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Overview
Piltdown. Even today the name sends a shiver down the collective spine of the scientific community, for this was the most dramatic and daring fraud ever perpetrated upon the world of science and academia. Between 1908 and 1912, a series of amazing discoveries relating to what appeared to be the earliest human were made close to the little village of Piltdown in Sussex. These remains belonged to the developmental 'missing link' between man and ape. The basic principles of evolution, first propounded by Charles Darwin some fifty years before, now appeared as indisputable fact. The Manchester Guardian ran the first headline: 'THE EARLIEST MAN?: REMARKABLE DISCOVERY IN SUSSEX. A SKULL MILLIONS OF YEARS OLD' it screamed, adding that the discovery was 'one of the most important of our time'. The news spread quickly around the world, with many voicing their eagerness to examine the find. Few archaeological discoveries have the capacity to be front-page news twice over, but 'Piltdown Man' is a rare exception. Forty-one years after he first became famous, the 'Earliest Englishman' was again hot news. It was late November 1953, and the world was about to discover that Piltdown Man had been a hoax. Not just any hoax mind, the London Star declared it to be 'THE BIGGEST SCIENTIFIC HOAX OF THE CENTURY'.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752487809 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 05/30/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 12 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Piltdown Man Hoax
Case Closed
By Miles Russell
The History Press
Copyright © 2012 Miles RussellAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-8780-9
CHAPTER 1
PHASE 1
A SPLENDID FELLOW
We do not know exactly at what point Charles Dawson was seduced by the idea of forgery, but it is clear that the first evidence of fraud comes with one of the earliest of his discoveries.
The Fossil
Dawson had been an avid collector of fossils from a very young age, gathering specimens from the cliffs and quarries close to the family home in Hastings. In many of these formative searches, Dawson had been encouraged by Samuel Husbands Beckles, a Fellow of the Royal Society and a distinguished geologist, then in his twilight years. Beckles, who as a lawyer may well have known Dawson's father Hugh, had lived in St Leonards-on-Sea since his retirement in 1845. He spent much of his time exploring the fossiliferous outcrops of Sussex and Hampshire, being credited as the first to recognise dinosaur footprints on the Isle of Wight. He discovered a number of dinosaur species new to science, including a small herbivore, named Echinodon becklesii in his honour, and a bipedal carnivore named (much later) as Becklespinax. By the time of his death, in 1890, he had amassed a huge collection of fossils, including a significant number retrieved from 'Beckles' Pit', a 600m2 excavation into the rocks of Durlston Bay in Dorset that he had overseen throughout 1857.
Together, the two men, Dawson and Beckles, collected an impressive array of fossils, the prize of which, noted as the 'finest extant example' of ganoid (plated) fish Lepidotus mantelli, was donated to the Natural History Museum in 1884. Other discoveries followed, including three new species of dinosaur, one of which was named Iguanodon dawsoni after the young solicitor by the palaeontologist Richard Lydekker, and a new form of fossil plant, later named Salaginella dawsoni. Under Beckles' apprenticeship, the 20-year-old Dawson was getting himself noticed. In gratitude for the burgeoning archive of dinosaur remains, the Natural History Museum conferred upon Dawson the title of 'honorary collector' and in 1885, thanks to his new circle of scientific friends, he was put forward and elected a Fellow of the Geological Society.
There is nothing overtly suspicious about the majority of Dawson's fossil discoveries, in fact specimens such as Lepidotus, Salaginella and Iguanodon are exactly the sort of things that a determined amateur palaeontologist feverishly searching the quarries of East Sussex would, during the latter years of the nineteenth century, be expected to find. Neither is there any doubt concerning the integrity of Samuel Beckles whose collection was donated to the Natural History Museum following his death in 1890. It was in the months following the passing of this great amateur palaeontologist, however, that Dawson's alternative career in deception took its first faltering steps.
As a solicitor with a passion for fossil remains and a close personal friend of the late Samuel Husbands Beckles, Charles Dawson was the perfect choice to sort, catalogue and record the collector's archive prior to its deposition in the Natural History Museum. In fact, Arthur Smith Woodward, then an assistant curator at the museum, observed that the young man 'gave much help to the British [Natural History] Museum in labelling the collection of Wealden fossils which was acquired from that gentleman's executors'. Not all the finds, however, made it to the stores of the London museum, some remaining (largely unlabelled and lacking full documentation) in Dawson's hands, finally ending up in the stores of the Hastings and St Leonards Museum. Dawson, it would seem, was reluctant to hand over all of the Beckles collection. Perhaps he kept some fossils as a keepsake to remind him of his erstwhile friend, or perhaps he felt that, as joint finder, he deserved to retain some of the pieces. Perhaps he believed that the more local Hastings institution deserved some of the collection for the purposes of display and research. Perhaps there was a more sinister motive behind the retention of specific artefacts.
Late in November 1891, Arthur Smith Woodward presented a paper concerning an exciting new fossil discovery before the Zoological Society of London. The find, a single tooth, was potentially earth shattering, as it seemed to provide the first evidence of a 'European Cretaceous Mammal': an important missing link in the history of life on earth. The tooth had been found, Woodward reported, by 'Mr Charles Dawson of Uckfield, in an irregular mass of communated fish and reptile bones, with scales and teeth' from a quarry near Hastings. Undeterred that the precise location, date and circumstances of the tooth's discovery were vague, Woodward observed that its size, when combined with the shape of the crown, strongly suggested that the fossil had derived from a wholly new species of the mammal order Multituberculata. This new species could, Woodward suggested, until the acquisition of further material 'bear the provisional name of Plagiaulax dawsoni, in honour of its discoverer'.
The order Multituberculata first appeared in the Jurassic period, between 206 and 144 million years ago, being at their most diverse and widespread during the late Cretaceous. Multituberculates do not belong to any of the groups of mammals alive today. They were small and hairy in appearance, their pelvic anatomy suggesting that they gave birth to tiny, marsupial-like young. The final lower premolars of most Multituberculates formed enlarged, serrated blades, such teeth often being described as 'plagiaulacoid' after the Mesozoic Multituberculate genus Plagiaulax.
The tooth that Dawson had presented to Woodward was larger than any known example of the genus Plagiaulax. It was also far more abraded than was common, Woodward observing the extraordinary amount of wear 'to which the crown has been subjected', having lost nearly all of its enamel. It was the patterning of wear that most seemed to perplex the young geologist, especially as the abrasion had not been produced 'entirely by an upward and downward or antero-posterior motion, of which the jaws of the know Multituberculata seem have been alone capable'. Any doubts concerning the antiquity of the abrasion were dispelled by Woodward, however, who noted that when he had first received it, the fossil had been so firmly embedded within its soil matrix that only long and diligent work by the technicians of the British Museum laboratory could satisfactorily detach it.
We now know, however, that the 'discovery' was in fact nothing of the sort; careful examination of the tooth showing that the side-to-side abrasion sustained, which Woodward noted as being otherwise unknown in the natural wear of this order of ancient mammal, is wholly artificial. Such damage, which had eroded the crown and much of the original enamel, could only have occurred through a programme of extensive and prolonged post-mortem rubbing with an iron file. In short, Plagiaulax dawsoni was a fake.
Quite why Dawson moved from 'honorary collector' and supplier of genuine finds to master forger it is impossible to say. Perhaps time spent fossil hunting in the quarries of east Sussex was not producing sufficient rewards; perhaps the process was simply taking too long or was losing its appeal (Dawson's spare time increasingly being taken up with his career and other interests); perhaps he just craved greater academic recognition? For whatever reason, at some point in 1891, Charles Dawson made the decision to gently manipulate existing geological data. He created a fraud.
Doctoring a Plagiaulacoid tooth taken, in all probability, from the extensive collection of his late colleague Samuel Beckles, Dawson filed down the crown, eroding much of the enamel in the process, and, in doing so, manufactured evidence for a wholly new species. Interestingly, although the find was only small, Dawson had hit upon the best way of increasing artefact significance and generating academic interest: he had created a 'missing-link' or transitional form, in this case between 'terrible lizard' and mammal. Transitional forms were later to play a prominent part in his antiquarian career, culminating, of course, with the missing link between ape and man that Piltdown so clearly represented. Plagiaulax dawsoni, however, was in retrospect a basic and fairly clumsy fraud, and anyone with access to a microscope and a degree of scepticism could easily have spotted it. At the time of its announcement, though, no one in the scientific community doubted its authenticity, especially as Dawson had gone to extreme lengths to ensure that the tooth was apparently still embedded in soil at the time it was donated to the Natural History Museum.
Dawson had, in the fabrication of wear patterns across the fossil tooth, also established a second vital aspect of establishing credibility, something which would become a key part of his modus operandi: the academic dupe. An academic or expert dupe was one who was unaware of a particular fraud, but who was only too happy to witness and verify it (therefore also indirectly verifying the reliabilty of the 'finder'). Establishing an unwitting dupe early on in the 'discovery' process not only helped increase the perceived authenticity of an object, making it more difficult to doubt or discredit, but it also confirmed both identification and attribution in a way that was acceptable to the wider scientific community.
In the case of Plagiaulax dawsoni, the solicitor from Sussex had found the first of a number of unwitting (and totally willing) victims: Arthur Smith Woodward. Woodward had no reason to doubt the word of Dawson, but neither did he fully investigate the nature of the 'find' nor interrogate the circumstances of its 'discovery'. His failure to spot the blatantly artificial wear patterns on the surface of the fossil tooth is forgivable, given that Dawson was both an enthusiastic fossil hunter and a man of the law, but his unambiguous acceptance and enthusiastic support of the forgery was something that Dawson would use again and again, to ever-greater success, most notably when it came to the fabrication of Piltdown Man.
Dawson's path to infamy had begun.
The Caves
Plagiaulax dawsoni had created a small amount of interest, further establishing Charles Dawson's credentials as a fossil hunter and amateur scientist of note (and providing another example of a species named after him), but, in the wider academic and antiquarian world, it was still small beer.
In the years that followed 1891, Dawson sporadically continued his fossil hunting expeditions, but prolonged work in the field of palaeontology ultimately left him little scope to improve his academic and scientific standing. He needed to diversify; to set his sights upon new targets; new areas of potential. Shortly after the formal identification of Plagiaulax dawsoni, Dawson switched his attention to the antiquities of man.
In 1892 he joined the Sussex Archaeological Society, becoming honorary local secretary for Uckfield, and began his own archaeological examination of Castle Hill in Hastings, the exact details of which remain frustratingly vague. It seems that the results of this phase of work were not quite to Dawson's liking, the finds not up to his high level of expectation. The excavations did, however, provide him with the opportunity to gain valuable fieldwork experience and to hone his craft as an antiquarian. Now he was ready to work upon sites which were more likely to produce results of the sort that he needed to advance his academic standing. In 1893 he commenced the exploration and examination of a series of tunnels, the first of which were the Lavant Caves, near Chichester, followed soon after by the Medieval passageways beneath Hastings Castle.
In 1916, the antiquarian Hadrian Allcroft wrote in angry terms concerning the archaeological investigation of the Lavant Caves, to the north of Chichester in Sussex, singling out Charles Dawson for particular abuse. 'The skill of a north-country miner,' Allcroft raged in the pages of the Sussex Archaeological Collections, 'would have dealt easily with the matter at the outset, and enabled the whole area to be cleared, searched and planned. As it is, the Caves, it is to be feared, are now lost for all time, and their secrets with them, while even the few "finds" are difficult of access to the majority'.
The main reason for Allcroft's displeasure was that, two decades after the site had been dug, the results remained unpublished and largely unknown. To make matters worse, the artefacts deriving from the dig had been dispersed whilst the caves themselves had been sealed, due to the threatened collapse of the roof, something that emphatically prevented any further investigation. Attempting to compile what little was known about the site, Allcroft complained bitterly that he had faced 'the greatest of difficulty in ascertaining something of the facts'.
What information we do have today concerning the investigation of the Lavant Caves in 1893 comes from secondary sources, primarily from observations made by visitors to the site. As far as we can tell, Dawson only publically discussed his work at Lavant once, in a paper presented to a meeting of the Sussex Archaeological Society in August 1893. Some details of the lecture were reported shortly after in the Sussex Daily News and Dawson himself supplied some detail to George Clinch, who used it in his chapter on 'Early Man' in the first volume of the Victoria County History of Sussex.
According to Allcroft, using information culled from Dawson's original lecture, the existence of a network of tunnels at Lavant had for years prior to 1890 been suspected due to the refusal of livestock 'to draw the ploughs over the thin roof of chalk which concealed the Caves'. Confirmation of the presence of underground workings came in around 1890 when an unnamed shepherd lost two hurdles he had been carrying through an opening in the roof of the buried feature. Realising the potential significance of the find, the landowner, the 6th Duke of Richmond, forced a brick and mortar stairway into the caves and commissioned two members of the Sussex Archaeological Society, Charles Dawson and John Lewis, to conduct further investigations.
Quite how and why Dawson got the commission, especially as his work to date had been primarily examining the geology and fossils of the Hastings area, is unclear. By 1893 Dawson was, however the honorary secretary of the Sussex Archaeological Society for Uckfield and he had already represented the organisation at the Congress of Archaeological Societies. Perhaps, as one of the up and coming new members of the society, he was simply the logical (or most available) choice. John Sawyer, commenting on the excavation of the caves in the July 1893 edition of The Antiquary notes enigmatically that Dawson had a 'penchant for explorations of this kind', whilst Lewis had apparently 'done some good work in the same line, especially in India'.
Little is really known about Dawson's collaborator in the project, John Lewis. His 1896 certificate of candidature for election to Fellowship of the Society of Antiquaries, following his collaboration with Dawson at Hastings and Lavant, notes his occupation as 'retired CE, formerly in the service of the Indian Government', his qualification being as a result of 'archaeological research in India and England'. The exact nature of this earlier work is unknown though the 'CE' in his application was probably an abbreviation for civil engineer, and it is known that a 'John Lewis' was employed as a permanent way inspector on the civil engineering staff of the North, and East, Bengal State Railways until 1893. It would seem likely, therefore, that the two Lewises were in reality the same, especially as 1893, the year that the Lewis employed by the North, and East, Bengal State Railways retired, was also the same year that the John Lewis 'formerly in the service of the Indian Government' came to work in the Lavant Caves with Charles Dawson. Dawson later thanked Lewis for providing plans of the Uckfield gas borings, so perhaps, in the capacity of 'CE', Lewis had already put his experience on the Indian railway to work in a similar field on his return to England. If he was indeed an experienced civil engineer, then Lewis would certainly have been an invaluable asset to Dawson in his clearance and recording of the Lavant Caves.
The presumption at the start of work was that the Lavant Caves represented a form of prehistoric flint extraction pit. Flint mines were, by the end of the nineteenth century, hot news as early archaeologists struggled to expose the full antiquity of human endeavour. Between 1868 and 1870, Cannon William Greenwell oversaw the first full excavation of a flint mineshaft in Britain, at Grimes Graves in Norfolk, to a depth of some 12m. The shaft had cut through and exploited three horizontal seams of subterranean flint, classified by Greenwell as the 'topstone', 'wallstone' and 'floorstone'. The 'floorstone' deposits at the base of the shaft represented the good quality flint that was so extensively exploited by Neolithic miners through the cutting of radiating galleries. Greenwell's work in Norfolk kindled huge interest in prehistoric mine sites, especially those detected in Sussex. In 1873 Ernest Willett began work at Cissbury, to the north of Worthing, where he traced a Neolithic shaft to its full depth of 4.2m. After Willett came Plumpton Tindall, Colonel Augustus Lane Fox, J. Park Harrison, Professor George Rolleston and Sir Alexander Gordon, all of whom opened new areas across the chalk hill of Cissbury between 1873 and 1878.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Piltdown Man Hoax by Miles Russell. Copyright © 2012 Miles Russell. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title,Acknowledgements,
Preface,
Introduction,
The Man,
The Hoax,
Phase 1: A Splendid Fellow,
The Fossil,
The Caves,
The Dungeon,
The Axe,
The Boat,
The Statuette,
The Horseshoe,
The Spur,
The Hammer,
The Hoard,
The Vase,
The House,
The Bricks,
Phase 2: A Man of Articles,
The Papers,
The Book,
Phase 3: A Curious Mind,
The Toad,
The Serpent,
The New Man,
Phase 4: The Big Discovery,
The Ape Man,
The Ape Men,
Dealing with Suspicion,
The Flint,
The Map,
The Bone,
Postscript,
Further Reading,
Plates,
Copyright,