by Lydia Pyne
Undeniably, learning that the Piltdown fossil was a hoax stirred up a lot of emotion among scientists who had worked with the fossils, particularly since Piltdown Man had been so firmly anchored in the evolutionary family tree for so long. Although Oakley and his colleagues had uncovered the truth about Piltdown, there was a respect for the previous generation of scientists who had participated in the early days of the research. One of the more poignant moments of Eoanthropus’s fall from grace came when Oakley, his wife, and a few others from the museum went to tell Sir Arthur Keith—himself an ardent supporter of Piltdown as an evolutionary ancestor—of their findings. Keith’s correspondence from that time paints the picture of a frail old man with hesitant, shaky handwriting—long retired from the museum, but still curious about the world and his beloved fossils. It was almost as if they were going to break the news that a colleague had died. And, in some ways, one had. Keith had lived and thought about Piltdown for forty years. In a moment of quiet gravitas, Keith remarked how grateful he was that Sir Arthur Smith Woodward wasn’t alive to find out that Piltdown was a fake.
“It isn’t hard to see why Smith Woodward—and so many others—was taken in so overwhelmingly. Given the desire to find evidence of ancient man in Britain, why should he even question the veracity of the specimens he himself had seen picked up from the gravel bed?” historian of science Dr. Karolyn Schindler notes, brilliantly contextualizing the discovery. “The question of course remains as to whether it was Smith Woodward’s great eminence that lent too much credence to the discovery, yet the majority though not all of the distinguished scientists involved in Piltdown had no doubt of its antiquity. Who, after all, would suspect a hoax like this?”20
Once the fossil was unveiled as a hoax, the question that burned in everyone’s mind was: Who? Who had perpetrated this elaborate hoax?
The list of suspects was—and still is—long. Many considered the prime possibility to be the fossil’s discoverer, Charles Dawson. Others have proposed prominent scientists William J. Sollas and Sir Arthur Keith. Still others suspect the archaeologist-philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Even the celebrated Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has his share of claimants suggesting that he had perpetrated the hoax, since he visited the site several times. For the most part, however, suspicion has centered around Charles Dawson. Dawson, the argument goes, must have been behind the hoax—desperate for the scientific recognition and celebrity that was attached to a famous fossil. Over the decades, though, support for Dawson’s character came from a variety of sources. An indignant letter to the editor of The Times, dated November 25, 1953, came from F. J. M. Postlethwaite, Dawson’s friend and stepson. He spoke on behalf of the late Dawson, gave a character witness, recalled watching Dawson’s excavations in 1911 and 1912 while on military leave from the Sudan—everything was on the up-and-up—and claimed Dawson could never be tied up in such an unseemly fraud. “Charles Dawson was at all times far too honest and faithful to his research to have been accessory to any faking whatsoever. He was himself duped, and from statements appearing in the Press, such is evidently the opinion of those who knew him well, some of whom are scientists of repute.”21
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At the point that the fossil was exposed, both scientific and popular audiences needed to find some way to make sense of such an elaborate hoax that had fooled so many people for so long. Some scientists—including Weiner and Oakley who debunked the fossil—started writing op-ed articles and piecing together oral histories and interviews with people involved with the entire Piltdown scenario. Kenneth Oakley, perhaps more than any other researcher associated with Piltdown, took it upon himself to collect these histories in an attempt to solve Piltdown’s mystery. In an interview with one of Dawson’s legal lackeys who ran Dawson’s office, the gentleman recalled the difficulties of working with an amateur naturalist during the Piltdown field seasons decades before: “On occasion Mr. Charles Dawson boiled specimens in the office kettle. On these days I had to delay making the office tea.”22
However interesting the fossil was as a human ancestor, it was that much more salacious and exciting as a fraud. The social pull of Piltdown reached so far beyond any kind of fluorine or chemical tests—as such, “Piltdown” has impacted people for decades, long after the hoax was revealed, even people without any kind of scientific or expert stake in the scientific evaluation of the specimen. In popular vernacular, “Piltdown” has come to be synonymous with an elaborate “fraud” or “hoax.”
The entire public life of Piltdown can be found in the bits and pieces of everyday effluvia—the outraged letter to the editor protesting the besmirching of a friend’s or colleague’s reputation; the odd bit of historical satire and poetry; the cartoon that make fun of the fossil and its adoring public. One of the folders in the British Museum’s Piltdown Collection is marked “Humour” and contains a trove of documents and sketches that speak to the lighter side of the fossil and its story. In 1954, Mr. N. P. Morris, a colleague of Kenneth Oakley’s, told the entire Piltdown story through campy prose:
Some forty years ago the Piltdown bones
Were found among some gravel, sticks and stones,
And when assembled—after quite a lull—
The Press announced the famous Piltdown Skull.
So E-o-anthropus achieved his fame
(Together with an academic name)
For then it was the experts dared to think
That they had really found the Missing Link.
The world in general got a nasty shock
On hearing thus of their ancestral stock,
But, by and large, they settled down again,
Their hopes of nobler vintage down the drain.
But as the years rolled by the specialists—
The Archaeo-and Anthropologists—
Grew more and more convinced they’d been beguiled,
And “Eo” was, in fact a Problem Child.
The mandible, according to their test,
Was modern ape, not fossil like the rest,
Which proved, undoubtedly, the knotty point,
That Piltdown’s jaw was sorely out of joint,
The battle rages as hotly as before,
For Piltdown (pictured in the Press once more
With lower dentures not as they should be)
No longer held the evolution key.
The scientists, still far from satisfied,
Went down to Sussex where the victim “died.”
From water and the gravel round about
They found his nationality in doubt.
An African? a D.P.—it would seem?
His politics! who knows what they’d have been!
While all these years this cur of wide renown
Had claimed protection from the British Crown.
(For radioactive tests have now revealed.
Some facts on vintage, hitherto concealed,
And X-ray analysis has shown
What clever chaps could do to fossil bone.)
So now with customary British phlegm
We chant for him a final requiem,
But who laughs last, may laugh the longest peel—
The hoaxer’s ghost has not been brought to heel.23
The poem highlights a lighter side to the Piltdown saga and helpfully gives us all the significant parts that made Piltdown, well, Piltdown. An academic name. Ape. Problem Child. Missing Link. Fame. Clever chaps. Sussex. Radioactive tests. British phlegm. Humor, wit, and satire have as much a part in the Piltdown story as the fossil’s fluorine tests and museum displays. As the public came to embrace a fraud, the Piltdown story coalesced and the fossil’s identity began to change.
The question of how to respond to the hoax fronted the British political establishment as well as its scientific communities. Only days after the news of the hoax broke, there was actually a motion before the House of Commons that concerned Piltdown. One member of the House had taken up the cause “on behalf of decades of disappointed schoolb
oys.” The motion read, “That this House has no confidence in the trustees of the British Museum, other than the Speaker of the House of Commons, because of the tardiness of their discovery that the skull of the Piltdown Man is a partial fake.” The motion never had a chance of passing, and the Speaker, with poorly suppressed hilarity, offered the observation that “the honorable trustees have many other things to do besides examine the authenticity of a lot of old bones.”24
The British Museum (Natural History) found itself thrust into the spotlight not only to field inquires from House trustees on behalf of disappointed schoolboys, but also to deal with the Nature Conservancy, which, in 1953, had just allocated conservancy status, funds, and legitimacy to the Piltdown site, designating it as a nationally important site for Britain’s archaeological heritage. The status was quickly and quietly withdrawn: “Piltdown Site Is Handed Back,” read a headline in the Evening News on November 24, 1954. (The site was, however, formally gifted to the Nature Conservancy in April 1957.)
The museum even had to figure out how to deal with the conspiracy wingnuts who came out of the woodwork, making general pests of themselves, offering their take on “solutions” to the Piltdown problem. A certain Mr. Alfred Scheuer, for example, created such a stink among the museum staff—with misspelled, poorly written, flight-of-fancy slanderous missives toward those associated with Piltdown, claiming that the museum had faked other finds—that the staff eventually stopped responding to Scheuer’s crazed letters. A note in the museum’s “Scheuer File” has a document dated April 28, 1967, from secretary Rosemary Powers: “Dr. Oakley: Mr. Jessup brought in this correspondence he had with Scheuer, so that we might squash the blighter with it if he pops up again. He has not been heard from in 3 years, happily. I have appended the old file number AL 1955/10.”25
More than its altered status as an evolutionary ancestor, photographs and portraiture of Piltdown changed considerably over the course of the specimen’s life. Once Oakley and his associates began working with Piltdown, the fossil was photographed surrounded by laboratory equipment. Scientists in formal wear weren’t cradling the fossil; rather, scientists in white lab coats used instruments to interact with Piltdown. Piltdown was no longer “Piltdown Man,” a human ancestor; it had become a specimen and scientific object to be poked, prodded, and worked out. When newspapers from the 1950s onward ran stories about Piltdown, they used photographs of the specimen in its laboratory contexts, and the public’s views of Piltdown were shaped by that media lens.
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So what’s the proper place in public and scientific spaces for something like Piltdown? A museum? Perhaps. The specimen is certainly famous, and it’s a significant part of paleoanthropology’s history. But if a museum’s job as an institution is to lend a certain credibility and legitimacy to the materials displayed in it, displaying Piltdown, or even a cast of Piltdown, becomes problematic, especially without proper context.
Kenneth Feder, author of Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, recalls a trip to the London Natural History Museum to check out Piltdown in its native museum habitat. “When I had trouble finding the fossil in a museum case, I approached a woman at the front desk, asking where I might see the Piltdown remains,” he explains. “‘Oh, that is not on display, sir,’ and went on to inform me, rather condescendingly, ‘It was all rubbish, you know.’” (Feder does note that Piltdown remains are brought out on display on occasion, particularly when relevant as archaeological fakes.)26 This begs the question of what purpose these casts serve, beyond historical curiosities. The Sterkfontein Museum, in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa, for example, has an interesting take on showing a cast of Piltdown to its audiences. The cast is displayed with the note, “Piltdown. Fake skull. Sussex.”
While Piltdown is a fake fossil, some museums opt to display it as part of paleoanthropology’s history. The exhibit in Sterkfontein, South Africa, allows visitors to see that Piltdown was a significant discovery. (L. Pyne)
It seems that just about everyone professionally associated with paleoanthropology today—and certainly every paleoenthusiast—has a theory on why the hoax lasted as long as it did (forty years) and what Piltdown meant (and means) to paleoanthropology. Consequently, talking about Piltdown feels a bit like asking someone to share her thoughts about a faked moon landing or conspiracies around JFK’s death. Even my trip to the Natural History Museum archives, so I could examine the Piltdown files myself, netted a polite smile from the ever professional archival librarians. After they wheeled over three carts full of Piltdown materials, they offered the observation that those files are “always extremely popular.” I felt almost as if I had just requested the secret files of the Illuminati.
But the drive to figure out who perpetrated the hoax and how the guilty party was so successful underscores why we are still talking about Piltdown today. In 2012, to mark the centenary of the fossil’s discovery, a team of fifteen interdisciplinary scientists associated with the Natural History Museum in London—calling themselves Piltdowners—met with the intent of cracking opening the Piltdown mystery, treating the forgery rather like police investigating a cold case. The team of scientists—made up of paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, and paleontologists, as well as geneticists and museum curators—have taken a very twenty-first-century approach to unpacking the fossil forgery, treating the entire episode rather like the investigation of an art crime rather than the plot of an Agatha Christie novel. Where efforts in earlier decades had focused mainly on identifying the perpetrator of the hoax, twenty-first-century studies have worked to understand the context of the fakery. Simply asking who perpetrated the hoax doesn’t begin to unpack the complexities of how it has lived within paleoanthropology’s own history. “The Piltdown conundrum is addictive, totally addictive,” archaeologist Dr. Simon Parfitt confessed in an interview with Evolve magazine.
At the Piltdowner meeting, Natural History Museum curator Dr. Rob Kruszynski offered a rundown of the impressive number of scientific tests that the material from the cold case had been subjected to, including nearly twenty different forms of analysis over sixty years. After the fluorine and radiocarbon testing exposed the hoax in 1953, the litany of analyses ramped up significantly. These new tests and methods—like confocal microscopy and CT scanning—offer new evidence about the Piltdown specimen to the ever growing body of Piltdown literature; the opportunity to showcase new and different analyses and methodologies on such a famous specimen undoubtedly holds a particular social cachet.
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Like the Old Man, the Piltdown “fossil” has spawned an impressive amount of literature outside of strictly scientific publications. Ronald Millar’s 1972 book The Piltdown Men presents the entire story in excruciating detail, with nothing too trivial to include. Other pillars of the Piltdown’s canon include J. S. Weiner’s 1955 The Piltdown Forgery; Charles Blinderman’s 1986 The Piltdown Inquest; Frank Spencer’s 1990 Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery; Miles Russell’s 2003 Piltdown Man: The Secret Life of Charles Dawson and the World’s Greatest Archaeological Hoax; John E. Walsh’s 1996 tome Unraveling Piltdown: The Scientific Fraud of the Century and Its Solution … to say nothing of the countless chapters, pamphlets, articles, monographs, and blog posts that fill the archives and serve as fodder for conspiracy theorists. I don’t think that there is a more published, more examined specimen in the fossil record, from dinosaurs to hominins, than Piltdown.
Plenty of fossils have held honored places in hominin phylogenies (key species, if you will), and have been removed as narratives of human history are revised and rewritten. What makes Piltdown so unique is the very fact that it is a hoax, and its salacious infamy has guaranteed it a historical identity. In Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss suggests that story—narrative—provides the cultural backdrop to making sense of history; in this case, scientific history, like Piltdown, is no different. “Mythology is static, we find the same mythical elemen
ts combined over and over again… . [History] shows us that by using the same material … one can nevertheless succeed in building up an original account for each of them.”27
By mere circumstance of the fossil being a fraud, it generated another social strata of meaning, an interpretation outside of science. There were questions about the legitimacy of the Piltdown memorial (How should people commemorate something that was fake?), what to do with museum material (Should something “wrong” be displayed in a museum?), and what the repercussions would be to those accused of being involved with the hoax (What is slander and what is speculation?).
We tend to get so caught up in the mystery and intrigue of the fabrication that we overlook other aspects of its life. Its life, however, is more than just the initial moment of its discovery, the controversies about its legitimacy, and its contributions to scientific debates. The Piltdown fossil tells us about the business of how paleoanthropology “does science” and how that changes over time, correcting for errors and introducing new technologies and methodologies. (Piltdown as a cautionary tale is well situated even in popular culture; in the first season of Bones, for example, one of the anthropologists is told, “It’s like Piltdown,” to connote a potential hoax.)
To pretend that the story of Piltdown is simply or only a scientific narrative that hinges on a correct interpretation of evidence—debunking a false hominin ancestor—misses the whole picture. It is not less famous for its hoaxy status; rather, its celebrity seems to grow the more the fossil is studied and the less we know for certain about it. When the Piltdown committee published its report stating that the fossil was a hoax, speculation immediately swirled as to who could have done it. Many of the scientists involved with the chemical and other tests, alongside countless armchair historian-detectives, have spent time researching and gathering evidence to try to point to the hoax’s perpetrator. But treating the Piltdown specimen like this reduces it to a material object. Concentrating on unveiling the hoax’s perpetrator basically reduces the fossil to a somewhat embarrassing historical deus ex machina in the story of paleoanthropology. It’s as if the fossil has no identity or purpose outside of its status as a hoax. Casting accusations—however founded or unfounded—about the hoaxer’s identity also speaks to the social life and place that Piltdown occupied. In short, it is part of its identity. Even the terminology of the fossil hinges on that historical turning point—it moves from being Piltdown Man, graced with a scientific name, Eoanthropus dawsoni, and imbued with scientific meaning, to simply being “the Piltdown Hoax.” The “Piltdown” part of its name and identity endure—forever linking the specimen with its place of origin—but the status changes. It’s not an ancestor; it’s an object. It’s not an active piece of hominin phylogeny; it’s separated from evolutionary discourse by the distancing article “the” and the distaste and notoriety that swirl around its hoaxy status. Piltdown’s notoriety has essentially made it the Milli Vanilli of the paleo world—a fake known for being fake.