The Piltdown hoax reconsidered

The Piltdown hoax reconsidered

Peter Costello

Antiquity 1985

[167] Ever since the revelation in 1953 that the finds at Piltdown were faked there has been very considerable speculation as to who was responsible for this astonishing fraud, and the matter has been ventilated many times in the last twenty years in our pages. Many people have thought that Charles Dawson was the forger and this seemed the answer by implication, though not specifically, in the late Professor Weiner's The Piltdown forgery. Other people, for various reasons, have tried to pin the blame, or part of the blame, on the late Father Teilhard de Chardin. Many other candidates have been put up and knocked down, and many of us have wondered whether we should ever know the truth. Now we think we do, owing to the most careful researches of Peter Costello, the biographer and known historian based in Dublin. He has written an invaluable book setting out his complete investigations into the mystery, and coming to what we believe is the proper and final solution. In advance of the publication of his important book he has very kindly agreed to give us a short account, which we print here with great pleasure. All readers of Antiquity will look forward with avidity to reading the complete statement of his case in his published book.

 

When the Piltdown Man was exposed in 1953 as a complete hoax, many of those involved in the investigation must have hoped that their report and the book by J. S. Weiner would put an end to the matter.

This has not proved to be the case. The hoax went on being discussed, and the wildest of theories have been put forward over the years-–most recently that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the man responsible. The reason for the continuing speculation is simple.

The story was an extraordinary one, and the 1953 investigation did not resolve all the problems it posed. As is well known, Charles Dawson was widely held to be the man behind the plot–largely because this was suggested in the initial story in The Times. Yet, in the conclusion to his book, J. S. Weiner had to admit that a doubt remained about Dawson's guilt. It is that doubt that has fuelled the years of speculation.

The problem with speculations is that they are only as good as the facts from which they start. That J. S. Weiner presented the facts soberly and accurately has been a generally accepted assumption. It is an assumption which I now challenge.

My own researches into the Piltdown affair began in I978 with the quite simple aim of seeing what evidence there was to prove that Teilhard de Chardin was either involved in or part responsible for the hoax. I was soon able to see that there was no evidence at all of his complicity. But more than that, I realized that the only way in which a solution could be reached would be to begin at the beginning, to investigate the life and activities of Charles Dawson, the events of the Piltdown explorations, and the details of the subsequent controversies leading up to the exposure of the hoax in 1953. Some attention would also have to be given to the speculations since then, however absurd.

My researches soon revealed the astonishing fact that much of what had been assumed and taken for granted about Dawson, the Piltdown finds, and the later events was quite wrong. The details of these researches have been incorporated in a book to be published next year. In this article I wish to provide merely a resume of some of the new information, and a statement of my solution of the Piltdown prohlem.

Is such detailed attention to a mere hoax worth while? I have been told, quite tartly, by one scientist who says he will reveal the nigger in the woodpile (his phrase) in his posthumous memoirs, that Piltdown is of no interest to anthropology, and that I am flogging a dead horse.

In reply I would draw attention to a passage in an article by W. K. Gregory published in 1914:

The question of the geological age of these now celebrated specimens is naturally of first importance. It has been suspected by some that geologically they are not old at all; that they may even represent a deliberate hoax, a negro or [168] Australian skull and a broken ape-jaw, artificially fossilized and 'planted' in the gravel pit to fool the scientists.

This, everyone will agree, is too close to the truth for comfort. By late 1913 there were scientists in Britain who knew that Piltdown Man was a hoax. Indeed, in 1954 Kenneth Oakley was informed that Professor Frederick Wood-Jones had remarked to a colleague that 'if it had not been for the outbreak of the Great War, there would have been a terrible scandal about Piltdown.'

I must confess that I have not got very far in identifying those who knew Piltdown was a hoax in 1913–the papers are just not available. But this is surely the reason for C. P. Chatwin's embarrassment when asked by Kenneth Oakley in 1953 what he knew about Piltdown. He was not responsible for the hoax. He was merely one of those who knew it was a hoax, but for reasons which will be familiar to every academic and civil servant, he kept silent. But the time for silence is past.

CHARLES DAWSON, EARLY LIFE AND WORK

Charles Dawson was that typical figure of the 19th century, the amateur scholar. Nowadays with the professionalization of science and archaeology, it is difficult to appreciate the contribution of such people. We should, however, remember that there were then few professionals–Smith Woodward, Dawson's friend at the Natural History Museum was one of them. Most of the real work was done by 'amateurs" like Charles Dawson.

Charles Dawson was born in 1864. His grandfather had been a Preston cotton-spinner, but his father broke the connexion with trade, using the family wealth to become a barrister. Ill health soon stopped such ambitions, and he took his own family to live in St Leonards (the new extension to Hastings), in Sussex. For the rest of his life, Charles Dawson was to devote himself to his adopted county.

He trained as a solicitor, and in 1890 bought into a practice in Uckfield, where he would have greater scope than in Hastings. His firm still exists. Nothing irregular has ever been alleged against Dawson the solicitor: a moral point in his favour. Indeed he seems to have been an astute and successful professional man. He took into partnership Ernest Hart, who later rose to be Official Solicitor of England, and editor of Halsbury's Laws : clearly a well chosen partner of consequence.

All Dawson s spare time and wealth were devoted to his antiquarian and scientific interests. A careful examination of his numerous investigations and publications reveals the interesting fact that with one possible exception all are honest and above board (the exception are the tiles from Pevensey Fort, which were the subject of an article in Antiquity 1973; 1 am by no means satisfied that Peacock's case is true.)

I have no room to go into the details of a lifetime's work in a short article. One example will perhaps suffice. In 1954 it was alleged by J. Mainwaring Baines that Dawson's magnum opus, Hastings Castle (2 vols., 1909) had been plagiarized from a manuscript prepared in 1824 by William Herbert. This claim was widely noticed in the press, and accepted by J. S. Weiner.

An examination of the manuscript (which is now in Hastings Museum) shows there is no substance in the charge. Herbert had excavated certain portions of the castle. His work was never published but was eventually passed to Dawson by Lord Chichester for use in the preparation of his own book. Dawson does indeed incorporate passages from Herbert into his text, a fact he acknowledges fulsomely in a preface. His book ranges over a longer period than Herbert, and includes large amounts of material either new or unknown to Herbert. This is not plagiarism. This is merely the method of every archaeologist who incorporates earlier findings into his book.

J. S. Weiner accepted what Mr Baines had to say as curator of Hastings Museum. He made no attempt to investigate the matter for himself.

Another dubious episode in Dawson's career which Weiner and other writers have made much of is the strange affair of the purchase of Castle Lodge, Dawson's home in Lewes, which once housed the Sussex Archaeological Society. Weiner's account of this incident is not just inaccurate; it is completely wrong in nearly every particular.

Weiner suggests that Dawson went behind the back of the S.A.S. to purchase the house from the Agent of the Marquess of Abergavenny. He then expelled the Society. Because of this action he was blackballed by the Society which was not represented at his funeral in 1916.

The facts are these. Castle Lodge was the property of the Crosskey family; Rohert Crosskey (who joined the S.A.S. in 1857) was Honorary Curator of the Society's museum from 1879. It was he who rented the lodge in the Society; an arrangement continued by his widow. At the turn of the century she wished to move away from [169] Lewes. Her Agent offered the Lodge to the Society in July 1901. This was noted at the time and the Hon. Sec. H. Michell Whitley, urged the Council to buy. But nothing was done. Having offered the house to the Society, as had been agreed, and receiving no response, her trustees felt free to dispose of the Lodge. Thus Charles Dawson, long a member of the Society, purchased the Lodge from another long-time member of the Society. What this incident exposes is the incompetency of the Honorary Secretary and the Council. He soon resigned, and later the Society too was revamped, after long public discussion.

Dawson continued as an active member of the Society, which his wife and step-daughter soon joined. There is little sign of estrangement. On the matter of the funeral, the Society, like many others, was in abeyance for the year, and it is likely that no officers were available to attend.)

That these and other episodes in Dawson's career could be so badly misrepresented so as to discredit him when the real facts were quite contrary was enough to suggest that his involvement in the Piltdown affair might also be riddled with errors.

PILTDOWN–THE COURSE OF DISCOVERY

There is no doubt that the account which Charles Dawson gave in 1912 of how he first came upon the gravel bed at Barkham Manor, Piltdown was exact. In 1899 he was appointed Steward of Barkham Manor by the Maryon-Wilson family. The tenant was Robert Kenward. On his visit to a Court Leet his interest was caught by the flint gravel on the drive outside the manor house, and he was told it came from a pit beside the drive. He inspected this, impressing on the farm workers his interest in anything unusual they might find in it.

The initial enquiry was reinforced by subsequent visits–Dawson is known to have been a generous tipper. Eventually something was found.

The story was that some farm workers digging out gravel in the spring of 1908 uncovered a skull which was broken up by a pick: they thought it was a coconut. One piece was given to Dawson, who on subsequent searches found more pieces.

In The Piltdown forgery J. S. Weiner was more than sceptical about this story. It was not, for instance, given in the report in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society nor in The Times report of the meeting at which the discovery was announced. As far as he was concerned 'the coconut story' into obscurity.

This is not the case. The story was known in the Kenward and Maryon-Wilson families and still is. Moreover, despite the QJGS , Dawson told the story himself at that famous meeting in November 1912. We know this for a fact because it was reported the next morning in an article in the Morning Post written by Arthur Keith of the Royal College of Surgeons (Keith, 1920a). (To his surprise, he got three guineas for it, as he notes in his journal, 1912b.‚

'The coconut story' rests then on the highest authority. It was not an invention. The skull was in fact dug out by the Keywards' carter, a man named Alfred Thorpe. Mr Robert Kenward was actually watching the work when this happened. He brought the pieces into the house to show his daughter Mabel. (She lived until 1978, and confirmed these facts several times.) Later he gave the pieces back to Thorpe, but Thorpe threw back all but one piece which he gave to Dawson. (Thorpe's daughter, Mrs Ernest Sergeant confirmed this for me.)

It was essential to Weiner's case to make light of the coconut story in order to suggest that Dawson himself planted the pieces–that there never had been a complete skull. But the evidence is clear: a skull was uncovered, thought to be a coconut and broken in pieces.

But how did the skull come there? Tests in 1959 showed the skull to be medieval in date. (Fragments of burnt medieval pottery were found in the course of the dig.) Mr Gilbert Grover, a local resident, tells me that the field behind the site was celled 'Church Field'–there is no sign of a chapel there, so it must have had some other religious use. In the parish registers of Fletching Church there are several medieval and late medieval references to visitations of the plague, and that the bodies of the victims were buried on the common, that is at Piltdown. (This point was noted by a corespondent in Sussex Notes and Queries in 1935 with the warning that 'excavations in that area should bear this entry in mind'! ) So of all places in the neighbourhood, Piltdown is the one where one would expect a stray medieval skull to turn up. The radio-carbon date assigned to the Piltdown skull in 1959 (620 + 100 BP) corresponds remarkably with the date of the Black Death, 1348/49.

It was some time before Dawson found more pieces of skull. He was now in a quandary: were they part of the same skull? He took what he had found to his friend Samuel Allinson Woodhead, the [170] principal of the Agricultural College in Uckfield, and county analyst. This was an old connexion: they had presented a paper to the British Association in 1899 and had worked in the natural gas find at Heathfield.

Woodhead tested the pieces, and found their composition was the same. (These tests are referred to in the original report.) More than that, there is evidence that it was Woodhead who suggested to Dawson that the pieces might be 'hardened' by being soaked in potassium dichromate. This, at that date, was a reasonable suggestion, for this chemical was used by chemists, photographers, and pathologists for the hardening of specimens and negatives. It had, however, the effect of altering the colour of the pieces.

The date was now December 1911. Many of Dawson's friends knew about the find–there were jokes about his Crippen-like activities in the cellar of Castle Lodge! (The horrid discoveries in the house at Hill Drop Crescent had been the sensation of 1910.)

There was as yet nothing special about the find. But when Dawson saw a cast of the jaw from Mauer (probably in the Royal College of Surgeons), he was struck by the possible connexion between that massive mandible and the peculiar thickness of the skull he had found. This was the suggestion that he put to Dr Arthur Smith Woodward when he brought the pieces up to London to show him in 1912.

It was not until later in the summer that Dawson and Woodward managed to explore the site together. That summer they uncovered more pieces of the skull, and, of greater interest, a mandible. This was not (as they might have predicted on the analogy with Mauer) a heavy specimen but a fragmented gracile jawbone. It was a dark colour, the same as the 'hardened' pieces. The skull, as we have seen, was a genuine find. The Piltdown Hoax began with the discovery of the jawhone.

Smith Woodward was now convinced of the significance of the find. It was his reconstruction (which Dawson had nothing to do with) which actually created Piltdown Man as an idea. And, preceded by a wave of gossip and rumour, the great discovery was announced to the Geological Society in December 1912.

There is no room here for a full account of the controversy that followed. It is enough to say that though popularly acclaimed, the Piltdown Man was viewed with deep suspicion in France, Germany, and America. Even at home there were critics, and in the closets of the scientific establishment, disbelieving sceptics. But such was Smith Woodward's eminence that the domestic doubters stayed silent. The lone exception was Professor Waterston of King's College London: foreign critics could be ignored.

A major point of controversy over Smith Woodward's reconstruction (aside from the matter of the cranial capacity) was the canine tooth. German anthropologists, for instance, meeting in conference in Nuremburg in 1913, were scornful of this aspect.

That summer the canine was found, by chance it seemed, in the raked gravel on the site by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (who had come to know Dawson while studying in Hastings). This find has always seemed odd. So much so that the small party of those who have long believed that Teilhard was involved in the hoax have pointed to this find as evidence. After all only Dawson, Woodward and Teilhard were present; according to the written record.

But this is not the case. A photograph exists, taken that afternoon, showing Dawson and Woodward working in the pit and Teilhard searching the gravel. Frisby, the Uckfield photographer took two series of photographs for Dawson (which he also sold locally as postcards), but this one was not among them. Here is direct evidence that a fourth unknown person was present that critical afternoon, prepared to photograph a special event. Very curious.

THE SECOND SITE

The history of the dig at the original site at Barkham Manor can be reconstructed in detail from the surviving records. There is little mystery about when and where the various items were found. What has always been shrouded in mystery is the second site, P II (Piltdown II).

This was vaguely stated by Smith Woodward to be in the direction of Sheffield Park. This caused great confusion, with some writers imagining that it was in Sheffield Park. Also it has become confused with another separate site at Barcombe Mills–where other finds were made for which Dawson and Woodward made no claims.

This is no doubt about the location of P II, so far as Smith Woodward was concerned. He and Dawson (and Teilhard in 1914) has visited this [171] second site several times. In due course, on a special map for archaeological sites which the SAS was preparing for the Ordnance Survey, he marked and annotated P II (PL. XXXII). This was intended to be an official record of the site, hut for various reasons was not published before the hoax was exposed.

The significant point about the site, which is in a field by Netherhall Farm (of which Dawson was also Steward), is that it lies on the same contour level as the original site at Barkham Manor (80 feet above sea level). This suggests that the field by the Great Wet Wood, was found as a result of a systematic search for further gravel deposits–a search we know Dawson made: 1,000 soundings in 300 fields.

A GREY EMINENCE?

In theorizing that Dawson was thc guilty party, Weiner suggested that to think otherwise was to see Dawson as dogged by a Mephistophelian character for several years. Easier to imagine Dawson guilty he felt.

Yet there is evidence for the existence of such a mysterious figure, Person X. Some items of evidence on this point:

1 Dawson visited Harrison of Igtham in a car driven by an unidentified person.

2. At P II 'a friend' found a hippopotamus tooth. Smith Woodward, despite enquiries in 1917, never traced this person.

3. Mabel Kenward used to tell of surprising 'a man in black' rooting in the pit. His black clothes suggest a professional man but the Wellington boots he also wore suggest a nearby residence (no gentleman before the Great War would have travelled from London in Wellington boots). His knowledge of the field paths by which he departed suggests someone familiar with the area.

4. In the spring of 1913 a teacher at Uckfield Grammar School was shown by Dawson's clerk a jawbone in a bag which had been brought to the office by 'one of the workers at Piltdown'. Mr Essex only realized in 1953 that the jaw he saw was different from the jaw in the museum (found the summer before‚. Mr. Essex and others suspected that this person was Teilhard, but this is not the case. (The full story of this matter and how it was suppressed by Weiner is told in my book.) This second jaw will appear again.

5. When the canine was found, as we have seen, a fourth person was present to take the photograph. Woodward, who was due to speak at the British Association in September, was anxious to keep the new find secret. He was annoyed, therefore, when the Daily Express on the following Tuesday (2 September) reported the discovery . Dawson confessed that he too was dismayed, especially as the story must have been given to the paper by someone in Uckfield who should have known better.

Despite this setback, Woodward announced the find at Birmingham. By now Dawson was on holiday in Scotland. Two days later the Daily Express published the photograph which must have been sent to them the morning that Woodward's lecture was reported.

Here, I suggest, is evidence of a deliberate manipulation of the press to keep the controversy alive. Moreover a manipulation going on while Dawson was away in remote Galloway.

A NEW SOLUTION

Who, it will be asked, could this person in Uckfield be? I had reached this point (dismissing as I went along many of the long favoured suspects such as Lewis Abbott, John Lewes, Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Hinton, William Sollas, Conan Doyle et al.) when sheer chance brought me a letter from Professor Glyn Daniel enclosing a communication from the surviving son of Samuel Allinson Woodhead.

Dear Prof. Daniel, I am the surviving younger son of Dr S. A. Woodhead, D.Sc., F.l.C., who was a close friend of Mr Dawson when they both lived at Uckfield in Sussex. For many years my father would not discuss the Piltdown Man with either myself or any elder brother always saying 'I don't wish to talk about it'. Sometime in the 1930s my mother gave me the facts which are as follows. Mr Dawson asked my father how one would treat bones to make them appear older than they were and my father told him how it could he done. I would point out that my mother was present at this meeting. A few weeks later Dawson 'found' some of the bones and my father accompanied him on the trips to Piltdown and even 'found' some of the bones himself. Unknown to Dawson my father took some back to his lab where he became very suspicious. Before he could ask Dawson what he was trying to do the 'find' had been publicized. Unfortunately for what happened later my father was an extremely loyal friend and did not give the secret away. However, the friendship cooled after this since obviously my father felt he had been used without his consent, which of course he would never have given.

It would appear that this settles once and for all who the second man was, albeit against his will.

This astonishing document was one open to critical examination on two points.

In 1954 [Kenneth Oakley was in touch with Mrs Woodhead through her elder son Dr Leslie Woodhead. The letters from Dr Woodhead are preserved [172] in the Natural History Museum, though Weiner gives a brief resume of them in his book. These letters make curious reading. L. S. E . Woodhead to Kenneth Oakley 10 January 1954):

Charles Dawson brought the skull to Dad as soon as he found it and realized it was something out of the ordinary. They went back together to look for the missing parts and Dad was actually there when the jaw was found and Dad himself found the eye tooth which was on the path by the side of the digging. I can assure you that Dad would never have been a party to any kind of fraud of hoax, call it what you will....

The Piltdown skull was found as stated by Charles Dawson and the other bits were found very soon afterwards in the presence of my father.

Naturally Kenneth Oakley sought more information. L.S.F. Woodhead replied (16 January 1954).

He was always very definite about the fact that it was not long after Dawson brought the skull to show him that he and Dawson went back and found the jaw–a matter of days at most, not months. Again the tooth was found within a day or so of the jaw–on a Saturday as a matter of fact. (found tooth working on his own [note in margin]).

My mother does remember that a priest found a tooth a year or so later but could not remember his name. This must of course be the Father Teilhard de Chardin you mention in your letter. Mother checked all that I told you in my last letter but cannot now be more definite.

Dr Woodhead believed that his father may have guessed of the fraud later on. Mr Woodhead tells me that his mother told him while he was sick in bed in the 1930s that Piltdown Man was a hoax. It is odd, to say the least, that she did not impart this information to Oakley in 1954. She seems indeed to have had information about 'finds' such as a jaw and a canine which do not feature in the official records.

Next there was a discovery of a canine (possibly a badger tooth) reported by Dawson in October 1913. And there was indeed another jaw, that mysterious piece of bone shown by Dawson's clerk to Robert Essex early in 1913 which had been brought into the office 'by one of he workers from Piltdown'.

To return to Mr Woodhead's recent letter. The careful collation of dates and times which I have made of the Piltdown finds throws an odd light on this too.

We know that Dawson was given the first piece of the skull in 1908 by Alfred Thorpe. It was not until the spring of 1911 that he found more pieces. We have it on record that these were the subject of analyses by S. A. Woodhead, as his figures were used in the original report. To run these tests he had to have the pieces in his lab. That odd question his wife recalls related (I imagine) to the question of hardening the bones and the use of potassium dichromate was Woodhead's.

Woodhead was thus one of the earliest to know of the Piltdown finds. He had at his disposal in the Agricultural College a well-stocked lab. There was also an extensive geological collection. He would not have found it difficult to obtain the items for the hoax. Even the orang jawbone would have presented little problem.

Borneo, the only source of such a bone, was a much visited place. The Hastings magnate, Lord Brassey, was there in his famous yacht Sunbeam– his collection can be seen today at the Hastings museum with which Dawson was connected. Brassey was a director of the British North Borneo Co.; another director lived in Eastbourne. In Brighton Museum today Bornean material from several private Sussex collections is on display. So in Sussex a medieval orang jawbone might easily have been found.

The crucial point Mr Woodhead makes in his letter is that his father detected the hoax but was prevented from doing anything about it because it was published too soon. This is not true.

Woodhead would have seen and tested the pieces by November 1911. After a summer of work at the site, it was not until November 1912 that there was any publicity. A year later, on 4 October 1913, we still find Woodhead helping at the site, still 'finding' items–this time years after he knew it was a hoax.

There certainly was a break of some kind between Dawson and Woodhead, but it did not come about as his son suggests. If Woodhead knew it was a hoax yet continued to help Dawson, there is, I am afraid, only one conclusion to be drawn: that Samuel Allinson Woodhead was responsible for the hoax.

Was he an innocent party? It seem s not. Was he Dawson's dupe? Not on the evidence available. Was he in league with Dawson? This is a possibility. But as I have tried to show Charles Dawson has been the victim of much misrepresentation, and I am for one fully convinced that he was not the agent but the victim of the hoax. And I have little doubt that the man behind the hoax, the man with opportunity, the chemical skills, the materials and time, was Sam Woodhead.

I put this to Mr Lionel Woodhead. He paused and smiled. He could not see how some might think his father was involved in the hoax. But he didn't think so.

Woodhead died in 1941. The surviving papers of Samuel Woodhead are in the care of his grandson I asked if there were any papers relating to Dawson and Piltdown. Mr Woodhead promised to look. Later I enquired again. The papers I was told contained nothing of interest to me. And there on that non-committal note the matter rests.

In conclusion: a careful examination of Charles Dawson's career suggests he was an honest and diligent worker; that in earlier accounts, he had been badly misrepresented; and that prejudice having been established, his role in the Piltdown affair has been misjudged. I believe that Charles Dawson was innocent of the Piltdown hoax, and that the real culprit was his friend and colleague Samuel Allison Woodhead.

We have not, I think, heard the last of Piltdown Man.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Bibliography

Anon. 1914. Museum exhibits discredited. Plagiarism in history, The Times, 15 November.

Challen, W. H. 1935. Fletching burials. Sussex Note and Queries . 5. 156.

Dawson, C. 1909. Hastings Castle (London).

Dawson, C. & A. S. Woodward. 1913. On the discovery of a Paleolithic skull and mandible

in the Wealden (Hastings Beds) at Piltdown. Fletching (Sussex), Quart J. Geol. Soc.

Lond. lxx, 82-99.

Gregory, W. K. 1914. The Dawn Man of Piltdown, American Museum Journal, 14. 190.

Keith, A. 1912a. The Piltdown Man, Morning Post, 23 November 1912.

1912 b. Journal, Keith Papers (Royal College of Surgeons, London).

Kenward, M. 1955. Red-letter days at Piltdown, Sussex County Magazine, 29. 332-6.

Peacock, D. F. S. 1973. Forged brick stamps from Pevensey, Antiquity , xlvii, 138-40.

Shoosmith, E. 1949. Fletching, Sussex County magazine, 23. 81.

Teilhard de Chardin, P. 1965. Lettres d'Hastings et de Paris 1908-1914 (Paris).

Vere, F. 1955. The Piltdown fantasy (London).

Vries, H. de & K. P. Oakley. 1959. Radiocarbon dating of the Piltdown Skull and Jaw. Nature, 184. 224-6.

Weiner, J. S. 1955. The Piltdown forgery (London).

Weiner, J. S., K. P. Oakley & W. E. Le Gros Clark. 1953. The solution of the Piltdown

problem. Bull. Br. Mus. Nat. His. (Geol.), 2. 225-87.

Williams, I. 1953. Piltdown Man forgery, The Times 21 November.

Winslow, J. & A. Meyer. 1983. The Perpetrator at Piltdown. Science 83 , 4. 32—43

Wood—Jones, F. Letter in Wood—Jones file, Piltdown Papers B—M. (N. H.).

Woodward, A. S. 1917. On a second skull from the Piltdown gravel, Quart. J. Geol. Soc.

Lond., 53. 1-10.

1948. The Earliest Englishman (London).

Wright, R. F. 1943. Obituary: Samuel Allinson Woodhead. The Analyst, 68. 297.

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