The Discovery Of The Piltdown Man
By Sammy Beanard
According to the story that had so far been accepted, it all began in a quite commonplace fashion one summer day in 1908. A little man of 44 years, with curling moustaches and bowler hat, was walking quietly along a quiet road in the County of Sussex, in the neighbourhood of Uckfield. He had almost arrived at the village of Fletching and had just passed quite close to a farm belonging to the hamlet of Piltdown. He suddenly stopped, stepped back a few paces and reflected. He had just noticed that certain parts of the road had been repaired with small flat, reddish gravel which he did not know existed in that locality. Now Mr. Charles Dawson, a solicitor of Newhaven, was also a keen amateur in 'things of the past. He was interested in archeology and geology, and he had a very definite weakness for palaeontology. Always on the lookout for a discovery, he soon questioned the workmen and learned that the gravel came from a small quarry nearby; he asked if anyone had found any bones there and obtained a promise that if any should turn up he would be advised at once.
Soon the foreman in charge of the work on the farm (so the story goes) gave him a small fragment of a flat bone that was reddish like the gravel, so like the gravel in fact that one could well believe that the greater part of the Piltdown skull was lost simply because the rust had been so abundantly deposited as to make it practically impossible for a layman to distinguish between bone and gravel. It seemed, moreover, that the workmen had on one occasion broken 'a sort of large coconut', as one of them said, without having paid the least attention to it. The forger who had made the jawbone had known how to produce this reddish coloration with diabolical skill.
The bone which the foreman had just given Mr. Dawson was part of the cranium; it was a fragment of the left parietal, that is to say, a fragment of one of those two roughly rectangular bones which form the top of the head, stretching side by side between the forehead and the nape and fitting together with little pointed teeth in such a way as to trace a sinuous line the parietal join that separates the brain-pan into left and right halves.
After this first discovery, irresistibly drawn by the Piltdown gravel pits, Charles Dawson returned to them again and again. But for three years his tenacity went unrewarded. There was nothing to be found in the gravel. In 1911 he himself started to poke about in a small pile of gravel dumped beside the pit. He extracted from it another fragment of parietal bone. Here is a point which it is important to stress straight away : the two fragments of parietal bone were never found properly embedded in a particular geological layer; they were found among the material that had been excavated and this was the case with all the remains of the Piltdown man discovered thereafter. This was one of the principal arguments used by its adversaries in discussion concerning the fossil.
However, after this further discovery, Charles Dawson hesitated no longer. He contacted an expert at London's Natural History Museum, Professor Arthur Smith Woodward, the palaeontologist. The two of them engaged some workmen, obtained the necessary permission, and in the spring of 1912 began to search the little quarry carefully. They extracted several scraps of skull and the right half of a jaw-bone. Woodward at once undertook the complete reconstruction of the skull on the basis of the few fragments he possessed and found that the volume of the brain, at 1,070 c.c., was a little less than that of modern man. Here, therefore, was man's ideal ancestor: man at the dawn of humanity. For this reason Woodward named him Eoanthropus Damoni.
The volume of the brain is known to experts as 'cranial capacity' and is expressed in cubic centimetres. Generally, it is between 1,400 and 1,600 c.c. in men and between 1,300 and 1,450 c.c. in women. While stating the volume of the brain it gives at the same time some indication of the degree of intelligence, although many other facts also come into play. Nevertheless, if this cranial capacity makes a comparison between the ancestors of man, the men of to-day, and the larger apes possible, it cannot be used in comparisons between man and other animals since the size of the animal is then involved, a factor which may falsify the results.
However that may be, on December i8th, 1912, Smith Woodward and Charles Dawson made a resounding communication to the Geological Society of London and showed its members the various bones that had been extracted from the quarry. Feelings ran high in scientific circles and amongst the public. The more important newspapers seized upon the discovery, just as 40 years later they were to seize upon the fall of the Piltdown man. For in 1912 the matter was important to Englishmen. This was the first time a fossil ancestor of modern man had been discovered in England, while France, Germany and Belgium already had several such fossils. And this fossil, this ancient citizen of the British Isles, provided (or so most people thought) a very fine missing-link between apes and man, but with an ape's jaw he had just upset all the accepted ideas of 50 years concerning human evolution. The affair became a sensation. Tourists flocked to Piltdown and the local inn which had changed its commonplace sign of The lamb for one with much greater publicity value, The Piltdown Man did a lot of trade.
But the great quarrel of the Piltdown man had only just begun. The French, proud of having seen the birth of the science of prehistory on their own soil, and the Americans, who, in default of possessing any venerable prehuman remains at home, were already taking an interest in Western Europe, at once took up a position opposed to the English. For them the matter was not in doubt: bones of two different individuals (by the greatest chance, certainly!) happened to be found so close together that they were mistaken for parts of the skeleton of one individual. Unfortunately the same coincidence was to be repeated in 1915, when Dawson found, about two miles from the first quarry, a few pieces of skull and a lower molar. Luck was playing a big part. So this last discovery served to convince the majority of American scientists and to sow doubt in the minds of the French, the more so because, until very recently, despite our palaeontological knowledge, the presence of an ape in England 50,000 years before our era could not be properly explained. And for a very good reason, since the said ape should not have come to England, even as a skeleton, until the beginning of the present century.
For 40 years the quarrel was to continue, giving rise to nearly 300 papers and sometimes involving violent quarrels between experts. One American anthropologist is reported to have said one day that two men who were not among his friends were the Piltdown man! Apart from the petty rivalries of national pride, what was in fact the change that the Piltdown 'discovery' brought to prehistory?
About the author
Sammy is constantly researching interesting information and writing articles to make it easy for his readers to understand different issues.
Check out what he has to say about people search and address sites, and find people by number sites. from http://www.FreeArticlesAndContent.com
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