or not Reverend Turk made a pilgrimage to Newell’s farm, we don’t know; but it would be safe to assume that when he heard about this giant in the earth he fairly quivered with satisfaction. How vindicated he must have felt. How joyous. How proud. Maybe a little complacent. Even a bit pontifical. If only we knew what he said to the diabolic cigar manufacturer.
And when Hull at last decided to crucify the gullible pastor, how did Reverend Turk respond? Did he pray? Did he forgive? Did he foam at the mouth? Furthermore, one can’t help wondering if the experience taught him anything. Probably not. Fundamentalists are apt to be so fundamental.
More sophisticated, more enigmatic, and infinitely more knowledgeable than our cranky American atheist was the British sponsor of Piltdown Man—that veritable missing link with a human cranium and the jaw of an ape.
“Several years ago I was walking along a farm-road close to Piltdown Common, Fletching, when I noticed that the road had been mended with some peculiar brown flints not usual in the district. On enquiry I was astonished to learn that they were dug from a gravel-bed on the farm, and shortly afterwards I visited the place, where two labourers were at work. . . .”
So begins the account of Mr. Charles Dawson, a rotund Uckfield lawyer and amateur antiquarian who discovered the famous skull. He told his story in 1912 at a meeting of the London Geological Society, to which he had been invited by Dr. Arthur Smith-Woodward of the British Museum, and his remarks later were printed in the society’s journal. Several renowned scientists were present when Dawson spoke, and for many years a painting titled Discussing the Piltdown Man hung on the staircase of the society’s headquarters.
Dawson said that after coming upon fragments of a skullcap he got in touch with Smith-Woodward, who examined the bones and considered them so important that he joined the search. Together they turned up quite a lot. According to Dawson: “Besides the human remains, we found two small broken pieces of a molar tooth of a rather early Pliocene type of elephant, also a much-rolled cusp of a molar of Mastodon, portions of two teeth of Hippopotamus, and two molar teeth of a Pleistocene beaver.”
From an adjacent field they recovered bits of deer antler and the tooth of a Pleistocene horse. All the specimens, including those of Piltdown Man, were highly mineralized with iron oxide.
The Piltdown cranium did not quite fit the Piltdown jaw, which made a few scientists uneasy. Yet they had been excavated at the same level, and despite the apelike lower jaw the molars were flat, indicating that the jaw worked with an acceptably human rotary motion. Then too, it would be exceedingly strange if, side by side, a prehistoric man had left only his skullcap while a prehistoric ape left only its jaw. Therefore they must belong to the same beast.
So excited was Dr. Smith-Woodward that he built a little house near the gravel bed, and when visitors arrived he could talk about nothing else.
A few more specimens were picked up: small bones from the nasal bridge and some delicate turbinal bones which support the membrane inside the nasal cavity. These turbinal bones were quite fragile; they fell apart when lifted out, but the shards were collected and glued together. And one hot August day Father Teilhard de Chardin, who had become interested in the project, was seated on a dump heap beside the pit idly running his fingers through the gravel when he noticed a canine tooth.
This tooth caused further debate at the Geological Society. It was very large, perhaps too large, and it appeared to be the tooth of a relatively old man whereas the jaw was that of a young man. Did this tooth come from another skull?
Piltdown Man eventually was accepted by English scientists, not without discomfort, as certain applicants for a social club may be accepted; but among friends and relatives, so to speak, he was admitted to the evolutionary tree. Elsewhere his credentials were not approved. Giuffrida-Ruggeri in Italy, Mollison in Germany, and Boule in France all thought the jaw belonged to an ape. American experts, too, looked skeptically at the reconstruction.
Against their doubts stood the simple argument of the discovery: fossil remains taken from Pleistocene gravel, much of it excavated under the meticulous supervision of Dr. Smith-Woodward of the British Museum.
Year after year the dispute simmered.
Then in 1953 the skull got a new custodian, Dr. Kenneth Oakley, who subjected it to a fluorine test. Buried bones gradually absorb fluorine from water in the earth; the longer the burial, the more fluorine.
Results of Oakley’s tests were astonishing and puzzling. On the basis of fluorine content the jaw and skullcap did indeed belong together, yet they held less fluorine than animal bones taken from the same stratum. The contradiction so exasperated Dr. Oakley that he abruptly told a colleague: “This thing is bogus!” But his intuitive thrust was ignored, perhaps because the skull had been in the museum such a long time—almost forty years. One hesitates to denounce an old acquaintance.
A few months later an Oxford anthropologist named J. S. Weiner was driving home at night when he clearly understood that Piltdown Man was a fake. And it is curious how often an insight such as Weiner’s is accompanied by actual physical movement. The astronomer Kepler, while drawing a figure on the blackboard for his students, was seized by an idea which led to our modern concept of the universe. The mathematician Poincaré reported that just as he was getting aboard an omnibus, just as his foot touched the step, a brilliant realization unfolded: “that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.” Beethoven, writing to his friend Tobias von Haslinger: “On my way to Vienna yesterday, sleep overtook me in my carriage. . . . Now during my sleep-journey, the following canon came into my head. . . .” A. E. Houseman: “Two of the stanzas . . . came into my head, just as they are printed, while I was crossing Hampstead Heath. . . .” And we have the testimony of Bertrand Russell who says that while walking toward Cambridge, capriciously tossing a tin of pipe tobacco and catching it—at the exact instant a ray of sunlight reflected from the metal surface of the tin he understood the basis of a certain philosophical argument. Goethe, too, experienced a swift flowering of knowledge while out for a walk, just as he noticed the whitened skull of a sheep on a hillside.
So it happened with the anthropologist, driving alone at night from London.
Weiner mentioned his startling thought to Sir Wilfred Le Gros Clark at Oxford. Then he took a chimpanzee jaw and spent a while filing down the molars. He was surprised by how quickly the teeth could be redesigned to look like human teeth. He dipped the chimp’s jaw in permanganate until it acquired a suitable brownish hue and when it was dry he laid his new fossil on the desk of Le Gros Clark. He is said to have remarked with a look of innocence: “I got this out of the collections. What do you suppose it is?” And Sir Wilfrid, who knew immediately, exclaimed: “You can’t mean it!”
They decided to have a conference with Oakley.
Soon after that conference Piltdown Man started falling apart. Those distinctively human molars had been artificially flattened; close inspection revealed that their surfaces were not quite on the same plane, as though the counterfeiter had altered his grip when he moved from one tooth to the next. The delicate turbinal bones were not what previous investigators had presumed them to be; they were merely a few bone splinters of indeterminate origin. The canine tooth found by Teilhard de Chardin was X-rayed and discovered to be a young tooth that had been ground down until the pulp chamber was almost exposed, which would not happen to a living tooth.
New chemical tests showed a nitrogen concentration of 3.9 percent in the jaw, 1.4 percent in the skullcap. There was also, on this occasion, a discrepancy in the fluorine content.
Details were noticed that should have been noticed earlier. Stone “tools” from the pit had been superficially stained with iron salts—except for
