Bones, Bodies amd Behavior: Essays in Behavioral Anthropology

Prologue to a Scientific Forgery: The British Eolithic Movement from Abbeville to Piltdown

PROLOGUE TO A SCIENTIFIC FORGERY The British Eolithic Movement from Abbeville to Piltdown FRANK SPENCER False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes delight proving their falseness. (Darwin, Descent of Man) Between 1912 and 1917 an unsuspecting scientific community was led to believe that the remains of an early fossil hominid had been discovered in the gravels at Piltdown, a small village nestled in the Weald of East Sussex. A human skull that seemed to couple an anatomically modern braincase with an ape-like jaw was reconstructed from these remains. At the time, this monstrous chimera was hailed as being "the most important discovery ever made in England ... [,j if not of greater importance than any other yet made at home or abroad" (Dawson & Woodward 1913:148). However, during the next forty years the evolutionary scenario implied by it became increasingly difficult to defend in the light of the emerging fossil record in Africa and Asia, as well as in Europe. Finally, in 1953, it was demonstrated that the respective ages of the Piltdown cranium and jaw were different, that they had been deliberately stained and the teeth artificially abraded, and that the entire assemblage was bogus and had been willfully planted by an unknown person Frank Spencer is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Anthropology, Queens College of the City University ofNew York. He co-edited The Origins ofModem Humans: A World Survey of the Fossil Evidence and has recently published Ecce Homo: An Annotated Bibliographic History of Physical Anthropology. He is currently completing a twovolume work dealing with the Piltdown forgery. 84 PROLOGUE TO A SCIENTIFIC FORGERY 85 The Piltdown skull cast produced by the R. F. Damon Company of Weymouth, England, based on the teconstruction by Woodward er a!. in 1912. The dark areas represent the original bone fragments. The reconstructed regions are white. Note the large projecting (reconstructed) canine in the mandible. This expectation was satisfied by the discovery of the lower canine by Teilhard de Chardin in the summer of 1913. As this photograph indicates, the mandible was missing two vital parts, namely, the mandibular condyles and symphysial region. As a consequence it was impossible to determine the bicondylar width and thereby confirm the association of the cranium with the mandible. Likewise, the argument that the mandible was apelike was incapable of definite proof in the absence of the crucial condylar region. (Courtesy of the British Museum [Natural History], London.) or persons (Weiner et al. 1953; Weiner 1955). Since then, the fame and significance of the Piltdown specimen have grown rather for what it is not than for what it is-and have been heightened by the fact that the perpetrator(s) of this forgery remain, as yet, unidentified. While this aspect of the Piltdown case is not without its fascination, it has nevertheless been allowed to obscure the value of the Piltdown episode as a case study in the history of science (d. Spencer, in press). Hence, the primary aim of this essay is to argue that this forgery must be understood in large part as the product of a clash-the 86 FRANK SPENCER roots ofwhich can be traced to the middle ofthe nineteenth century- between two rival factions in British science over the question of human origins and antiquity. Indeed, it was in the context of this burgeoning debate that evidence emerged which nurtured the expectation that the remains ofearly man would be found in southern.England, either in Kent or in Sussex. Thus the discovery of the Piltdown hominid in 1912 was not an entirely unexpected event. And contrary to popular belief, this event was not a practical joke that got out of hand, but rather a carefully orchestrated scenario designed to manipulate scientific opinion on the question of human antiquity. Although the details of that scenario will be elaborated elsewhere (cf. Spencer, in press), the present essay seeks to explain the particular configuration ofthe Piltdown assemblage, and to examine briefly the broader significance of the forgery in relation to the mainstream of paleoanthropological science during the first half of the twentieth century. The Discovery of Human Antiquity and the Problem of Tertiary Man The realization that the present biocultural state ofhumankind had involved a long and tortuous history was an idea that began to force...