristics and indicated that his baby belonged in the family somewhere between Pongidae and Hominidae: “The specimen is of importance because it exhibits an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man.”