Others were less impressed with the bones. Professor F. Mayer of Bonn claimed the skeleton was probably that of a rickety Mongolian Cossack ‘who, on his way through Germany towards France in 1814, had crept into the cave and died’. He came to this conclusion by observing the bowed leg bones, indicating horsemanship, an injured elbow (obviously a war wound), and the large brow ridges, evidence of the agony the individual had suffered before death as he frowned in pain! In contrast Lyell more soberly concluded, ‘on the whole I think it probable that this fossil may be of about the same age as those found by Schmerling in the Liège caverns’, while Thomas Huxley regarded it as representing no more than an extreme variant of Homo sapiens. William King, an Irish anatomist, considered that the shape of the skull was distinct enough to indicate a separate species, and at the 1863 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Newcastle he proposed the name Homo neanderthalensis, the first new species of fossil human, a name that was published the following year. In doing so he gained priority for the Neander Valley finds and their name, since he pre-empted Falconer and George Busk, who were considering giving the name Homo calpicus (after the ancient name for Gibraltar) to the skull found there in 1848, which was actually that of a Neanderthal woman. As finds of similar-looking humans turned up in increasing numbers from caves in Belgium, France and Croatia, the ‘Neanderthals’ were gradually recognized as distinct and ancient inhabitants of Europe, although it was still unclear if even older people had existed anywhere else in the world.
By 1997 most of us thought that there was nothing new to add to the story of the Neander Valley finds; the site had been completely destroyed, no one had saved any associated materials such as stone tools, and the existing sixteen bones had been studied to death. But two things were radically to change the situation and put Fuhlrott’s discoveries back in the centre of science. First they were sampled for ancient DNA, and as we shall see in Chapter 5 this gave us a completely new insight into the Neanderthals. Second, two German archaeologists had decided to attempt an incredible piece of detective work: they would try and locate the material lost from the cave in 1856. They had to examine the surviving quarry plans, look at sketches and paintings of the valley as it was before quarrying, and then drop deep trenches in the areas where the spoil might have been dumped from the cave down to the valley floor. One of them, Ralf Schmitz, wrote to me about the plans and put the chances of their success at about 5 per cent: incredibly, in one of their first trenches they found a piece of bone that fitted on to the original Neanderthal femur, where it was broken. This was like recovering one of the lost arms of the Venus de Milo. Soon they had excavated many stone tools and fossil bone fragments. These included the first human teeth and jawbone fragments from the site, and a piece of face that fitted perfectly on to the 1856 skullcap. Arm bone fragments duplicated those already found and this indicated that there was at least one more individual – demonstrated from the DNA recovered from it to be yet another Neanderthal. Three fragments were radiocarbon dated and gave similar dates of about 40,000 years old. Spanning 140 years, a connection of discovery was made between Fuhlrott and Schmitz, a physical connection was made between the old finds and the new, and the type specimen of the Neanderthal group once again became the centre of scientific attention as it yielded up the first ever DNA of an ancient human for analysis.
In 1868, twelve years after the discoveries in the Neander Valley, work on a railway cutting in the Vézère valley of the Dordogne region in France exposed a rock-shelter of the Cro-Magnon period full of the remains of reindeer, lion and mammoth, together with Upper Palaeolithic tools and ancient hearths. Amongst these finds were human bones, covered in red ochre pigment, and rows of seashells, apparently necklaces. However, in contrast to the Neanderthal finds, these bones looked much more like modern humans – and the site gave its name to these early Europeans. The remains were eventually published in detail in 1875 in a beautifully illustrated monograph Reliquiae Aquitanicae, but sadly only after the authors Edouard Lartet, a French magistrate turned palaeontologist, and Henry Christy, an English banker and hat-maker, had both died. The finds included engravings of reindeer and mammoth on fossil remains of the animals themselves, providing the most direct testimony of the contemporaneity of humans and ice age animals. Even more powerful testimony followed in 1880 with the publication by the Spanish prehistorian Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola of wonderful cave paintings of bison and bulls accidentally discovered by his young daughter in the Altamira Cave near Santander. Unfortunately, their sophistication meant that it was many more years before they were generally accepted as authentic.
Since, in many French sites, Middle Palaeolithic flakes and scrapers always seemed to underlie blade tools of the Upper Palaeolithic, it began to be argued that just as the Middle Palaeolithic gave way to the Upper Palaeolithic, so the Neanderthals must have given way to the Cro-Magnons. But what remained unknown was who had made the distinctive handaxes of the even more ancient Lower Palaeolithic. Would remains ever be found of the most ancient humans, ones who provided a link to our ape ancestry? In 1863 there had briefly seemed to be an answer to that mystery from the Moulin-Quignon quarry at Abbeville, the area of the Somme River studied by Rigollot and Boucher de Perthes. A human lower jaw had been found in apparent association with several handaxes, but while many French workers became convinced that the association was genuine, Evans, Prestwich and Falconer, previously so supportive of Boucher de Perthes, now demurred. They cautioned that the jaw looked like that of a modern human, and according to Busk and Falconer was ‘gelatinous’ like fresh bone, while the handaxes seemed to be recent forgeries, probably made using metal hammers and without the natural staining of genuine examples. Evans suggested that Boucher de Perthes put one of his most trusted workers on a careful watch and within a week there was clear evidence that handaxes were being planted. In 1863, Evans pronounced, ‘I sincerely hope that the human jaw from Moulin-Quignon may from this time forward be consigned to oblivion. Requiescat in pace!’ When chemical tests were applied to it in 1950, they confirmed that it was not fossilized.
There were claims from Britain of an even greater antiquity for another modern-looking jawbone, this time found in sands being excavated at Foxhall, near Ipswich. Again Falconer urged caution, and the high organic content of the bone seemed to warrant this. The story was repeated yet again when a human skeleton was discovered in a gravel pit at Galley Hill in Kent. As we shall see in the following chapters, this part of Kent around the village of Swanscombe is famous for the thousands of handaxes it has produced, and in 1888 human remains were found in the same gravel deposits. They were robustly built but much more modern looking than the skeleton from the Neander Valley, and opinion was divided about whether this was a genuine fossil relic of the handaxe makers, or a much later burial cut into the river gravels. Chemical tests applied in the 1950 s showed that the Galley Hill bones were not fossilized, and finally in 1960 a radiocarbon date was carried out on one of the arm bones, giving an age of only about 3,500 years. Unfortunately the current whereabouts of the Foxhall jaw is unknown, so it has not been possible to apply the same kinds of analyses to it.
Eventually, near the end of the nineteenth century, a really primitive human fossil was found, not in Europe but on the other side of the world. A Dutch army doctor, Eugene Dubois, used his posting to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in 1887 to search for the Pithecanthropus (ape-man) that the German biologist Ernst Haeckel had predicted would be found in southern Asia. His finds consisted of some teeth and jaw fragments, a human-looking thighbone and a skullcap even lower and flatter than the Neanderthal one, with huge brow ridges and a much smaller brain capacity. Dubois christened these finds Pithecanthropus erectus, now better known as Java Man or Homo erectus. So, much to the consternation of those European experts who recognized that the Neander Valley fossil was too human to represent a missing link, their continent had produced nothing to indicate it was important in human beginnin
gs. So where were the remains of the people who had made the earliest stone tools, people who dated not from tens of millennia ago, but perhaps from hundreds or even thousands of millennia?
In 1907, a possible answer emerged, and this time there was no question that this might be an intrusive modern human masquerading as an ancient fossil. Dr Otto Schoetensack, a geologist at Heidelberg University in Germany, had regularly examined animal bones found during quarrying in a sand pit at Mauer, a few miles from Heidelberg. At a depth of eighty feet, workmen discovered a very thick jawbone containing most of its teeth, and in contrast to the finds from Moulin-Quignon, Foxhall and Galley Hill, this jaw had absolutely no sign of a modern chin. Schoetensack studied the Heidelberg jaw, as it became known, and he published a thorough account of the discovery and its context in 1908, naming the jaw as the type of a new human species Homo heidelbergensis. The associated warm-climate animals included hippo, elephant, rhino, scimitar-tooth cat, red deer and two species of beaver. By 1908, there was a better understanding of the succession of mammal species in Europe, and Schoetensack argued that the Mauer fauna was much more ancient than ones known from the late Pleistocene such as those found with Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon fossils, and
with Upper and Middle Palaeolithic tools. Homo heidelbergensis was from the Middle Pleistocene and by implication (since no definite artefacts were found at Mauer) was representative of the people who had made Lower Palaeolithic tools such as handaxes. Although Schoetensack did not attempt to estimate the actual age of the find, others guessed it could be ten times older than those of the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons – perhaps an astonishing 500,000 rather than 50,000 years old. Some scientists recognized similarities to the Neanderthals, perhaps hints that this might be an earlier member of the same evolutionary line; others such as the British anatomist Sir Arthur Keith thought that the teeth indicated quite an advanced kind of human, while the Cambridge anthropologist Wynfrid Duckworth said, ‘Would the Mauer jaw be appropriate to the cranium of Pithecanthropus? I believe an affirmative answer is justified.’ Others, such as the Australian expert on the evolution of the brain Grafton Elliot Smith, believed that none of these finds offered evidence of the ancestor of our species Homo sapiens. Our large brain and distinctive globular skull form must have taken a long time to evolve, he argued, and somewhere in the fossil record from the beginning of the Pleistocene the evidence was waiting to be discovered.
There was an additional complication raised long before by people like Joseph Prestwich, whom we encountered in the ferment of the year 1859. Were the handaxes being found in the gravels of many European rivers really the oldest evidence of human occupation? For Prestwich, the answer was no. He believed that the most primitive humans would have made much more primitive stone tools, minimally modified cobbles and flakes. Such tools became known as eoliths (‘dawn stones’) and the search for them and their manufacturers preoccupied many archaeologists around the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly in Britain. James Reid Moir, President of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, scoured the cliffs and beaches of East Anglia for them, while Benjamin Harrison, a Kent grocer, searched the high ‘plateau gravels’ of south-east England. Eoliths were so simple that they would be almost indistinguishable from natural flakings, and this problem was not lost on the fiercest critics of their very existence. John Evans laid out the hallmarks of human workmanship that would be expected on genuine ancient tools – the physical signs left when stone was purposefully and directionally struck on stone by Man. While the signs were unquestionably there on classic artefacts from the Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, they were sadly lacking on British eoliths. And in 1905, the French anthropologist Marcellin Boule not only suggested that apparent eoliths would be produced in large numbers when cobbles smashed against each other on riverbeds and seashores, he actually found perfect examples in cement-mixing mills at Nantes. As one French pre-historian remarked: ‘Man made one. God made ten thousand. God help the man who can distinguish the one in the ten thousand.’
By 1912, British archaeologists, whether they favoured handaxes or eoliths, were desperate for a convincing early Briton. It was becoming a serious national embarrassment. Britain’s greatest rival, Germany, had the Neanderthal skeleton and the Mauer mandible, our old imperial rivals the French had the Cro-Magnon finds and, from 1908, a succession of spectacular Neanderthal skeletons; even the Dutch had Pithecanthropus from the Dutch East Indies. Thus the stage was set for something that, in the end, would provide even more national embarrassment: Piltdown Man. This notorious affair was probably spawned by the finds of Java Man and Heidelberg Man, with the idea of creating an even more spectacular find on British soil. Charles Dawson, a solicitor and amateur fossil hunter, claimed that sometime before 1910 a workman handed him a thick, dark-stained piece of human skull that had been found in gravels at the village of Piltdown in Sussex. By 1912, Dawson had collected more of the skull from around the site, and had contacted his friend Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the British Museum (now the Natural History Museum, where I work). Together they began excavations at Piltdown in 1912, and soon found more skull fragments, fossil animal bones, stone tools, and a remarkable fragment of lower jaw.
Amid great excitement, they announced the finds to a packed session of the Geological Society in London at the end of 1912, and named a new type of early human, Eoanthropus dawsoni (‘Dawson’s Dawn Man’). Although the skull and jaw pieces were awkwardly broken, Smith Woodward reconstructed them into a complete skull that combined a rather modern-looking braincase with very ape-like jaws. On the basis of the associated animal bones and stone tools, Smith Woodward and Dawson argued that Eoanthropus dated from the early Pleistocene (some guessed as far back as a million years) and was thus more ancient than Heidelberg Man. Some experts remained doubtful, but in 1913 and 1914 more finds were made at Piltdown, including a canine tooth intermediate in size between that of apes and humans, and a unique carved artefact made from a large piece of elephant bone that because of its shape became known as the cricket bat. In 1915 the last Piltdown finds were made: a tooth and some skull pieces closely matching the first finds. These were supposedly found by Dawson in a field two miles from the original site. The additional finds swung the opinion of many sceptics in favour of Piltdown Man, and it helped that Eoanthropus met the expectations of scientists like Elliot Smith that the brain had evolved to a large size early in human evolution, while other features (such as the jaws and teeth) may have lagged behind.
But the days of Eoanthropus were numbered. As further finds of possible human ancestors were made in Africa and Asia during the 1920 s and 1930 s, Piltdown Man was pushed into an increasingly peripheral position in the story of human evolution, since nothing else resembled it. When new chemical and physical dating techniques were applied to Piltdown Man from 1949 onwards, the results were puzzling, suggesting that the skull and jaw material, unlike the fossil animal bones from the site, could not be very ancient. Then in 1953, their suspicions aroused, Oxford scientists Joe Weiner and Wilfrid Le Gros Clark asked Kenneth Oakley, Smith Woodward’s successor at the British Museum, to apply even more stringent tests. They soon published their initial investigations and conclusions: the ape-like Piltdown mandible was a forgery. Over the next two years Oakley and colleagues conducted even more wide-ranging analyses which showed that the whole Piltdown assemblage of bones and artefacts was fraudulent. The site had been systematically salted with bones and artefacts from various sources, most of them artificially stained to match the colour of the local gravels. The ‘missing link’ itself consisted of parts of an unusually thick but quite recent human skull, and the jaw of an unusually small orang-utan with filed teeth. Uproar followed, and the press had a field day, with reactions ranging from mockery to questions in Parliament about the competence of the British Museum.
So who was responsible for this hoax, which for forty years fooled some of the most outstanding British scientists? At least twenty-five men
have been accused of being involved in the forgery, ranging from Dawson and Smith Woodward through to the eminent anatomists Arthur Keith and Grafton Elliot Smith. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who lived in Sussex and played golf at Piltdown, has been added to the growing list of suspects. Dawson, however, remains the prime candidate for the forger. He was the first person seriously to search for and report fossils from the site, and he was present when all the main finds were made. He is the only individual who can definitely be associated with the final ‘discoveries’ at the second Piltdown site, and subsequent to his final illness and death, no further significant discoveries were made at either Piltdown locality. However, an alternative candidate has recently come to the fore in Martin Hinton, who at the time of the discoveries was a knowledgeable volunteer in Smith Woodward’s department at the British Museum, and later became Keeper of Zoology there. In the mid-1970s an old canvas travelling trunk with his initials on it was found when loft space was being cleared above the old Keeper of Zoology’s office. Amongst the items unpacked by AHOB member Andy Currant were mammal teeth and bones stained and carved in the manner of the Piltdown fossils.
Homo Britannicus Page 4