Excerpts from
Dragon Bones: The Story of Peking Man (2000)
by Penny van Oosterzee
In the history of the study of human evolution there is a series of associations that have become fixed. Pithecanthropus erectus from Java and his discoverer Eugene Dubois; Raymond Dart and Australopithecus africanus from southern Africa; Louis Leakey with east African Homo habilis. If there is one name associated with the discovery of Peking Man, Sinanthropus pekinensis, it is Davidson Black . . .
In 1906, at the age of 22, Black became a doctor and, with the letters M. D. after his name, promptly decided that medicine as a career did not appeal to him after all. He returned to the University to study his first love, biology, reversing the order in which arts and medicine is usually taken and receiving a Bachelor of Arts (in Biology) in 1909. That same year he accepted a lectureship in the department of anatomy at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He still spent his summer holidays doing fieldwork in outback Canada, by now a competent amateur geologist, a topic he studied in his spare time . . .
His most exacting studies, however, were in human anatomy and in neuroanatomy. In 1914, Davidson Black travelled abroad to study neuroanatomy with the famous Australian, Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, who was working in England. At the time, Smith was working on the reconstruction of the newly found Piltdown Man, another contender for the title of ‘missing link’. Smith was studying the pattern of the brain on the inside of the skull and, for the purposes of comparison, had collected casts of all the known fossil human skulls. This work aroused a much greater interest in Davidson Black than the brains of the lungfish that Smith was trying to persuade him to study.
Black was captivated with the problems of human evolution that the Piltdown skull represented. It is ironic, to say the least, that the Piltdown skull, which catalysed the sea-change for Black, turned out to be one of the most famous frauds in the history of science. It is perhaps just as well that the scientifically rigorous Black never knew it.
The main actor in the Piltdown Man drama, until his death in 1916, was Charles Dawson, a solicitor and an amateur archaeologist and collector of fossils for the British Museum. From 1908, Dawson had been collecting the fragments of fossilized bone which were being thrown up by the roadmakers near Piltdown in southern England. By 1911, Dawson had collected enough pieces to convince himself that these were indeed remains of a primitive human being. In 1912, he took his collection of fossils to Arthur Smith Woodward, the Keeper of the Department of Geology in the South Kensington Museum, who declared that they belonged to an ancient period. Later the two men examined the pits together and found other pieces of a skull that seemed to be part of the original find, and later a monkey-like jawbone with a few teeth. The excitement caused by these finds was great and the newspapers took up the cry that Dawn Man had been found in the south of England. Scientists, however, disagreed among themselves as to how a monkey jawbone could be made to fit with an obviously human skull. No-one suspected that the finds were anything but geniune.
At the time of the Piltdown finds there were very few early hominid fossils. Neanderthal Man was considered to be human, and there was continuing heated debate about the ‘transitional form’ status of Dubois’ Pithecanthropus erectus. It was expected that there was a ‘missing link’ between ape and man but it was an open question as to what that missing link would look like. Piltdown Man had the theoretically expected mix of features—a mixture of human and ape with the noble brow of Homo sapiens and an ape jaw—which lent it credibility. As did the fact that it was English!
During the next two decades, however, Piltdown Man became a problem child. It did not fit with new discoveries. As a result, it was increasingly marginalised, and eventually, simply ignored; one palaeontologist wrote that ‘you could make sense of human evolution if you didn’t try to put Piltdown Man into it’. Piltdown Man was, however, carried in the books as a fossil hominid, puzzled over from time to time, until being dismissed once again. Then in July 1953, an international congress of palaeontologists examined the world’s cache of fossil hominids. Against such a line-up, Piltdown Man looked suspicious. He simply did not fit in with the crowd. He was a crooked piece in the puzzle. It finally dawned on one of the scientists that perhaps he was a fraud.
Once the possibility had been raised, so were the mists of uncertainty surrounding the Piltdown fossils and it became ridiculously easy to see that the finds were a fake. For a start, another look at the teeth showed that they had been filed to fit: the first and second molars were worn to the same degree, and the inner margins of the lower teeth were more worn than the outer. In other words, the wear was the wrong way around! Inspection under a microscope immediately confirmed the artificial abrasions.
How was it that, for 40 years, the fraud had escaped notice? The answer was simply that nobody had previously examined the Piltdown specimens with the idea of a possible forgery in mind.
If the answer is that simple, the forgery itself was simply breathtaking. In the first instance, there were never any significant fossils at the Piltdown quarry. Instead it was salted from time to time with bones from a variety of sources: a medieval human skull; a orang-utan jaw from Sarawak; a Pleistocene chimpanzee fossil canine; a fossil elephant molar from Tunisia; and a fossil hippopotamus tooth, from Malta or Sicily. The latter two teeth were meant to indicate fauna during the Piltdown Man’s era. [52-58]