[19] The anonymous aphorism "I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it" is a continuing truth in science. And of course, it cuts two ways: you often see what you expect to see and not what you don't. Of course, no two scientists' set of guidelines, or preconceptions, are going to be identical, even if the individuals concerned are in broad agreement. And as preconceptions are the lens through which each scientist views the questions to be asked about the world and the "facts" perceived therein, there is always a good deal of room for lively disagreement.

Johanson readily agrees that paleoanthropology is no different from other sciences in this respect. "The fossil finders themselves have often brought with them their own personal prejudices and beliefs. . . . We see discoveries as bolstering our specific interpretation of what the family tree should look like." ¹⁰ Leakey's view is similar. "In our family we were working with the human sciences, and I was never shown examples of objectivity in the true sense of what science is supposed to be like." ¹¹

The paleoanthropology literature is replete with references to this kind to controversy, disagreements, and even personal battles So when American anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka asked in 1927, "What is the actual, precise, evidence for human evolution that science now possesses, and upon which it bases far-reaching conclusions?" (my emphasis), ¹⁴ he was in fact posing a question that has no answer because there is no evidence for human evolution, but because no science works that way. No science–least of all paleoanthropology–is as objective as Hrdlicka implies here or as is often portrayed in the philosophers' idealized view of science.

Paleoanthropology is thus no different from other sciences in being controversial. What sets it off from other sciences is the degree of controversy it engenders. Yes, controversy is found in all sciences, but in paleoanthropology discernibly more so. Yes, pre-conceived ideas shape the progress of all sciences, but nowhere else to the degree that occurs in the search for human origins. And yes, personalities are important in the flow of all sciences, but, again, in the science of man emphatically so. "All sciences are odd in some way," notes Duke University anthropologist Matt Cartmill, "but paleoanthropology is one of the oddest.'' ¹⁵ Paleoanthropology is like all other sciences, only more so. Why?

Why, when the fossil missing links under consideration are those in a chain of extinct horses or ammonites, is there controlled controversy–"But when it extends to fossils which can be brought forward as evidence that man is related to something simian," observes Gerrit Miller, onetime curator at the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C., "the case is very different." "Then," he notes, "it leads to the expressing of opinions delivered from sharply defined and diametrically opposed points of view." Why?

Le Gros Clark has an answer: "Undoubtedly, one of the main factors responsible for the frequency with which polemics enters [21] into controversies on matters of paleoanthropology is purely an emotional one. It is a fact (which it were well to recognize) that it is extraordinarily difficult to view with complete objectivity the evidence for our own evolutionary origin, no doubt because the problem is such a very personal one." Ernst Mayr, one of the generation's most prominent evolutionary biologists, concur: "Human beings seem quite incapable of speaking about themselves and their history without becoming emotional in one way or another." ...

[60] But one of the great ironies of the rejection of the Taung child, of course, is that it was at Elliot Smith and Keith's instigation that Dart had gone to South Africa in the first place. Dart's literary style was indeed florid for scientific discourse, but then so was that of his mentor, Elliot Smith. And it was with the tools of the neurological trade bestowed upon him by Elliot Smith that Dart was able to palpate incipient humanity in the contours of the Taung baby's brain. But irony is heaped upon irony in this story, because it was this same focus of intellectual attention–Elliot Smith's expertise in human neurology–that helped put into place the major tangible obstacle blocking the Taung child's route to the human family tree. That obstacle was the infamous Piltdown Man, the "fossil" that held the British anthropological establishment in its thrall for nigh on four decades.

The various specimens that constitute the Piltdown Man were found over a period of half a dozen years, from 1912 onward, from two sites near the town of Piltdown, Sussex, just 40 kilometers from where Charles Darwin spent the greater part of his life. Their initial discoverer was Charles Dawson, a lawyer and amateur prehistorian. From the first site, a gravel pit, came several fragments of a remarkably humanlike cranium together with part of a remarkably apelike lower jaw. It was an extraordinary combination, and clearly begged the question of whether cranium and jaw had belonged to the same individual. The key part of the jaw joint that would have settled this question had been broken off and lost during the fossilization process, an unfortunate quirk of fate–or so it had seemed. Other fossils found with Piltdown appeared to [61] indicate considerable antiquity, perhaps as early as the beginning of the Pleistocene (which would now be dated at 2 million years ago).

In the face of varying degrees of skepticism from North America and continental Europe, the British anthropological establishment concluded in near unanimity that jaw and cranium were indeed from one individual, that it was an ancient form of humanity, and what is more, its unusual form was precisely what would have been predicted, given prevailing theory. Virtually every major voice in British anthropology proclaimed that although the cranium was clearly very modern in aspect, many apelike features could also be discerned; and that while the jaw certainly looked like that of an ape, the trained eye could readily discern important human characteristics in it.

In fact, as was discovered a long forty years after its first announcement, the Piltdown Man was a hoax, a fraudulent seeding of the Piltdown gravel pits with fragments from a modern human cranium and an orangutan's jaw. Unsolved to this day, the Piltdown forgery remains one of the great whodunits of modern times.

At the time that the Piltdown finds were announced, anthropology had been going through a set of theoretical changes into which the Piltdown fossils fitted as snugly as if they had been tailored that way–which, of course, they had. According to Hammond, these changes include the following: Arthur Keith's ideas on the great antiquity of man; Grafton Elliot Smith's hypotheses on the part played by brain expansion in human evolution; William Sollas' work on mosaic evolution, the idea that different parts of an organism might evolve at different rates; and Marcellin Boule's [62] recent analysis of Neanderthal Man, in which he said the species had become extinct without descendants. "Due to their devotion to these new ideas," says Hammond, "a protective screen emerged around the forgery and played a crucial role in its initial acceptance and later defence."

Perhaps most fundamental of all these was the revolution in thinking about the Neanderthals, which Boule, an eminent French paleontologist, wrought almost single-handedly between 1908 and 19I2. That the effect of Boule's conclusions was crucial to the eager acceptance of Piltdown as genuine, there is no doubt. That Boule's interpretations of the Neanderthal fossils he was studying were entirely erroneous, powered as they were by a particular set of preconceptions of his own, simply adds yet another layer of irony to our main story: namely, why the Taung child was dealt with so harshly when it was first offered as a member of the human family. To understand fully the rejection of Taung, you have to understand the acceptance of Piltdown, and in turn you have to understand the expulsion of the Neanderthals....

[68] And the interesting question then becomes "What shapes the preference of an individual or group of researches?" not "What is the truth?"

It is clear that Boule went beyond the evidence of his eyes–perhaps to press more persuasively his version of the Truth. Michael Hammond suspects that, given the evolutionary model that was prevailing at the turn of the century, a simple, objective description of the robusticity of Neanderthal anatomy might have been inadequate to persuade many anthropologists that the species should be excluded from human ancestry altogether. "Without the stooping carriage, the morphological differences between the Neanderthals and modern man would not have been sufficient to so definitely expel the Neanderthals from a place in the evolutionary origin of man," guesses Hammond. To ensure expulsion, Boule required Neanderthals to display a distinctly apelike stooping gait and many other "primitive" characteristics; he would exaggerate the differences from modern humans and minimize the similarities. Boule may have realized–consciously or subconsciously–that he had to overstate his case in order to ensure that it would be noticed. Such a tactic is common in the intellectual development and promulgation of new ideas, and for Boule it worked handsomely. His commitment to viewing human history as a bush, not a ladder, with Neanderthal as one of its side branches, had been fulfilled.

The scientific literature of Boule's time is replete with expression of Edwardian revolution and even moral indignation at the supposed brutishness of Neanderthals. It would, however, be a mistake in Boule's case to conclude that his technical assessments were based on this perceived brutishness. In fact, it was rather the other way around. His preconceptions–primarily that human history was like a bush, not a ladder–demanded that Neanderthals [69] be as different as possible from modern humans, and so he needed to exaggerate those differences which did exist and even invent some which didn't. The result was that Neanderthal looked more brutish than he really was.

For half a century Boule's legacy from La Chapelle-aux-Saints was the keystone to most, but not all, anthropological views about Neanderthal Man: he was a cousin, not a brother, Homo neanderthalensis to our Homo sapiens. Then, from the mid-1950s through the 1970s, Loring Brace and others led a revival of the notion that Neanderthal was indeed our direct ancestor, and not a side branch that became extinct. As a result, most anthropologists agree that Neanderthal should be called Homo sapiens neanderthalensis– in other words a subspecies and a very close relative to our own. (But, as so often happens in the science of paleoanthropology, the intellectual cycle is due to turn once again, and currently there is a gathering sentiment in favor of pushing La Chapelle-aux-Saints and his fellows onto a side branch once more. The reasons for doing so now are different from Boule's seventy years ago, so it seems he may have been right after all, but for the wrong reasons.)

When Boule's work on La Chapelle-aux-Saints was approaching its grand culmination in 1912, with major publications in the Annales de Paleontologie, he had been faced with something of a problem, as Michael Hammond explains. "The definitiveness of Boule's conclusion on the Neanderthals suffered from the fact that a great gap remained in the paleontological record. At the end of the first decade of this century, there existed no clear evidence for a pre-Neanderthal population with specializations significantly different in their pattern of development than those of the Neanderthals, and which could be taken as an indication of a more sapiens-like line of evolutionary change. Obviously, if the Neanderthals were not ancestral to man, there must have existed other populations undergoing other evolutionary developments.." ¹⁰ In other words, Boule's conclusions provided a clear prediction, which needed to be confirmed by the discovery of the right kind of fossils if his line of argument was to carry weight. "It was precisely at this time that the Piltdown Man emerged with its saintly human forehead lacking the great [browridge] of the Neanderthals.'' ¹¹ At one stroke, the gap was filled.

So it was that Neanderthal Man and Piltdown Man became paleontological partners, each one requiring the other for its existence. "A common theme among anthropologists involved in the [70] reconstruction and defence of Piltdown was the recent dismissal of the European Neanderthals from human ancestry," says Hammond. "Indeed, the most famous anthropological forgery [Piltdown] of this century was firmly rooted in one of the most influential anthropological mischaracterizations [La Chapelle] of the century." Sir Arthur Smith Woodward brought the two together nicely in his announcement of Piltdown in December 1912. The discovery, he said, "tends to support the theory that [Neanderthal Man] was a degenerate offshoot of early man, and probably became extinct; while surviving man may have arisen directly from the primitive sources of which the Piltdown skull provides the first discovered evidence."' ¹²

Given all the many anatomical incongruities in the Piltdown remains, which of course are glaringly obvious from the vantage of the present, it is truly astonishing that the forgery was so eagerly embraced, by much of the British establishment at least, and by some notable North American anthropologists, including Henry Fairfield Osborn. The forgery was perfectly tailored, not technically but theoretically, and in the timing of the series of discoveries too. For instance, the first discoveries announced included parts of the obviously humanlike cranium and the equally obviously apelike jaw. But there was no canine tooth, which was a subject of some considerable interest because of the unusual wear pattern it might bear. Sir Arthur Smith Woodward predicted publicly what he thought such a tooth would look like, and within a few months one was found. His prediction was vindicated to the finest detail.

Later, in 1917, when some opinions were still wavering, another discovery was made, this time 3 kilometers from the original site. The arrival of Piltdown II, as it was called, served to still the doubts of many observers, because it seemed to show that the original had been no freak. "There is no longer any reason for attaching any significance to criticisms that have been made by anthropologists not acquainted at first hand with all the evidence now available,'' ¹³ said Elliot Smith of the import of this second Piltdown Man.

"If there is a Providence hanging over the affairs of prehistoric men, it certainly manifested itself in this case," joined in Henry Fairfield Osborn. "The three minute fragments from this second Piltdown man . . . are exactly those which we should have selected to confirm the comparison with the original type." ^'14 The notion [71] that the skull and jaw had belonged separately to a human and an ape had indeed been widespread. "It would have been very difficult to dislodge this opinion, so widely entertained in Europe and America, but for the overwhelming confirmation afforded to Smith Woodward by the discovery . . . of a second Piltdown man."

Indeed, this second discovery almost broke down the skepticism of Marcellin Boule, who believed that although the skull represented a type of Dawn Man of the sort he had predicted must exist, the jaw must have belonged to an ape. "In the face of these new facts, I am not inclined to be as positive as formerly," admitted Boule. "But I must add that my doubts have not been completely laid to rest." ¹5 The Germans, however, for the most part remained unmoved in their disbelief. Nationality was indeed a strong predictor of an individual anthropologist's position on Piltdown, as indeed it had been with Neanderthal.

One reason that Britain offered such fertile soil for planting the forgery was that most of the theoretical developments that shaped it had originated there. As mentioned earlier, in addition to the expulsion of the Neanderthals, there were three major issues: first, Arthur Keith's conviction about the great antiquity of modern forms of man; second, William Sollas' work on mosaic evolution; and third, Elliot Smith's theories on brain expansion's leading the way in human evolution.

It is something of a British anthropological tradition that modern forms of man originated deep in geological history. Arthur Keith was the principal proponent in his day, and it is more than a little interesting that Louis Leakey, who for a time was a close associate of Keith's, carried on the tradition. Like Osborn, Keith considered the human brain to be so special that only a very long period of slow evolution could have fashioned it from a more primitive state. As mentioned earlier, his obsession with the idea had led him erroneously to accept two modern skeletons, Galley Hill Man and Ipswich Man, as being of ancient origin. When Piltdown Man came along, once more it seemed to offer evidence in support of his cherished theory. "By 1912, Keith was definitely looking for evidence in this regard, and was obviously ready to suspend much critical judgment on almost any fossil which gave more weight to his idea," ¹⁶ says Michael Hammond.

William Sollas, an anthropologist from Oxford University, actually came closer than anyone else in predicting the form of Piltdown before it turned up. Indeed, in 1910 he had said a human [72] ancestor with a large brain and an apelike jaw was "an almost necessary stage in the course of human development." Until Sollas began working on the idea of mosaic evolution, in which parts of an organism might evolve at different rates, the whole process was seen as rather regular. At the turn of the century the idea was not only that human evolution followed a straight and regular progression, but also that the body "would at each stage become a little less ape-like, a little more human-like," as Keith put it. If this notion had still prevailed in 1912, the Piltdown forgery would never have been accepted as genuine. More to the point, it almost certainly would not have been perpetrated in the form in which it was. Sollas' influence in arguing that evolution can work at different rates in different parts of the body made plausible the combination of a human cranium with an apelike jaw.

Keith eagerly embraced Sollas' arguments, and saw them expressed in Dubois's find from Java as well as in Piltdown. "The same irregularity of expression of parts is evident in the anatomy of Pithecanthropus, the oldest and most primitive form of humanity so far discovered. The thigh bone might easily be that of a modern man, the skull cap that of an ape, but the brain within that cap, as we now know, had passed well beyond an anthropoid status," observed Keith. Mosaic evolution was seen in Java Man and in Piltdown Man, just as it should be–or so it seemed.

Perhaps the most enthusiastic promoter of Piltdown Man was Elliot Smith, for whom it represented something of an intellectual triumph. "In the two years before Piltdown's emergence, Elliot Smith was bringing to conclusion a decade of study on the evolution of the brain in man and other primates," explains Michael Hammond. "He decided that the growth of the brain was the fundamental factor in man's evolution.... By 1912] he would be searching for fossil evidence to support his theory on the precocious modernization of the brain and would be tempted to accept any fossil which indicated the leading role of the brain in human evolution." ¹⁷ Indeed, when the Piltdown "fossil" eventually came along, Elliot Smith said that "the outstanding interest of the Piltdown skull is the confirmation it affords of the view that in the evolution of man the brain led the way." ¹⁸

So it was that with its human cranium, ape's jaw, and supposed early Pleistocene origin, "No other morphological combination could have fulfilled the theoretical ideas of scientists such as [73]

Boule, Keith, Elliot Smith and Sollas," says Hammond. ¹⁹ It was a jewel of a forgery. Robert Broom accepted it. So, briefly, did Louis Leakey. And Henry Fairfield Osborn considered it to be the embodiment of his Dawn Man theory. But even those who did accept Piltdown as a genuine fossil typically pushed it out on a side branch, extinct without issue. Nevertheless, its existence "proved" that there were forms of early, primitive men evolving in this most precocious manner.

The real interest of Piltdown, however, is not so much where on the family tree–or bush–it was hung, but how those who believed in the fossil saw in it what they wanted to see. Remember, the cranial parts were those of modern man, Homo sapiens, an individual who died perhaps 2,000 years ago at most. And the jaw is that of a modern orangutan, chemically treated to make it look like a fossil and with cheek teeth filed down to make them look humanlike. Given this mischievous chimera, this is what was said of them.

"The Piltdown skull, when properly reconstructed, is found to possess strongly simian peculiarities," noted Elliot Smith. "In respect of these features it harmonizes completely with the jaw, the simian form of which has not only been admitted, but also exaggerated by most writers." ²⁰ In other words, Elliot Smith was able to see signs of humanity in the orang jaw and features of an ape in the human cranium. "That the jaw and cranial fragments . . . belonged to the same creature there has never been any doubt on the part of those who have seriously studied the matter,'' 21 he opined somewhat peremptorily in 1914. It wasn't that the chances were minuscule that a human and an ape might lie down dead cheek to cheek in England's distant Pleistocene. For Elliot Smith, the anatomy unequivocally showed that Dawn Man sported an apelike jaw, just as you would expect him to.

Being a neurologist, Elliot Smith also examined the form of the brain impressed on the inner surface of the cranium. "There are clear indications," he said, "that mere volume is not the only criterion of mental superiority. Those parts of the organ which develop latest in ourselves were singularly defective in [Piltdown]." ²² There are clear echoes here of Boule's assessment of the Neanderthal's supposed inferior mental capabilities, simply because of an assumed primitiveness. Remember, Elliot Smith was in fact describing a fully modern human brain.

Soon after the first Piltdown material was recovered, Sir Arthur [74] Smith Woodward, who named the fossil Eoanthropus dawsoni, reconstructed the cranium. Lacking large segments of the anatomical jigsaw puzzle, Smith Woodward had to make some guesses as to how the pieces he had might relate to each other. Apparently misidentifying some minor anatomical landmarks on the interior of the cranium, he assembled a skull that not only was erroneously small (just over 1,000 cubic centimeters) but also appeared to have certain primitive anatomical features. This reconstruction deeply impressed Elliot Smith. Sir Arthur Keith, however, challenged the accuracy of the reconstruction and did one of his own, eschewing the errors Smith Woodward had committed. Keith's version not only was much bigger (about 1,500 cubic centimeters), but also lacked the primitive features erroneously present in Smith Woodward's. Quite an intellectual battle ensued over who was correct, and at one point Keith offered to demonstrate his skills in anatomical reconstruction. He had to attempt a cranial reconstruction using just a few fragments of a modern skull whose shape and size were known and which had been broken for the purpose. Keith showed himself to be a match for the task, but that still did not settle things.

"I regret to record that it most unfortunately gave rise to a rather acrimonious, and somewhat painful, controversy between Keith and Elliot Smith," commented Sir Wilfred Le Gros Clark, who was instrumental in exposing Piltdown as a forgery in the fall of 1953. "Why . . . did not [Keith's] correction immediately raise suspicions of the authenticity of the Piltdown fossils?" asked Le Gros Clark. "Because of its personal nature the controversy [between Keith and Elliot Smith] certainly clouded the issues and befogged the atmosphere of scientific discussion. Elliot Smith had failed to recognize the true significance of Keith's correction, and, in spite of it, still maintained that the skull and brain did show markedly primitive and simian characters, while the ape-like character of the jaw, in his view, had been exaggerated. In his day Elliot Smith's authority carried greater weight {and rightly so, for he was a very eminent anatomist), so that not only did he persuade himself that his original interpretation of the skull and endocranial cast had been fundamentally right, he also seems to have persuaded biologists in general that this was so." ²³

But in spite of their differences of opinion, both Keith and Elliot Smith continued to accept Piltdown Man as a vindication of their own ideas, each for his own different reasons. Keith, who viewed [75] the skull as essentially modern in form, saw it as a confirmation of the antiquity of modern types of man. At the same time, Elliot Smith claimed the cranium to be distinctly primitive in form and to prove that "in the evolution of man, the brain led the way." Built from a set of plausible theoretical constructs, the "protective screen" surrounding Piltdown proved to be unusually resilient. "All the collateral lines of evidence appeared to be mutually confirmatory and in complete harmony with each other, " commented Le Gros Clark when he discussed the forgery at a lecture at Britain's Royal Institution not long after its exposure. "So much so, indeed, that . . none of the experts concerned were led to examine their own evidence as critically as otherwise they would have done." A clearer message for the process of science can hardly be imagined.

During the four decades following the discovery of Piltdown, the influence of the British school began to decline. Other fossil discoveries were being made in both Asia and Africa, and Piltdown came to look more and more enigmatic. "A puzzle of a most bewildering kind" ²⁴ was how Le Gros Clark described it in 1950. "By this time Piltdown just didn't make any sense," recalls Sherwood Washburn. "I remember writing a paper on human evolution in 1944, and I simply left Piltdown out. You could make sense of human evolution if you didn't try to put Piltdown into it." ²⁵ Earnest Hooton, Washburn's mentor and one of the most ardent Piltdown supporters in the United States, was outraged by Washburn's paper. "You can't leave out the evidence," Hooton stormed at his former pupil.

But for most people, Piltdown eventually ceased to be evidence at all. It was gradually pushed to one side, awaiting some kind of resolution, though no one ever guessed that forgery would be the answer. Gerrit Miller, of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C., came closest when, in 1915, he made the following comment: "deliberate malice could hardly have been more successful than the hazards of deposition in so breaking the fossils as to give free scope to individual judgment in fitting the parts together." ²⁶ For Miller, this was merely a rhetorical observation, not a serious conjecture. But forty years later, it proved to be uncannily accurate.

Appropriately enough, in addition to being involved in the exposure of the Piltdown fraud, Le Gros Clark was also instrumental in rescuing the Taung skull from anthropological oblivion. . . .

______________________________________________________________________________

10 "Four Million Years of Humanity," lecture at the American Museum of Natural History,

New York, 9 April 1984.

11 CBS Inc, 1981.

12 The Roots of Mankind, published by George Allen & Unwin, 1971, page 139.

13 Essays on the Evolution of Man, published by Oxford University Press, 1924.

14 Smithsonian Report for 1928, page 416.

15 "Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad," Natural History, November 1983, page 65.

10 "The Expulsion of the Neanderthals from Human Ancestry," in Social Studies on Science,

vol. 12, page 23.

11 "A Framework for the Plausibility of an Anthropological Forgery," in Anthropology, vol. 3,

pp. 47-58 [1979], page 50.

12 "Description of the Human Skull and Mandible and the Associated Mammal Remains,"

in Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, vol. 69, pp. 117-47 [1913], page 139.

13 Human History, published by Jonathan Cape, 1934, page 85.

14 "The Dawn Man at Piltdown, Sussex," Natural History, vol. 21, pp. 580-81 [1921].

15 Fossil Men, published by Oliver and Boyd, 1923, page 471.

16 As 11, page 51.

17 As 11, page 52.

18 Essays on the Evolution of Man, published by Oxford university Press, 1924, page 67.

19 As 11, page 55.

2 As 13, page 84.

21 "The Controversies Concerning the Interpretation and Meaning of the Remains of the Dawn Man Found Near Piltdown," in Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, vol. 59, pp. VII-IX, 31 March 1914, page IX.

22 As 13, page 67.

23 "The Exposure of the Piltdown Fraud," lecture at the Royal Institution, London, 20 May 1955.

24 History of the Primates, published by the British Museum [Natural History], 1950.

25 Interview with the author, Berkeley, 3 October 1984.

26 "The Jaw of the Piltdown Man," Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, vol. 65, no. 12, 24 November 1915, pp. 1-31, page I.