SPECTATRIX
The Piltdown Forgery
By JACQUETTA HAWKES IN a book published a few years ago I said of Piltdown Man, " I like this Yorick who must jest, even with his bones," but I had no notion when I wrote of the extent and depth of the jest which for the past week has been putting my Yorick into the headlines. Knowing Dr. Kenneth Oakley as a man at once meticulous as a geologist, cautious in using his authority and gentle by nature, I feel certain that he would not have announced a hoax unless the proof was as sure as anything in our human affairs can ever be. I think, therefore, that we can ignore the assertions of the popular Press that his discoveries will be followed by years of savage warfare among scientists. On the contrary, this exposure will not only be almost universally accepted, but also most readily welcomed for removing what has always been recognised as a hard lump of anomaly upsetting our digestion of the facts, now fast accumulating, concerning the evolution of man. IN a book published a few years ago I said of Piltdown Man, " I like this Yorick who must jest, even with his bones," but I had no notion when I wrote of the extent and depth of the jest which for the past week has been putting my Yorick into the headlines. Knowing Dr. Kenneth Oakley as a man at once meticulous as a geologist, cautious in using his authority and gentle by nature, I feel certain that he would not have announced a hoax unless the proof was as sure as anything in our human affairs can ever be. I think, therefore, that we can ignore the assertions of the popular Press that his discoveries will be followed by years of savage warfare among scientists. On the contrary, this exposure will not only be almost universally accepted, but also most readily welcomed for removing what has always been recognised as a hard lump of anomaly upsetting our digestion of the facts, now fast accumulating, concerning the evolution of man.
In any line of family portraits an individual with a top to his head which would not have looked out of place in Blooms- bury a quarter of a century ago, supporting a jaw too brutal for any human circles whatsoever, would be suspected of an origin on the wrong side of the blanket. We are all relieved to know just how illegitimate the conception of Piltdown Man must have been, for now we can paint out his jaw from the human portrait gallery.
It was not by chance that this discovery was made just when it was most needed for our studies : the fluorine test, which , was chiefly responsible for showing the jaw to be recent, is one of the fascinating new methods of dating the vast stretches of our history that wept by unmeasured. These techniques, striking examples of the way in which the natural sciences can serve history, enable us to draw up calendars for time past instead of time to come. While less accurate than the better known tree-ring and Carbon 14 methods, the fluorine test can reach much further back into the past, so that whereas before the precious fossil evidence found scattered through three continents could only be roughly dated by geological means, each bone can now be individually checked. As a result, it is easier than before to decide the all-important question as to whether one kind of primitive man lived before or after another. So the discovery of the Piltdown forgery was part of a much wider campaign by palaeontologists to take the skeletons from their cupboards and set them in order.
Many people must have been surprised, and either amused or shocked, when they learnt from their newspapers that the experts had been capable of believing that an ape's jaw, even one which had been tampered with, could ever have belonged to an evidently human skull. All anatomists, it is true, had recognised it as, a very odd mixture, and several had main- tained it to be an impossible one, yet reconstructions showing Piltdown Man with an, intellectual forehead and simian mouth and chin continued to be made—indeed we now discover that several hundred of these highly embarrassing busts have been sold to museums and other places of public instruction throughout the world ! At the same time the need to allow for the possible existence of such a weird hybrid befuddled, if only slightly, our evolutionary thinking.
Having resigned from their secure fraternity myself, I am not inclined to be generous to experts, yet in this instance there is a very sound excuse for their apparent folly. The whole trend of recent discovery has favoured the continuance of the old error. Because it is now known- that ape-men and men qualified to join the ranks of homo sapiens lived side by side on this planet, perhaps for as long as a million years, it has been difficult to insist that simian and sapient characteristics could never be found together in one individual or one breed.
The original Neanderthal skeleton, after which this famous species of brutish cavemen came to be called, was found in 1857, two years before Darwin published his Origin of Species. When in time the Victorians began miserably or cheerfully to accept their descent from ape-like ancestors, it was natural to recognise Neanderthal Man among our immediate forebears. It followed that homo sapiens was of very recent birth and could not have been long in this world when his superior talents enabled him to exterminate the brutal old Neanderthal stock towards the end of the Old Stone Age.
However, recent evidence, and particularly Mr. Marston's find of Swanscombe Man in the mid-1930's, has proved our species already to have been in existence some quarter of a million years ago, while a single lower jaw from Kenya may push our origins yet further back to the very beginning of the Old Stone Age. This would give homo sapiens an antiquity of up to a million years, and mean that he had already long been going about his simple but promising affairs when the small-brained apeman, Pithecanthropus, was living in the caves of Choukoutien, near Peking. The existence of several types of man more or less intermediate between Pithecanthropus and homo sapiens suggests that we are in fact descended from beings very much of the Pithecanthropic kind, and there may even have been subsequent - interbreeding between the two stocks. Nevertheless if one of us were privileged to return to explore the earth of the Old Stone Age, choosing perhaps the agreeably warm period between the second and third ice ages, he would meet some people whom he could bring back to modern London without distress to anyone except themselves, while elsewhere he would see tribes vastly more primitive in physique than those we exterminated in Tasmania.
This contrast only became more acute later in the Old Stone Age when the Neanderthal race seems to have evolved back towards a more brutal bodily form, becoming more ape-like than their own ancestors. Thus when such fine upstanding modern types as Cro-Magnon Man moved into Europe they found themselves confronting creatures with eyes deep-set below jutting bony brows, with teeth projecting and chins -receding, shambling and uncouth of gait. They exterminated them as we exterminated the Tasmanians, leaving only a few to linger in remote corners of the world—late survivors such as the Rhodesian Man of Broken Hill.
These facts make it easy to excuse the experts for being, and remaining, hoodwinked. It is more dangerous to the cause of knowledge and understanding to be too sceptical than to be a little gullible. At the time the remains were unearthed, many people insisted that the Neanderthal bones were those of an idiot. Today the boot is, as it were, on the other foot. Now, presumably, the Piltdown jaw will be forgotten while the skull-cap is accepted as belonging to a genuine but no longer very important member of our species who was living in the Sussex area some fifty thousand years ago. It seems that this Piltdown Man, and even his predecessor from Swanscombe, already possessed the complete physical equipment which, without further change, has produced all the marvellous achievements of civilized man. Whether, in the depths of the primeval wilderness, the head and the hand could have been so endowed by the chances of natural selection alone, is not a question to be argued here. It is, indeed, one aspect of the greatest question on earth.
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