The Panda’s Thumb (12 page)

Moreover, had anyone been inclined to pursue the matter, there were published grounds for suspecting fraud from the start. A dental anatomist, C.W. Lyne, stated that the canine found by Teilhard was a young tooth, just erupted before Pilldown's death, and that its intensity of wear could not be reconciled with its age. Others voiced strong doubts about the ancient manufacture of Piltdown's tools. In amateur circles of Sussex, some of Dawson's colleagues concluded that Piltdown must be a fake, but they did not publish their beliefs.

If we are to learn anything about the nature of scientific inquiry from Piltdown—rather than just reveling in the joys of gossip—we will have to resolve the paradox of its easy acceptance. I think that I can identify at least four categories of reasons for the ready welcome accorded to such a misfit by all the greatest English paleontologists. All four contravene the usual mythology about scientific practice—that facts are “hard” and primary and that scientific understanding increases by patient collection and sifting of these objective bits of pure information. Instead, they display science as a human activity, motivated by hope, cultural prejudice, and the pursuit of glory, yet stumbling in its erratic path toward a better understanding of nature.

The imposition of strong hope upon dubious evidence
. Before Piltdown, English paleoanthropology was mired in a limbo now occupied by students of extraterrestrial life: endless fields for speculation and no direct evidence. Beyond some flint “cultures” of doubtful human workmanship and some bones strongly suspected as products of recent interments into ancient gravels, England knew nothing of its most ancient ancestors. France, on the other hand, had been blessed with a superabundance of Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons and their associated art and tools. French anthropologists delighted in rubbing English noses with this marked disparity of evidence. Piltdown could not have been better designed to turn the tables. It seemed to predate Neanderthal by a considerable stretch of time. If human fossils had a fully modern cranium hundreds of thousands of years before beetle-browed Neanderthal appeared, then Piltdown must be our ancestor and the French Neanderthals a side branch. Smith Woodward proclaimed: “The Neanderthal race was a degenerate offshoot of early man while surviving modern man may have arisen directly from the primitive source of which the Piltdown skull provides the first discovered evidence.” This international rivalry has often been mentioned by Piltdown's commentators, but a variety of equally important factors have usually escaped notice.

Reduction of anomaly by fit with cultural biases
. A human cranium with an ape's jaw strikes us today as sufficiently incongruous to merit strong suspicion. Not so in 1913. At that time, many leading paleontologists maintained an a priori preference largely cultural in origin, for “brain primacy” in human evolution. The argument rested on a false inference from contemporary importance to historical priority: we rule today by virtue of our intelligence. Therefore, in our evolution, an enlarged brain must have preceded and inspired all other alterations of our body. We should expect to find human ancestors with enlarged, perhaps nearly modern, brains and a distinctly simian body. (Ironically, nature followed an opposite path. Our earliest ancestors, the australopithecines, were fully erect but still small brained.) Thus, Piltdown neatly matched a widely anticipated result. Grafton Elliot Smith wrote in 1924:

Piltdown also buttressed some all too familiar racial views among white Europeans. In the 1930s and 1940s, following the discovery of Peking man in strata approximately equal in age with the Piltdown gravels, phyletic trees based on Piltdown and affirming the antiquity of white supremacy began to appear in the literature (although they were never adopted by Piltdown's chief champions, Smith Woodward, Smith, and Keith). Peking man (originally called
Sinanthropus
, but now placed in
Homo erectus
) lived in China with a brain two-thirds modern size, while Piltdown man, with its fully developed brain, inhabited England. If Piltdown, as the earliest Englishman, was the progenitor of white races, while other hues must trace their ancestry to
Homo erectus
, then whites crossed the threshold to full humanity long before other people. As longer residents in this exalted state, whites must excel in the arts of civilization.

Reduction of anomaly by matching fact to expectation
. We know, in retrospect, that Piltdown had a human cranium and an ape's jaw. As such, it provides an ideal opportunity for testing what scientists do when faced with uncomfortable anomaly. G.E. Smith and others may have advocated an evolutionary head start for the brain, but no one dreamed of an independence so complete that brains might become fully human before jaws changed at all! Piltdown was distressingly too good to be true.

If Keith was right in his taunt to Weidenreich, then Piltdown's champions should have modeled their theories to the uncomfortable fact of a human cranium and an ape's jaw. Instead, they modeled the “facts”—another illustration that information always reaches us through the strong filters of culture, hope, and expectation. As a persistent theme in “pure” description of the Piltdown remains, we learn from all its major supporters that the skull, although remarkably modern, contains a suite of definitely simian characters! Smith Woodward, in fact, originally estimated the cranial capacity at a mere 1,070 cc (compared with a modern average of 1,400 to 1,500), although Keith later convinced him to raise the figure nearer to the low end of our modern spectrum. Grafton Elliot Smith, describing the brain cast in the original paper of 1913, found unmistakable signs of incipient expansion in areas that mark the higher mental faculties in modern brains. He concluded: “We must regard this as being the most primitive and most simian human brain so far recorded; one, moreover, such as might reasonably have been expected to be associated in one and the same individual with the mandible which so definitely indicates the zoological rank of its original possessor.” Just a year before Oakley's revelation, Sir Arthur Keith wrote in his last major work (1948): “His forehead was like that of the orang. devoid of a supraorbital torus; in its modeling his frontal bone presented many points of resemblance to that of the orang of Borneo and Sumatra.” Modern
Homo sapiens
, I hasten to add, also lacks a supraorbital torus, or brow ridge.

Careful examination of the jaw also revealed a set of remarkably human features for such an apish jaw (beyond the forged wear of the teeth). Sir Arthur Keith repeatedly emphasized, for example, that the teeth were inserted into the jaw in a human, rather than a simian, fashion.

Prevention of discovery by practice
. In former years, the British Museum did not occupy the vanguard in maintaining open and accessible collections—a happy trend of recent years, and one that has helped to lift the odor of mustiness (literally and figuratively) from major research museums. Like the stereotype of a librarian who protects books by guarding them from use, Piltdown's keepers severely restricted access to the original bones. Researchers were often permitted to look but not touch; only the set of plaster casts could be handled. Everyone praised the casts for their accuracy of proportion and detail, but the detection of fraud required access to the originals—artificial staining and wear of teeth cannot be discovered in plaster. Louis Leakey writes in his autobiography:

Henry Fairfield Osborn, although not known as a generous man, paid almost obsequious homage to Smith Woodward in his treatise on the historical path of human progress,
Man Rises to Parnassus
(1927). He had been a skeptic before his visit to the British Museum in 1921. Then, on Sunday morning, July 24, “after attending a most memorable service in Westminster Abbey,” Osborn “repaired to the British Museum to see the fossil remains of the now thoroughly vindicated Dawn Man of Great Britain.” (He, at least, as head of the American Museum of Natural History, got to see the originals.) Osborn swiftly converted and proclaimed Piltdown “a discovery of transcendent importance to the prehistory of man.” He then added: “We have to be reminded over and over again that Nature is full of paradoxes and that the order of the universe is not the human order.” Yet Osborn had seen little but the human order on two levels—the comedy of fraud and the subtler, yet ineluctable, imposition of theory upon nature. Somehow, I am not distressed that the human order must veil all our interactions with the universe, for the veil is translucent, however strong its texture.

Postscript

Our fascination with Piltdown never seems to abate. This article, published originally in March, 1979, elicited a flurry of correspondence, some acerbic, some congratulatory. It centered, of course, upon Teilhard. I was not trying to be cute by writing at length about Teilhard while stating briefly that Dawson acting alone accounts best for the facts. The case against Dawson had been made admirably by Weiner, and I had nothing to add to it. I continued to regard Weiner's as the most probable hypothesis. But I also believed that the only reasonable alternative (since the second Piltdown site established Dawson's complicity in my view) was a coconspiracy—an accomplice for Dawson. The other current proposals, involving Sollas or even G.E. Smith himself, seemed to me so improbable or off-the-wall that I wondered why so little attention had focussed upon the only recognized scientist who had been with Dawson from the start—especially since several of Teilhard's prominent colleagues in vertebrate paleontology harbored private thoughts (or had made cryptically worded public statements) about his possible role.

Ashley Montagu wrote on December 3, 1979, and told me that he had broken the news to Teilhard himself after Oakley's revelation of the fraud—and that Teilhard's astonishment seemed too genuine to represent dissembling: “I feel sure you're wrong about Teilhard. I knew him well, and, in fact, was the first to tell him, the day after it was announced in
The New York Times
, of the hoax. His reaction could hardly have been faked. I have not the slightest doubt that the faker was Dawson.” In Paris last September, I spoke with several of Teilhard's contemporaries and scientific colleagues, including Pierre P. Grassé and Jean Piveteau; all regarded any thought of his complicity as monstrous. Père Francois Russo, S.J., later sent me a copy of the letter that Teilhard wrote to Kenneth P. Oakley after Oakley had exposed the fraud. He hoped that this document would assuage my doubts about his coreligionist. Instead my doubts intensified; for, in this letter, Teilhard made a fatal slip. Intrigued by my new role as sleuth, I visited Kenneth Oakley in England on April 16, 1980. He showed me additional documents of Teilhard, and shared other doubts with me. I now believe that the balance of evidence clearly implicates Teilhard as a coconspirator with Dawson in the Piltdown plot. I will present the entire case in Natural History Magazine in the summer or fall of 1980; but for now, let me mention the internal evidence from Teilhard's first letter to Oakley alone.

Teilhard begins the letter by expressing satisfaction. “I congratulate you most sincerely on your solution of the Piltdown problem…I am fundamentally pleased by your conclusions, in spite of the fact that, sentimentally speaking, it spoils one of my brightest and earliest paleontological memories.” He continues with his thoughts on “the psychological riddle,” or whodunit, he agrees with all others in dismissing Smith Woodward, but he also refuses to implicate Dawson, citing his thorough knowledge of Dawson's character and abilities: “He was a methodical and enthusiastic character…In addition, his deep friendship for Sir Arthur makes it almost unthinkable that he should have systematically deceived his associate several years. When we were in the field, I never noticed anything suspicious in his behavior.” Teilhard ends by proposing, halfheartedly by his own admission, that the whole affair might have been an accident engendered when an amateur collector threw out some ape bones onto a spoil heap that also contained some human skull fragments, (although Teilhard does not tell us how such a hypothesis could possibly account for the same association two miles away at the second Piltdown site).