Piltdown Man : the Revenge

Saturday, November zist, 1953, was for the great majority of Londoners a Saturday of no importance : the weather was gloomy, the sky was low, the red omnibuses crowded the centre of the city, signs glittered in Piccadilly Circus, and starlings twittered in Trafalgar Square. Nothing had changed.

Nevertheless, it was no ordinary Saturday. Aloof from all this activity, down in the west, not far from the quiet spaces of Kensington Gardens, a number of laboratory assistants were busy under the direction of a departmental head. The next day, being a Sunday, there would be many visitors to the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, the children more numerous than the adults. Now, on the morning of November 2ist there had appeared the usual monthly bulletin of the geological department of the Natural History Museum, and in a few lines this contained a sensational communication that had left the majority of its readers flabbergasted and had raised a cry of triumph from a few others. For forty years the scientists had been hoaxed and the Piltdown man was really nothing but a fake. Its jaw, which had been regarded as a true antiquity, was no more and no less than the jawbone of an ape an orang-utan or a chimpanzee that had probably been alive at the beginning of the century in the reign of the good King Edward VII.

That is why, in the ground-floor galleries of the museum, on the left, some twenty yards from the entrance, they were in a hurry to change the glass case where the casts of the Piltdown man were displayed, These specimens, hitherto regarded as being about 40,000 years old, had been under investigation by one of the world's most celebrated anatomists, Professor W. le Gros Clark. For the second time in four years, the lower jaw, the solitary canine and the fragments of the cranium had been subjected to the merciless test of microchemical examination. They did not emerge with credit. On the first occasion, in 1949, it had been necessary to rate the Piltdown fossil considerably younger than was thought. It was not from 75 to 100,000 years old, but 40,000 at the very most. On the second occasion it was necessary to rate it even lower: at least a part of the fossil had been faked. And there was reason for the excitement, for the bomb had been thrown by three world-famous scientists. It was Dr. Weiner of the Department of Anatomy at the University of Oxford who 'belled the cat 5 and energetically demanded a re-examination of the bones, and it was his chief, the famous Professor le Gros Clark, and Dr. Oakley, a well-known prehistorian on the staff of the Natural History Museum, who had closely collaborated in this revaluation.

But who was this venerable person, this pillar of the museum, casts and photos of whose bones had been sent around the world so that they might be submitted to the pitiless criticism of the experts? This Piltdown man is more than a humble fiameless fossil. He is a veritable symbol. By the studies, discussions and even the disputes he has provoked, he shows us, probably better than any other fossil, the exciting hunt which man has carried on in search of his ancestors; moreover, he shamelessly reveals both the strength and weakness of paleontology, and of all the natural sciences in a more general way.

So on this notable Saturday of November zist, 1953, the prehistorians took their revenge on the Piltdown man. The brief article which brought about his fall would scarcely have attracted attention if the newspapers in Britain, Europe and America had not devoted to him some lengthy articles that were decorated with a few quite misleading caricatures. For forty-eight hours radio and television sought out the prehistorians in order to drag them before the microphone. Queen Elkabeth might be leaving for her 174-day tour of the world, the French National Assembly might be carrying on a noisy debate about the European Army, and the police investigations into the triple murder at Lurs might be in full swing; but all these events had to share the front page of the newspapers with headlines that announced the exposure of the greatest scientific fraud of the half-century. A few old bits of bone and a few worn teeth were enough to stampede the journalists. Articles and interviews about these rusty remains, hitherto known only to experts, were hastily concocted.

Yet the excitement was surprising. One would like to be sure that the journalists and radio-reporters were not obeying some unconscious impulse; and after careful reflection I think that the layman has seen in this affair an opportunity to take his revenge on the scientists. Nuclear physics threatens us with its explosions, and palaeontology has had to pay for the damage done by splitting the atom. Moreover, there is the curious fact that on the very day the Piltdown fraud was exposed, one of the most eminent atomic scientists in America, Dr. Robt. Oppenheimer, reported the discovery of new nuclear particles and stated that our knowledge of this realm of physics might be greatly upset thereby.

And all this because a very clever forger it is still impossible to say exactly who he was, but it was possibly Mr. Dawson himself had, by the skilful use of a file and a small bottle of potassium bichromate, disguised the bone of an ape as a human fossil. It is worth giving some attention to the matter, for in the end it raises the problem of the origin of man and, by inference, of the origins of life on the earth, forcing one at the same time to question the confidence that can be placed in the prehistoric discoveries which are used for their interpretation.