Unraveling Piltdown

by John Evangelist Walsh

In 1913 amateur fossil hunter and archaeologist Charles Dawson found in a gravel pit the cranium and jaw of an entirely new species of humanoid, which became known as Piltdown man, which caused headlines worldwide as the missing link between man and ape. In 1952, it was exposed as a hoax. With eight pages of photos, this book is a wonderful detective story, and the first examination the convincingly fingers the perpetrator.

Genres: Science, History, Archaeology, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published August 27, 1996

About the author

John Evangelist Walsh was an American author, biographer, editor, historian and journalist. He was best known for leading a team of 7 editors tasked with creating a condensed version of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Reviews

[Richard Bartholomew · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Here is no cause for derisive accusation, as happens too often, no occasion for snide humor. The Piltdown fraud was nothing short of despicable, an ugly trick played by a warped and unscrupulous mind on unsuspecting scholars." So thunders the American author John Evangelist Walsh, whose mission in Unraveling Piltdown (or Unravelling Piltdown the UK edition) is twofold: to expose the perpetrator comprehensively once and for all, and to put to rest spurious accusations that have been made against various innocent parties in the decades since the hoax was discovered – most notably, allegations against the anatomist Arthur Keith, against the priest-philosopher and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and against the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Their common misfortune was to have had dealings with Charles Dawson, a solicitor and antiquarian living in Lewes in East Sussex who enjoyed the respect and friendship of prominent figures within the scientific establishment.

The background to the story of is well known: in 1912 Dawson wrote to his friend Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum, claiming to have in his possession fragments of an unusual fossil skull that had been discovered by workmen digging at a gravel pit at Barkham Manor, a site in East Sussex in a rural area close to Uckfield called Piltdown. Woodward and Dawson subsequently travelled together to the site, and during their own diggings Dawson apparently uncovered further fragments. The reassembled remains were presented to the world as "Piltdown Man" – a paleoanthropological discovery with huge implications for the history of human evolution, apparently indicating that increased brain capacity preceded other physical changes among early hominoids. Woodward would later call Piltdown "the most important event" of his life, and he spent his final year dictating a book on the subject that was published in 1948 as The Earliest Englishman. Two years later, fluorine absorption tests by Kevin Oakley proved that the skull was much younger than previously thought, and by 1953 further examination by Joseph Weiner established fraud rather than some mistake.

Dawson had died early in 1916, aged 52, but he was still well-remembered in Lewes when Weiner visited the town in 1953 in pursuit of his suspicions. He found that local opinion was that the discovery of fraud at Piltdown would be no great surprise, given Dawson's character. Dawson had used underhand means to secure the lease on the building that had until then housed the Sussex Archaeological Society, while the historian Louis Salzman accused him of sending anonymous postcards in a scheme to derail his admission into the Society of Antiquaries; the incident had occurred shortly after Salzman had penned a highly critical review of a book by Dawson about Hastings Castle, in which he accused Dawson of misreadings, mistranslations and inadequate referencing. Weiner also noted that Dawson had been associated with various other dubious "transitional" finds, listed by Walsh as "a boat that was half coracle and half canoe, a horseshoe that was both tied and nailed on, a Neolithic stone weapon with an unprecedented wooden haft, the first use of cast iron in Britain, a mammalian form between Ptychodus and Hybocladus, and an unusual Norman prick-spur".

One would have thought that this would have been a satisfactory explanation, but no fewer than 11 other individuals were later implicated as alternative suspects or as accomplices. Walsh works through the list methodically, giving chapter-length treatments to the three most prominent individuals and setting out the claims in detail.

Doyle, explains Walsh, had been accused by "an obscure academic named John Winslow", who in 1983 argued that as a spiritualist the writer had wanted to expose the scientific establishment. Doyle had the technical expertise to create credible fraudulent remains, and Dawson had visited his home in Crowborough to discuss fossils. Winslow also claimed to have identified obscure hints in Doyle's novel The Lost World.

Teilhard, meanwhile, had been involved at Piltdown as a volunteer digger, and he was present when Dawson supposedly produced fragments from out of a spoil pile. His guilt was suspected by Louis Leakey in the 1970s, on grounds that he never expanded on, and then a case was made against him by Stephen Jay Gould in 1980. Gould drew attention to a supposed "slip" found a letter written by Teilhard, and to the fact that despite his personal involvement he made little reference to the discovery in his subsequent writings and paleontological theorising. Oakley recalled that when Teilhard attended an exhibition at the Natural History Museum about the hoax in 1954, he had "glumly walked through as fast as he could, eyes averted, saying nothing".

Keith was identified as an accomplice in a work begun by an Australian science historian named Ian Langham and completed after his death by “an Englishman teaching at Long Island University” burdened with the name of Frank Spencer. Their book was published by the Oxford University Press in 1990, and their argument then supplemented by a South African anthropologist named Phillip V. Tobias in Current Anthropology. It was alleged that Keith seemed to know more about details than could have been the case had he not been party to the deception.

Walsh unpacks how in each instance the accusers engaged in wild speculation, misinterpreted events and misunderstood documents. In the case of Doyle, no plausible narrative of how he could have planted fake remains was provided, and if his purpose was to expose scientists then why did he not reveal the hoax himself? And as for Teilhard, his silence on Piltdown may well have been because he suspected fraud all along, but could not prove it, while his "glum" aspect at the exhibition reflected his pain at Dawson’s betrayal.

Walsh then circles back onto Dawson, critically surveying his antiquarian career and outlining a scenario in which the solicitor working alone is a perfectly adequate explanation. The man was a serial fabricator and plagiarist, through which he gained "public honors by election to scholarly bodies". We don’t know why he did it, but Walsh notes that his younger brother Trevor was a high-achieving military man who had received a peerage. Walsh also reflects on a particularly bizarre letter from 1907, in which Dawson claimed that while crossing the English Channel the year before he had witnessed a sea-serpent: "The loops were fully 8 feet high out of the water, and the length 60 to 70 feet at the smallest computation":

The mind of a lifelong dissembler—what makes it incline now to this elaborate deception, now to that smaller on—is mostly past fathoming. But in the case of Dawson's sea-serpent letter at least some part of the motivation may be glimpsed. Arrestingly, it betrays the forger's utter confidence in being able to manipulate, almost to play with, the susceptibilities of his old friend, the country’s leading expert in marine paleontology. The letter marks, perhaps, that moment in Dawson's life when he came to an overriding belief, no doubt to him quite thrilling, in his unlimited power to deceive.

An almost equally fascinating question as Dawson’s motivation is why this letter did not put Woodward on his guard when five years later Dawson wrote to him with another sensational claim. Walsh highlights how Woodward's discussions about Piltdown glossed over difficulties and vagaries, particularly as regards Dawson's claims to have found confirmatory fragments consistent with Piltdown at a second site, nearby at Sheffield Park. Woodward returned to the Piltdown pit almost every year for more than two decades after Dawson's death, and he spent "hundreds" of hours combing through gravel. Walsh suggests Woodward had secret doubts, and that his wasted efforts were "a dogged hunt for personal reassurance".

[Codenwarra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly researched book about the Piltdown fraud which exonerates some of the usual suspects through a careful consideration of who was where and when.

Much has been written on this case and some of the other material seems to suggest that an amateur cannot read and understand a scientific work as well as any person with formal qualifications. Others confuse dates, Walsh does not fall into these traps as far as I can tell, and shows how thin the cases against some of the suspects really were.

[Alison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got sucked into reading this pretty randomly, during a library inventory project. It gets a little bogged down toward the end, but I had a surprisingly hard time putting it down otherwise.

[Ardicehartry]

I read this book years ago and found it interesting. Paul and I were just talking about what leads one to commit scientific fraud ... so I thought I would reread it with that in mind.