Ian Langham

The Artefact 1978

Dr. Langham is Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, N.S. W. 2006, Australia. MS received 24 November, 1978.

PIXss

Plate 1: The carbonate-encrusted Talgai cranium as it appeared to Wilson, David, and Etheridge in 1896 and again in 1914. (Photograph courtesy University of Sydney Archives.)

In The Piltdown Men, Ronald Millar has attempted, albeit in an impressionistic and incompletely documented fashion, to pin the Piltdown hoax on the eminent Australian anatomist Sir Grafton Elliot Smith. Having accumulated an interlocking web of circumstantial evidence, the present author finds himself agreeing with Millar about Elliot smith's involvement, and regards Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, the prominent British Museum palaeontologist, as having been a likely accomplice in the hoax. The presentation of all the evidence relating to this hypothesis is beyond the scope of the present paper, and will be developed in a forthcoming book, tentatively entitled The Piltdown Factor. What follows is of course part of the web of circumstantial evidence which, I believe, implicates Elliot Smith and Woodward. However for reasons of brevity I shall not, in the present paper, attempt to argue ab initio for the assertion that these two gentlemen were the guilty parties. Rather I shall, on this occasion, interpret the facts relating to Talgai in the light of my belief, acquired on the basis of a great deal of additional evidence, that Elliot Smith and Woodward are the most probable candidates for having perpetrated the forgery.

THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE TALGAI FIND

Until recent years, it had always been assumed that, prior to 1914, the Talgai cranium had never been submitted for scientific evaluation, but had languished in private possession in rural Queensland and New South Wales. However in a notable paper (Macintosh 1969) based upon archives discovered in the Australian Museum by Dr. Alex Ritchie, the late Professor Macintosh brought to light a curious and totally unexpected episode in the history of the cranium. Since a major concern of the present article will be the investigation of the likely significance of this episode in relation to the Piltdown affair, it will be necessary to go over

[184] PIX

Plate 2: J. H. McGregor's 1914 restoration of "Piltdown Man". (Original photographs now held in folder entitled "Talgai skull", Edgeworth David Papers, University of Sydney Archives.)

[185] the ground covered by Macintosh in some detail.

Circa September 1896 a description of the skull was apparently given in The Walcha Witness, a New South Wales country newspaper. Upon reading this description, the Curator of the Australian Museum in Sydney, Robert Etheridge Jr., wrote to Crawford and asked him to send the skull to the Trustees of the Museum for examination (Macintosh 1969:193), whereupon Crawford replied that he had forwarded the skull to Messrs. Turner and Henderson [a Sydney firm of stationers], where it would be "on view for some time". In the same letter, Crawford also mentioned that he was currently "in communication with some friends in England on the subject of the monetary value of the skull and trust soon to hear their opinion" (ibid.). A few days later, an item appeared in a weekly review column of a Sydney newspaper, stating that Turner and Henderson had received "A curiosity in the form of a petrified skull of an aboriginal ... from one of their customers residing at Walcha". "The shape of the skull", continued the report, "a protruding jaw and a low retreating forehead indicates a nature of almost exclusively animal propensities. This unique relic of past times will be submitted to the authorities of the Museum for inspection" (ibid. :194) .

On 6th October 1896, the Trustees of the Australian Museum met to evaluate the Talgai cranium. Among the people present at the meeting were the Curator, Robert Etheridge the Secretary, S. Sinclair; J.T. Wilson, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Sydney; and T.W. Edgeworth David, Professor of Geology at the University of Sydney (ibid. :193). As Etheridge recorded, the fossil human skull having been exhibited, "It was agreed to inform the proprietor that the Trustees are ready to favourably consider the purchase of the skull, but would like to know what sum is asked for it" (ibid.).

In a letter dated 7th October 1896, Sinclair wrote to Messrs. Turner and Henderson, informing them that the Trustees are "much interested" in the fossil skull, "and think that the Australian Museum would be a most suitable place to deposit it, as it would be then accessible for public information and scientific description.. "They would be quite willing to purchase it", continued Sinclair, "if your friend would be kind enough to name a price" (ibid. ).

On 8th October 1896, Etheridge wrote directly to Crawford, stating that the Museum had asked Messrs. Turner and Henderson to ascertain the value which Crawford put upon the skull (ibid .) . In a letter written on October 11th, Crawford replied to Etheridge as follows:

[186] Following this rebuff, Sinclair wrote to Crawford on October 13th, 1896:

In a Report to the Trustees dated 30th October 1896, Etheridge expressed his regret that Crawford could not "be induced to give a definite answer re the sale of the specimen" (ibid: 194). Then, on the following day, Etheridge, who had apparently been away from Sydney, wrote again to Crawford:

On the 18th of November 1896, Crawford replied to Etheridge:

As will be detailed later in the paper, the 1914 reappearance of the Talgai cranium was notable for at least three reasons. Firstly, the preliminary scientific description of the cranium was given by none other than Edgeworth David and J.T. Wilson, both of whom wrote as though they had seen the skull for the first time in 1914. Secondly, the skull was hailed as a dramatic confirmation of the Woodward-Elliot Smith interpretation of the Piltdown remains, and came at a time when the interpretation had been under strong attack. Thirdly the actions of Elliot Smith just prior to the "surprise" unveiling of the cranium in 1914 might be interpreted as indicating foreknowledge on his part. In view of these facts, a number of questions arise. The one that I wish to consider at this stage of the paper involves possible connections between Talgai and the Piltdown hoax: Is it likely that Elliot Smith and/or Woodward found out about Talgai as a result of the 1896 episode described above? Certainly, the Talgai fossil, with its evidently human cranium and its gigantic ape-like canine teeth, might have provided a plausible model for the Piltdown fabrication.

POSSIBLE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN THE 1896 TALGAI

EVALUATION AND THE PILTDOWN HOAX

J T. Wilson, on the other hand, did not merely know Elliot Smith and admire his work. He also carried on a voluminous correspondence which is liberally sprinkled with references to evolutionary theory in general and human anatomy in particular. It was therefore with great interest that I perused the Wilson-Elliot Smith correspondence for the relevant period in the Sydney University [189] Archives. Elliot Smith, after obtaining his medical qualifications under Wilson, and demonstrating in anatomy at the University of Sydney for several years, departed for England circa April 1896. For the next thirteen years the two men corresponded frequently and discussed many items of mutual interest. Judging from the correspondence which has survived, which would seem to represent a fairly complete set of the letters written by Elliot Smith, the main aim of these discussions was to speculate about how such items could be useful in furthering each other's careers, and in generally advancing the course of evolutionary theory in anatomy. The letters of 1896 and l897 contain no discernible references to the Talgai cranium. This of itself is very strange, as there are mentions of many other topics which one would expect to be of far less interest to the two men. That Elliot Smith realised that British scientists of the period were very desirous of obtaining data relating to the Australian Aborigines is certainly evident from the correspondence. In a letter from Cambridge dated 18th November 1896, Elliot Smith wrote:

"Among anthropologists over here there is an extreme desire to know something definite of the soft parts of the Australian aboriginal. A full account of the myology of even a single individual aboriginal would be welcomed over here. Could you get someone to do the work – your new demonstrator next year?"

Given the fact that a small group of Trustees, of which Wilson was a member, had, through their Secretary pronounced the Talgai cranium to be "of great interest to Anthropologists and Palaeontologists", and given that a contemporary newspaper report had stated that "The shape of the skull a protruding jaw and low retreating forehead indicates a nature of almost exclusively animal propensities", it seems patently incredible that Wilson would not have informed Elliot Smith about the skull. And lest it be thought that perhaps The University of Sydney Anatomy Department in general, and Wilson in particular were not overly interested in human evolution, let me make two points. The first concerns a visit to Sydney by Wilhelm Krause, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Berlin. On 9th July 1897, Krause read a paper on "The Remains of Pithecanthropus Erectus" to the University of Sydney Medical Society. In this paper, Krause compared the external configurations and cubic capacities of the skulls of the Neanderthals, the Australian Aborigines, the Anthropoid apes and Pithecanthropus [also known as 'Java Man']. The single extant tooth of Pithecanthropus was described, Krause comparing it "with the teeth of apes and of the Australian native black in point of size and contour". Finally Krause discussed "The bearing of the question upon the Darwinian theory of evolution, including the 'missing link' n . This paper was attended by a "very large" audience, which included Professor Wilson (Hermes "Medical Supplement", 13th August 1897:XX). In the course of Krause's visit to Australia he was able to obtain, through the "extreme kindness" of [among others] [190] J.T. Wilson, "at least two hundred aboriginal skulls for scientific examination". "Certain is it", wrote Krause a year later, "that no anatomist has ever had so many skulls in hand of such an interesting and quite primitive race of mankind, as the Australian Aboriginal ... Every one who has some interest in Australian scientific work and some knowledge of anatomy could and should help here. I do not speak about the masters of science in Australia [men like Wilson, presumably]; they know by themselves what may be done, without me ... gather every aboriginal skull, present it or sell it to the next museum, accurately registering everything which you may find out about the age, tribe and so on ... Last but not least, do gather aboriginal brains. There is very little known about them" (Hermes "Medical Supplement", 24th November 1989:XCV).

My second point concerns Wilson's known reaction to the Talgai cranium when reintroduced to it eighteen years later After Crawford submitted a photograph of the skull to Edgeworth David in 1914, David showed it to Wilson, who "immediately perceiving the possibilities, expressed a strong desire to have the specimen itself forwarded to Sydney" (Smith, S.A. 1918:351f). A newspaper account of Wilson and David's unveiling of the cranium to the British Association in August 1914 reported that "If the Pleistocene age of the skull can be established, it will rank in importance with the famous skulls of Neanderthal and Spey, surpassing them in interest as far as Australia is concerned, for it would represent the earliest aborigines of this continent and be an epoch-marking discovery..." (Sydney Morning Herald 22nd August 1914, p.9). And the main burden of the "preliminary communication" through which Wilson and Edgeworth David introduced the cranium to international science was apparently to establish a Pleistocene antiquity for the skull. The surviving abstract of this communication points out that "A few miles from the spot where the skull was picked up bones of many types of extinct animals of Pleistocene Age have been discovered, and as the present skull is in at least as advanced a stage of fossilization as the bones of Diprotodon, Nototherium, etc., in adjacent regions. it may provisionally be assumed that this human skull is also of Pleistocene Age". The fact that the shape of the skull has been distorted, presumably "by steady pressure due to the weight of an original thick overburden of clay, is in harmony with the evidence as to the high antiquity of the skull". The cranium "is far older than any other aboriginal skulls that have ever been obtained in Australia", Wilson and David conclude, "and it proves that in Australia man attained to geological antiquity (Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science Australia 1914:531).

These two points taken in conjunction force us to the conclusion that Wilson must have been very interested indeed in the Talgai skull when he first examined it in 1896, and strongly suggest that he would have informed Elliot Smith about it. Why then do not Elliot Smith's letters make mention of the skull? My speculative answer to this question is that Wilson did inform Elliot Smith

[191] of the existence and nature of the Talgai cranium in 1896, and that any written discussion of the matter by Elliot Smith was censored from the correspondence. Indeed, a perusal of the surviving correspondence could suggest that some sort of censorship has been practiced. Assuming that Wilson wrote to Elliot Smith about the Talgai cranium at the end of 1896, one would expect Elliot Smith to have written a number of letters on the subject from early 1897 onwards. In fact there seems to be a significant gap in Elliot Smith's letters for this very period. For the seven months March through September 1897, there are only two surviving letters from Elliot Smith. This contrasts with the preceding six months from September 1896 through February 1897, for which there are seven letters. Moreover, as will be described shortly, one of the two surviving letters from the formerly mentioned period has had its concluding section torn away. Could this indicate censorship, presumably on the part of Wilson? No doubt this line of thought will seem quite gratuitous at this point in the argument, but I hope that it will appear somewhat less gratuitous by the time this paper draws to a close, and a good deal less gratuitous by the time I complete my magnum opus on Piltdown.

What then was the purpose of Elliot Smith's anonymous trip to Sydney? One possibility which cannot be discounted is that Elliot Smith came home because he was suffering from a psychiatric problem of some kind (an hypothesis which would help to explain the anonymity of the trip). Certainly the August 14 [192] letter contains the following passage which is quite uncharacteristic of the normally ebullient Elliot Smith:

And the concluding section of the letter, which immediately follows this apparent description of depression, has been torn away, suggesting that Wilson, or someone who had access to his correspondence after his death, saw fit to indulge in a little judicious censorship. One problem about interpreting the passage just quoted is that Elliot Smith does not specify the place from which he left in an apparently depressed state. In context however, it seems most likely that the place in question was Sydney, in which case the depression (if that is what is was) may well have come upon him at the end of his Australian sojourn, rather than having been the precipitating cause of the visit. Against the hypothesis that it was a psychiatric problem which brought Elliot Smith back to Australia in 1897 is the fact that the August 14 letter makes it quite clear that, while in Australia, Elliot Smith was actively helping Wilson and Baldwin Spencer, Professor of Zoology at the University of Melbourne, with their work on Australian marsupials Thus, the Australian visit would seem to have been a working trip rather than one of rest and recuperation. And if it was a working trip, what are the odds that one of the major items on Elliot Smith's agenda would have been to discuss the Talgai cranium with Wilson? Indeed, it must surely be possible that the passage censored from the August 14 letter referred to the cranium, and was excised by Wilson because he wanted to make quite sure that their knowledge of the cranium at this early stage was kept secret.

Putting these three letters together with each other, and with the letters from 1896, three major points emerge:

The conjunction of points (2) and (3) strikes me as absolutely incredible. Although the surviving photograph is small (3" x 25") and not well-focussed, [It is too poor in quality to reproduce here - Ed.] there can be absolutely no doubt that it represents what science now knows as the Talgai cranium. Nor, one would think, could there be any doubt that it represents the skull of a human being, and not that of an animal. Indeed, even if it were to be interpreted as the skull of an ape, the British Museum should have been extremely interested in a fossil ape skull found in Queensland, of all places! Certainly when Wilson was shown the very same photograph in 1914, his reaction was, as I have already mentioned, quite unequivocal. "Immediately perceiving the possibilities" of the skull, he "expressed a strong desire to have the specimen itself forwarded to Sydney". Surely if the poor [194] focussing of the photograph left the British Museum people in any doubt as to what it depicted, they could easily have written back to Crawford requesting a clearer photograph.

And who, in the British Museum at that time would have had the motivation to arrive at such an incredible decision, and the authority to make it stick? I cannot claim to be privy to all the motivations and machinations of the British Museum hierarchy during this period, but one obvious candidate springs to mind– Arthur Smith Woodward, Assistant Keeper between 1892 and 1901, and Keeper of the Department of Geology from 1901 onwards, a man who by 1896 had already received the Lyell Medal from the Geological Society, and established himself as Britain's leading palaeontologist, with well over 200 published items to his credit (Cooper 1945-48). Could Woodward, after consultation with Elliot Smith perhaps, have decided to defer the scientific unveiling of the Talgai cranium until a more opportune moment arose?

Alternatively, Woodward may well have found out about the existence and nature of the Talgai cranium through Robert Etheridge Jr. Woodward and Etheridge had been colleagues in the British Museum between 1882 and 1887. That the two men kept in touch after 1887 is evidenced by an article on an Australian fossil fish which they jointly published in the early 1890s (Etheridge and Woodward 1891). Indeed, when Etheridge died in 1920, Woodward wrote his obituary for the journal Nature (Woodward 1920). Two points about their collaborative article may be worth noting. One is that the fossil fish had been found in "The Rolling Downs Formation of Central Queensland" (the Talgai cranium having been unearthed in the Darling Downs of South-Eastern Queensland). The second is that Woodward had previously written articles on a specimen of the very same genus of fossil fish (Belonostomus ), which had been discovered (as the Piltdown relics were later to be) in Sussex (Cooper 1945-48:91f).

Summing up this admittedly speculative section on possible connections between the 1896 examination of Talgai and the likely perpetrators of Piltdown, we may say that, while it seems doubtful that Edgeworth David would have informed Elliot Smith about Talgai, the likelihood that Wilson would have done so seems high. Moreover, there is a distinct possibility that Woodward may have learned of the cranium independently, either through Crawford's enquiry to the British Museum or via Etheridge. With these possibilities in mind, let us now examine the "official" scientific unveiling of the cranium in 1914.

THE "BIG EVENT" OF THE SYDNEY BRITISH

ASSOCIATION MEETING

On April 1st 1914 Crawford wrote to Edgeworth David and enclosed his indistinct photograph of the Talgai skull. "Knowing that you are an authority and interested in such matters", wrote Crawford, [195] "I am taking the liberty of thus addressing you and trust that you will kindly favour me with your opinion as to whether such a skull is of any value" (op. cit., note 11). The letter makes no mention of the 1896 episode, and one can only speculate as to whether Crawford knew that he was addressing one of the scientists who had evaluated the cranium at that time. As has already been mentioned, David then showed the photograph to Wilson who, "immediately perceiving" the potential importance of the skull, expressed a strong wish that the specimen itself should be sent to Sydney.

We shall return to Crawford, David and Wilson in a moment, but let us first consider some episodes which belong chronologically at roughly this place, and which involve Elliot Smith.

Elliot Smith then launches into a detailed exposition of the circumstances under which Dawson came upon the first Piltdown fragments, and brought them to the attention of Woodward. Following the discovery of further pieces of cranium and of a jawbone by Dawson and Woodward, a reconstruction of "Piltdown man" had been made. However since that time, nothing further of any consequence had been discovered in the Piltdown gravel pit, even though investigations are still proceeding. "Indeed", the article continues, "the day before he left England Dr. Elliot Smith and an assistant went to Piltdown and did some digging, but the only thing they turned up was the tooth of a rhinoceros ...".

"The jaw of the Piltdown skull", Elliot Smith told the interviewer, "is far and away the most primitive of any jaw ever found, though in some respects the jaw of what is known as the 'pithecanthropus erectus', discovered in Java some years ago, is much more degraded. It is doubtful if the latter can really be connected up with the primitive line of human descent, the line which led to modern man ... The interest in the Piltdown skull is that it represents a type that has advanced a considerable way along the lines which eventually led to the modern type of man, and yet in the jaw there is retained the most [196] ape-like condition that has ever been found in any human remains ... As far as the brain is concerned, the Piltdown man is definitely human ... and yet, if you consider the jaw –well if that jaw had been found without any teeth, or if it had been found separate from the skull, no one would have hesitated to call it an ape's jaw. It is, however, inconceivable that two of these curious, primitive ape-like beings, each leaving complementary parts, should be destroyed side by side at the same time".

In response to a question about the kind of life which the Piltdown race might have led, Elliot Smith replied: "I suppose ... the life they led was very much like that of the Tasmanians, who are now extinct. So far as equipment was concerned, the Tasmanians ... were certainly the lowest race on earth. They were more isolated than other races, and retained up to modern times an equipment not very much greater than that of a man of the Piltdown stage". At this point, Elliot Smith produced a rough piece of flint found in the Piltdown excavations, and observed that it had presumably served as some kind of implement. "I think the Australian blacks are now the lowest type of human being we can find, especially in the south", Elliot Smith went on. "Many of those in the north are more cultured than the southern blacks, as a result of contact with the people of other parts of the world".

Elliot Smith then recalled that, several months before he had first learned of the Piltdown finds, he had delivered an address to the British Association in Dundee, in which he had put forward the theory that "in the ancestors of man the brain reached its human status before the features of the face. My argument was, briefly, that the feature which essentially distinguishes man from the apes is his mental characteristics ... in other words that man reached his human estate by virtue of his development of the brain, and that afterwards his features became refined as a result of his definite selection. As his esthetic taste became elevated, he exercised a higher mental discrimination in selecting his female partner". It is hardly surprising then that, when "Piltdown man" appeared shortly after this speech was made, Elliot Smith was to hail him as the transitional form linking modern man with his more simian progenitors. How obvious it was that the expanded brain of "Piltdown man" had facilitated aesthetic preferences in mating, thereby creating selection pressures which were to refine away the ugly, ape-like jaw and teeth of his breed.

To the-evidence of this July 2nd interview, let us add that of a roughly contemporaneous article on Elliot Smith in Hermes, the magazine of the University of Sydney. This article, which was obviously based upon an interview with the visiting Elliot Smith, says in part:

Summing up the significance of these indications of Elliot Smith's preoccupations following his arrival in Sydney, and prior to the 'surprise' unveiling of the Talgai cranium, we should note four things: The first is that Elliot Smith obviously had Piltdown and its implications for human evolutionary theory very much on his mind. The second is that he was significantly concerned with the conjunction in 'Piltdown man' of an apparently human cranium and an apparently ape-like mandible. The third is that he readily drew parallels between Piltdown and the Australian and Tasmanian Aborigines. And the fourth point is that Elliot Smith wanted to claim foresight for having put forward a theory in pre-Piltdown days which predicted that the 'missing link' would be likely to have a modern brain, allied to more simian facial features.

Taken by themselves or out of context, there is nothing terribly surprising about any of these points. Piltdown man was a preoccupation of many evolutionary biologists and anthropologists of the day; the conjunction of Piltdown's simian jaw and human cranium had already given rise to much debate; the Australian and Tasmanian Aborigines were widely regarded as two of the most "primitive" races in existence; and any scientist who indulges in theoretical speculation is likely to find reasons for believing that one of his hypotheses has been confirmed. However, taken together, and in the context of the way in which the Talgai cranium was soon to be interpreted, it seems to me that the July 2nd interview in particular might well indicate that Elliot Smith had prior knowledge both of the imminence of the unveiling, and of the nature of the skull itself. And the plausibility of this hypothesis gains considerably from a consideration of Elliot Smith's overall strategy and frame of mind in relation to the 1914 British Association meeting.

In many ways Elliot Smith's homecoming resembled the return of a conquering hero. Here he was, having made the big leagues overseas, returning for a triumphal performance in the company of some of the world's most distinguished scientists. What a perfect opportunity to simultaneously impress his Sydney mentors, debate with eminent colleagues, and sway the Australian public with his home-grown but internationally matured erudition and [198] insight. From Elliot Smith's point of view, the meeting had two dramatic highlights. One was of course David and Wilson's unveiling of the Talgai cranium, and we shall learn in a few pages how swiftly the Talgai cranium, and we shall learn in a few pages how swiftly Elliot Smith capitalized on that event. The other dramatic highlight was bound up with Elliot Smith's attempted contribution to cultural anthropology–his notion of "hyperdiffusionism", according to which virtually everything of cultural value in indigenous societies was to he explained as having "diffused", either by trade or by actual migrations, from the allegedly primal source in Ancient Egypt. The particular event which took place at the 1914 meeting was subsequently described as the "cornerstone" of Elliot Smith's hyperdiffusionistic edifice (Dawson 1938:66). It involved the mummified remains of a Melanesian, and is worth recounting at some length.

While visiting the Museum of his old Medical School at the University of Sydney in July 1914, Elliot Smith took the opportunity of examining one of the exhibits, a mummy from the Torres Straits. A detailed account of what followed has been provided by D.M.S. Watson, a palaeontologist from University College London who was present at the moment of relevation.

Having reached these extraordinary conclusions, Elliot Smith tried them out, firstly in the concluding lecture of a series of public lectures on 'Ancient Egypt' which he delivered at the University of Sydney towards the end of July (Sydney Morning Herald, 31st July 1914), and secondly in a sectional paper which he read in Melbourne on August 14th (Smith, G.E., 1929:25ff).

Perhaps because of the sudden and dramatic way in which Elliot: Smith produced these apparent flashes of insight, the majority of his listeners seem to have accepted his relevations as unpremeditated and spontaneous. However, knowing a little of the background, one must have serious reservations. The Torres Strait mummy had been in the collections of the Macleay museum at the University of Sydney since 1888 (Pretty 1969:26), the same year that Elliot Smith first enrolled as an undergraduate. In those days the University was far from being the sprawling, populous place which it is today, and it seems incredible that Elliot Smith could have spent over eight years, first as a student and subsequently on the staff of the Medical School, without becoming acquainted with the starkly grotesque mummy which is one of the Museum's prize exhibits. Indeed, Professor J.V.S. Megaw tells us that "many years previously" to the studies of Egyptian mummification which Elliot Smith carried out in Cairo during the first decade of the twentieth century, the Australian anatomist had observed the Torres Straits mummy in the Macleay Museum (Megaw:1973). And, in the previously discussed newspaper interview which Elliot Smith granted immediately after his arrival in Sydney on July 2nd 1914, he chose to illustrate his theory of hyperdiffusionism with the observation that mummification, after originating in Egypt and spreading in a long arc through India, Ceylon, Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, had eventually penetrated (presumably via the Torres Straits) as far as Northern Australia". So once again, Elliot Smith's pronouncements may well be taken as indicating foreknowledge of an event which he should have known nothing about.

Moreover, there is some evidence which could indicate that, prior to his return to Australia in July 1914, Elliot Smith used a colleague to check that the Torres Straits mummy was as he remembered it in its old place in the Macleay Museum. The Museum's visitors book, now held in the University of Sydney Archives, indicates that on February 3rd 1914, a Dr. Hamlyn Harris of Brisbane visited the Macleay Museum and examined the mummy. Since in 1912 Harris had published several accounts of similar mummies from the Queensland Museum, it seems likely that Elliot Smith, who by 1912 was acknowledged as the world authority on mummification, would have been in touch with Harris on this matter. Assuming this to be true, might Elliot Smith have used such a contact as a pretext for asking Hamlyn Harris to check out the Macleay Museum mummy prior to the July 1914 relevations?

[201] Certainly two additional facts relating to this matter are suggestive. The first is that, despite making a special trip to the Macleay Museum to see the mummy, Harris seems not to have subsequently published anything about it, and not even to have left any notes on the topic (Pretty 1969:26). The other is that, in a letter which advises of his impending visit, Harris gives as his contact in Sydney "the Curator, Australian Museum" (i.e. Robert Etheridge Jr., correspondence and former colleague of Arthur Smith Woodward). Quite possibly I am drawing an unwarrantedly sinister inferences about what could have been nothing more than the cooperation of scientific colleagues and the workings of 'normal science', but I find it difficult to believe that Elliot Smith's 1914 epiphanies regarding the Macleay Museum mummy were anything [other] than a pre-meditated and stage-managed performance. Certainly if Elliot Smith really believed the mummy to be as consequential for worldwide theories of culture as he claimed it was, it seems extremely odd that he never published a serious scientific description of the specimen (ibid:. 27). In fact, in his subsequent diffusionistic works, Elliot Smith seems to have been far more interested in using the mummy as propaganda, than in producing a detailed and objective account of it. All in all, Elliot Smith's actions regarding the Macleay mummy are consistent with the hypothesis that he set out, in a cynical and premeditated fashion, to exploit it for his own intellectual and vocational ends. And if such motivations are admitted in this instance, what light does this cast upon his behaviour in respect of Talgai? But we have spent long enough in the murky regions of Elliot Smith's motivations. Let us now return to our account of Wilson and David's unveiling of the skull, and of the circumstances surrounding it.

On the 23rd of July Crawford replied, stating that he had forwarded the skull by rail, and requesting a valuation. Four days later David wrote back with the news that he and Wilson had given the skull a brief examination, and had formed the opinion that it possessed scientific value. Having emphasized that Australian scientific institutions have limited funds, David asked Crawford to name a fair price. And, in his final paragraph, David requested information about the provenance of the skull:

[202] "Will you kindly also let me know when and where, and under what conditions you found the specimens [sic]; especially in regard to the depth below the surface, and if there were any other bones or fragments of bones in the neighbourhood or in association with it" (ibid.).

Replying in a letter dated 2nd August, Crawford gave a version of the discovery of the skull which, like the one which apparently caused Etheridge to lose interest in 1896, held out little hope that the skull's geological provenance could ever be clearly established:

Replying on August 15th, David averred that it was indeed unfortunate that the skull had not been found in situ, as dating it would now be impossible. Nonetheless, "it is, to judge by its state, pretty old", being "probably the oldest aboriginal skull yet found in Australia". What is more, from the anatomical point of view it is "distinctly interesting". With regard to the value of the skull, "Professor Wilson and I have carefully considered the matter ... and consider that it would be worth about twenty- five pounds, and would be prepared to purchase it from yourself for that amount, and in his account which he hopes to write later of the skull Professor Wilson would of course associate your name with its discovery" (op. cit., note 14).

Crawford having apparently replied that he regarded twenty-five pounds as a totally inadequate offer, David responded that the real scientific value of the skull could not be finally estimated until various tests had been completed and the skull had been exhibited to the British Association. Once this had been done, its true monetary value would be known, and "we will set about raising funds to purchase it for Australia" (ibid.).

The official unveiling to the Anthropology Section of the British Association finally took place on August 21st, and was universally accorded to be a stunning success. The September issue of The Scientific Australian observed that the happening was described as the 'big event' of the British Association's meeting in Sydney. As the Sydney part of the meeting included nearly two hundred papers and addresses, some of them delivered by world-famous scientists like Lord Rutherford, Sir Oliver Lodge and Professor William Bateson, this was certainly not faint praise. And in 1915, an item in the prestigious British journal Nature pronounced the unveiling to be "Perhaps the most remarkable incident of the meeting of the British Association in Australia" (Nature 96 (2393), 9th September 1915). Recalling the event a decade later, Edgeworth David was to write

A perusal of accounts of the unveiling makes two things clear. The first is that the event came as a surprise to the great majority of the people present. The second is that Wilson and David at no time let on that they had seen the skull prior to 1914. Consider for example the following report from a contemporary newspaper:

As I have already indicated, the main burden of the "preliminary communication" through which Wilson and David unveiled the skull seems to have been to minimize the difficulties relating to the establishment of provenance, and to argue for the geological antiquity of the fossil. But the circumstance which really helped Wilson and David to carry the day was the Piltdownian ethos in which the communication was expounded.

In such a Piltdownian context, the finding of a highly mineralized skull with a brain-casing of human form and a pair of gigantic canines in the upper jaw was little short of sensational. In a lecture delivered in the Sydney Town Hall on the same day as the David and Wilson performance, Elliot Smith drew the obvious moral. Some authorities had refused to believe that the human brain pan and huge canine tooth found at Piltdown came from the same skull. Now, declared Elliot Smith, "the finding of the Talgai skull, with its great dog teeth", had "finally settled that doubt" about the Piltdown remains. (Scientific Australian September 1914:5). The Talgai cranium constituted the first Pleistocene remains to have been found in Australia, he observed, and represented the real Proto-Australian. Its discovery would no doubt "make this meeting of the British Association famous in the history of anthropology", a remark which the patriotic audience greeted with applause (Sydney Morning Herald 22nd August 1914:9).

In a letter dated 29th August 1914, which was received by David immediately after his return from Queensland on the evening of September 2nd, Crawford let go a bombshell. He had read a newspaper report of the unveiling of the cranium, and had noted with displeasure that the information given regarding the circumstances of obtaining the specimen for exhibition was "most misleading" (The report, which appeared in The Daily Telegraph on August 22nd, alleged in one place that the skull had been discovered by David and Wilson, and in another place that David and Wilson had obtained it direct from a stockman). Crawford therefore requested that David should carefully pack up the skull and deliver it to a Mr. A. Minnett, a Sydney friend and business associate, whom Crawford had separately instructed to "take possession" on his behalf (op. cit., note 11).

This request produced a flurry of activity. On the 3rd and 4th of September, Mr. Louis Schaeffer, Chief Laboratory Assistant and Photographer in Wilson's Anatomy Department, made a series of twelve glass negatives of the cranium (Macintosh 1969:190f). In a lengthy epistle written on September 3rd, David apologized to Crawford for the misleading newspaper report, and stated that he had rung up a Daily Telegraph reporter and asked him to publish a correction. Regarding the antiquity of the skull, David had this to say:

And, by way of justifying his previous offer of twenty-five pounds for the skull, David included a hand-written opinion from Professor Sollas of Oxford, whom he described as "the best known of English anthropologists". Dated September 3rd, this effusion of Sollas is worth quoting in its entirety.

In the apparent desire to get the most from the cranium before handing it over to Minnett, David then decided to comply with Etheridge's request to allow the Australian Museum to make a replica. In a letter to Schaeffer written on Monday September 7th, David stated that, on Saturday night last, Wilson had requested David to instruct Schaeffer to send the skull immediately to Etheridge, with a view to Etheridge making a cast. Moulds were then produced at the Australian Museum between the 7th and 13th of September (Macintosh 1969:191).

The Edgeworth David correspondence files in the University of Sydney Archives contain a terse memorandum from the Curator of the Australian Museum which may well be relevant to the above events. Dated September 15th 1914, and addressed to Professor T.W.E. David, it reads

Since Crawford had formerly been an auctioneer in Queensland, and since this information consistently appeared on the printed stationery which Crawford had used in his letters to David, there can be little doubt as to the identity of the "Enterprising Auctioneer". Etheridge may have been referring only to the fact that the Australian Museum had finished making its cast, but the [207] second sentence is puzzling, suggesting that some legal manoeuver was involved as well, in order to prevent Crawford from selling the cranium overseas. This suggestion is confirmed by a letter dated October 21st 1914, in which David informs Crawford's Sydney contact Minnett that, if Crawford were to offer the skull for sale outside Australia this procedure would "as you know ... be absolutely illegal" (op. cit., note 14).

In fact, the haste in making a cast seems to have been unnecessary. For, in a letter written on September 5th, Crawford reveals that he had been palliated by David's apology over the matter of the inaccurate news report, and that for the time being he is quite happy to leave the cranium in David's hands for further examination. As is revealed by a handwritten annotation on the back of this letter, however, David, who must have been very busy at the time the letter was received, had no time even to read it over, and left someone (presumably his secretary) with instructions to "kindly make excuses" to Crawford (op. cit.. note 11).

In a letter written to Crawford on September 18th, Minnett advised that, following a discussion with Dr. S.A. Smith of the Sydney University Department of Anatomy, Smith's brother Professor G. Elliot Smith had produced a valuation of the Talgai skull. Expressed in the form of a letter to Minnett, this valuation reads as follows:

Following this more generous valuation, Crawford was inspired to offer the skull for sale at one hundred and fifty pounds, a figure which was quickly accepted by David and Wilson, although not without a certain amount of protest (David to Minnett, 21st October 1914, op, cit., note 14). The task of raising this sum of money was then assumed by Elliot Smith, who persuaded a wealthy Sydney politician, the Hon. Joynton Smith, to purchase the cranium and present it to the University of Sydney (Macintosh 1974:18 and Nature 96(2393) September 9th 1915). In a newspaper report prior to the formal presentation, David opined that the skull "is one of the most important of the historical finds in any part of the world, and certainly the most [208] interesting anthropological discovery yet made in Australia" (The Sun, June 15th 1915). Then, at a public meeting held on 18th June 1915 in conjunction with the presentation, David and S.A. Smith unleashed a fulsome range of superlatives. With what we might describe, in the light of his previous negotiation!) with Crawford, as a certain amount of unconscious irony, David described the skull as "worth its weight in gold". Then, with a fine disregard for the literal meanings of words, he added that "The University of Sydney and men of science throughout the world were under a deep debt of gratitude to Mr. Joynton Smith for purchasing the skull, which was undoubtedly a priceless specimen" (paraphrased in Nature 96 (2393), September 9th 1915). S.A. Smith proclaimed that one of the canine teeth of the Talgai fossil was "the largest human tooth so far discovered". Moreover, the "extremely primitive" anatomical characteristics of the cranium were such as to render it worthy of being ranked with what in 1915 were widely regarded as the only plausible candidates for missing link status– viz. "the prehistoric Heidelberg jaw and the Piltdown skull" (ibid.)

On July 5th 1915, Etheridge wrote a letter to David which may throw some light on the problem of whether, during the events surrounding the 1914 unveiling, the two men were aware that they had previously evaluated the cranium in 1896. Under the heading "Talgai Skull", Etheridge writes

On the following day, David replied:

Two things seem clear from this fascinating exchange. One is that Etheridge, despite having been the one who initiated the 1896 negotiations with Crawford, had quite forgotten the affair until accidentally coming across the correspondence with Crawford in the Museum archives. As a perusal of Etheridge's bibliography (Records of the Australian Museum XV, Sydney 1926:27:5-27) makes quite clear, such amnesia is hardly surprising. During his career Etheridge had written a myriad of articles on various fossils from all over Australia, and must have entered into negotiations with hundreds of amateur fossil collectors, naturalists and other people who had possession of potentially interesting specimens. What is more, Etheridge [209] appears to have held firm theoretical views which would have increased the likelihood of his forgetting about an apparently ancient human fossil from Australia. As we have already noted, he was committed to the belief that man had not inhabited Australia for a geologically significant period of time. Beliefs such as this, in the context of the Darwin-inspired debates which racked the life-sciences during the late 19th century, were likely to be held (or denied) with a considerable investment of emotion.

The second point is that, having uncovered the 1896 correspondence Etheridge seems to have realised the strange light it threw upon the behaviour of Professors David and Wilson in 1914, when both of them wrote and acted as though they had never seen the Talgai cranium until a few weeks before the unveiling. This is indicated both by Etheridge's reference to Crawford's having "evidently" failed to obtain the "opinion of some Professors", and by his immediately following statement that "The whole affair is curious". In fact, it could even be that Etheridge, in as tactful a fashion as possible, was actually inviting David to admit that he and Wilson had had prior knowledge of the skull.

Let us consider the possibilities here. Could David have genuinely forgotten, as Etheridge seems to have done? Certainly David had been a busy man between 1896 and 1914. In fact, soon after the 1896 evaluation he had become embroiled in what was probably the most momentous event of his distinguished scientific career. Earlier in 1896 the Royal Society of London had outfitted an expedition to Funafuti Atoll, in the Ellice Group, to test rival theories on the origin of coral reefs. Led by W.J. Sollas, this expedition had failed in its main objective of boring the atoll to a depth of 500 or 600 feet (Hermes October 28, 1897:3). David had then organized an Australian expedition which succeeded not only in drilling more than 1000 feet into the atoll, but also in effecting a subsidiary boring under the waters of the lagoon (Woodward and Watts 1938:270). The results of David's expedition were widely interpreted as refuting Sollas' theory of the origin of coral reefs and confirming Charles Darwin's theory of secular subsidence, to which David also subscribed. Upon his return home to the University of Sydney in October 1897, David was accorded a hero's welcome (Hermes October 28, 1897:5). Personally I doubt that, however exhausting, time-consuming or emotionally stimulating David's Funafuti expedition was, it would have completely erased [210] his memory of the 1896 evaluation of the Talgai cranium. Surely what causes a normal person to forget a particular event is not the subsequent occurrence of an entirely disparate event, albeit a very taxing one. Rather it is the subsequent or prior occurrence of numerous other events of a similar nature to the first one. Somehow it seems that Etheridge's job situation rather than David's, would have tended to promote amnesia in regard to the 1896 viewing of the Talgai skull. And what is more, unlike Etheridge, David does not seem to have held any preconceptions about man's lack of geological antiquity in Australia.

When we come to consider J.T. Wilson, the possibility that he would have forgotten the 1896 event seems even more remote than in the case of David. Not only did he have a job in which the evaluation of fossils would have been few and far between. Not only did he lack a prior commitment to a conservative estimate of human antiquity in Australia. In addition, Wilson espoused a theoretical position, deriving from his evolutionary interpretation of anatomy, which should have inscribed the special features of the Talgai cranium indelibly in his memory. And if he did decide the cranium was important in 1896, if he did fail to act upon this opinion, and if he did fail even to recognize the very same fossil when called upon to describe it in 1914, where is the "Wilsonian thoroughness" with which, according to the writer of his definitive obituary, he executed his duties as a Trustee of the Australian Museum? (Hill 1948-49:650).

Even if it were to be allowed that neither David nor Wilson gave the Talgai skull a second thought between 1896 and 1914, it seems inconceivable that they could have done what they did in 1914 without one of them remarking to the other that he remembered having seen the cranium before. As Macintosh has aptly remarked:

To men of David and Wilson's training and interests, the skull should have been absolutely unforgettable. Thus I conclude that in the way they unveiled it in 1914, David and Wilson were guilty, at the very least, of lack of candour.

Smith then gives a broad hint about the nature of the evolutionary mechanism which allegedly converted the "missing link" into modern man. As one might have expected, he here seems to be following his older brother in believing that the expansion of the human brain facilitated the operation of aesthetic preferences in the selection of a mate, which resulted in the gradual refinement of simian facial characteristics:

Indeed, following his return to England, Elliot Smith himself played a crucial role in pointing up the significance of Talgai in relation to Piltdown. In February 1915, we find him showing lantern slides of the Talgai cranium to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society (Millar 1974:149). Later in the same year we find that he has lent his slides to Woodward, who is using them to argue, as Dawson was also to do, that the form of the upper canine teeth in the Talgai specimen suggests that they must have interlocked with the canines in the lower jaw, "like those of an ape, and precisely like those of Piltdown man" (ibid .). As the Australian Museum archives indicate, in September 1916 the Museum was preparing to send a cast of the Talgai cranium to Elliot Smith in Manchester ((Macintosh 1969:192) And, finally, in December 1916 we find Elliot Smith reading his [213] brother's Piltdown-oriented account of the Talgai cranium to the Royal Society (Smith, S.A. 1918:351).

Whether or not Elliot Smith had anything to do with it, a further occurrence which should be noted at this point was the discovery, early in 1915, of the fragments of a second "Piltdown man". Said to have been found by Charles Dawson in a field some two miles distant from the original site, these fragments consisted of two pieces of apparently fossilized skull, plus a molar tooth which was very similar to one of the teeth in the Piltdown jawbone. When this evidence was eventually made public in February 1917, six months after Dawson's death, the doubters who had suggested that the original Piltdown bones had come from two separate animals were decisively silenced. To find matching relics of a man and an ape in close proximity was conceivable if it had happened only once. But the finding of a similar conjunction of relics at an additional site rendered the coincidence theory utterly implausible. In actual fact, coincidence certainly did not play a role, but this was not because the tooth and skull fragments came from the same animal. On the contrary, as we now know, the tooth was from a modern ape, and one of the cranial fragments probably came from the same human skull which had been used to fabricate the first "Piltdown man". In other words the second set of Piltdown remains were as bogus as the first, and were probably the result of a further plant which the hoaxer(s) engineered as a means of circumventing criticism of the original relics. What is of interest from our point of view is the similarity between the implications of the Talgai find, and the implications of the discovery of "Piltdown man, Mark II". In both cases, the association of tooth and cranium was taken as assuaging the major doubt about the original relics. The close temporal proximity between the public exhibition of the Talgai specimen in August 18l4, and the discovery of the second Piltdown man a few months later is suggestive, to say the least. Could it have been that the hoaxer(s), having noted that the unveiling of a skull-tooth association from distant Queensland had removed some of the scepticism about "Piltdown man", decided to produce an additional association which would be regarded as even more convincing because it came from a site much closer to the original gravel pit?

SUMMATION

As the late Professor Macintosh observed of the superbly detailed research which he himself pursued into the many problems surrounding the Talgai cranium:

[214] Although perhaps some would consider that the present paper raises more questions than it answers, one hopes that it has at least sketched out the rudiments of a possible explanation for some of the many enigmas of Talgai. My contention is that the rudiments of such an explanation lie in the fact that the indisputably genuine Talgai fossil was intimately entwined with the undeniably fraudulent "Piltdown man". Just how intimately is a question which future archival research may hopefully answer, but in the meantime, some tentative hypotheses may be in order. The evidence presented in this paper suggests the following conclusions about the way in which Talgai was or might have been entangled with Piltdown. Some of these conclusions are stated less forthrightly than others, because the evidence for them is judged to be less compelling.

(1) Following the 1896 evaluation of the Talgai skull at the Australian Museum, it seems probable that Elliot Smith learned of its existence from Wilson. Moreover, it is likely that one of the major purposes of Elliot Smith's unpublicized return visit to Australia circa August 1897 was to discuss with Wilson the significance of the skull, and its possible utility in advancing either or both of their careers. I suggest that what they jointly decided was to let the skull remain in obscurity until a more opportune time arose for bringing it to the notice of the international scientific community. The absence of any direct references to the cranium in Elliot Smith's surviving letters to Wilson is explained in terms of censorship, probably by Wilson himself, and possibly in response to Etheridge's implication to David in July 1915 that, if "some Professors" had evaluated the cranium in 1896, then there was something "curious" about the way in which it had re-appeared in 1914.

The difficulty with this hypothesis, and it is a difficulty which should not be minimized, is that it depends largely upon evidence of a negative kind. The only positive evidence r have adduced to support it is circumstantial. Obviously the plausibility of this hypothesis is going to depend heavily upon the strength of my yet-to-be-expounded general case for regarding Elliot Smith as one of the Piltdown forgers.

(2) The absurdity of the British Museum's response to the photograph of the Talgai cranium which Crawford sent to that institution "some years" prior to 1914 suggests that some museum official with authority in matters palaeontological had ulterior motives for allowing the fossil to remain in obscurity for a time. It was suggested that the official in question [215] may well have been Woodward, who, possibly in consultation with Elliot Smith, decided to reserve the unveiling of the Talgai cranium for a date which would be more opportune in relation to the unfolding of the Piltdown adventure. And, even if future research were to reveal that Woodward did not learn of the existence of the Talgai specimen through Crawford's enquiry to the British Museum, the possibility would remain that he might have heard about it through his former colleague Etheridge, with whom he had co-authored a paper on another fossil from the Queensland Downs.

(3) Assuming that there is some truth in the first and/or the second of the above conclusions, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Talgai cranium might have served as a kind of prototype oŁ Piltdown man. After all, three inferences in particular would have been likely as a result of even a casual inspection of the Talgai cranium by a trained observer. The first is that the fossil, because it is so heavily encrusted with carbonate, is presumably very ancient. The second is that the shape of the brain-casing, inasmuch as it can be discerned beneath the encrustation, seems reasonably modern. The third is that, because the palate is oblong in shape, and possesses some very large teeth, including and especially two huge canines, the dentition of the cranium might be regarded as distinctly more simian than that of modern men.

Now consider three of the major features of the Piltdown fabrication. Firstly a number of different techniques are known to have been used in the attempt to make the fragments appear ancient. For example, the fragments were stained in various ways, and the partially fossilized ones were chemically treated in an attempt to mineralize the bone (Oakley 1976:12). Secondly the cranium used had a brain-casing of fundamentally modern shape. Thirdly the jaw chosen was in fact that of an ape. It may be coincidental, but the aims of the Piltdown fabricator(s) seem(s) to have been to create a relic which reproduced the more obvious features of the Talgai skull.

(4) Elliot Smith's early arrival for the British Association meeting, the nature of his statements immediately after arrival, his general strategy for the meeting (as illustrated by the incident of the Torres Straits mummy), and the contents of the public address on "Primitive Man" which he delivered a few hours after David and Wilson's "surprise" unveiling of the Talgai skull, together suggest that Elliot Smith had foreknowledge of the skull's existence, and of its possible utility in "confirming" his interpretation of the Piltdown remains.

(5) It is possible that Elliot Smith, perhaps through Wilson (or more improbably, that Woodward, perhaps through Etheridge) may have put Crawford up to sending David the photograph of the skull in April 1914, in what should have been (and but for David's procrastination, would have been) ample time for it to be exhaustively evaluated and included in the program of the British Association meeting.

The main difficulty with this hypothesis is that Crawford's correspondence with David contains nothing to suggest that anyone had put him up to writing. Crawford sounds from his letters as though he is acting purely on his own initiative. His justification for writing to David, that he knows David to be "an authority and interested in such matters", is something which, considering David's eminence as a geologist, a layman might well have gleaned from newspapers of the period.

Of course it is possible that, if someone did put Crawford up to initiating communications with David, they may simultaneously have persuaded Crawford not to let David know about the tip-off. And if one thing seems clear about Crawford, it is that he would have been responsive to persuasions of a financial kind. It may therefore not be totally irrelevant to note that it was directly due to Elliot Smith that Crawford was paid a substantial amount for the cranium – firstly because Elliot Smith's valuation of the skull at one hundred pounds [217] was much more generous than anyone else's, and secondly because it was through Elliot Smith that the final payment of one hundred and fifty pounds was raised.

(6) Although in 1914 David and Wilson said nothing publically about their 1896 experience, they could hardly have forgotten the incident completely. It is hypothesized that the reason they kept quiet about their earlier knowledge of the cranium was to enhance the dramatic effect of the unveiling, something which would have suited their own individual purposes in addition to those of the Piltdown hoaxer(s).

It should be noted that I am not suggesting that either David or Wilson knew, or even remotely suspected, that "Piltdown man" was fraudulent, or that anyone may have been manipulating them in regard to Talgai. If indeed circa 1897 Elliot Smith did request Wilson to keep quiet about the Australian Museum evaluation, I am sure that the request would have gone something like: "Let's keep this specimen under wraps for a while. It might come in very handy on some future occasion". Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink. There need not have been any suggestion of real impropriety, just a (seeming) gentleman's agreement between an ambitious young Professor and his even more ambitious young student to defer the official proclamation of the fossil.

(7) When the Talgai cranium was unveiled to the world of international science in 1914, it was in an atmosphere pregnant with the Piltdown controversy. For this reason, the preliminary presentation, reception, and official description of the cranium were all coloured by a Piltdownian ethos which, largely because of the presence of Elliot Smith at the British Association meeting, and the involvement of his Antipodean colleagues in the acquisition and description of the specimen, ensured that it was interpreted in accordance with the Woodward-Elliot Smith analysis of the Piltdown fragments.

This conclusion I regard as beyond dispute.

(8) The nature of the Talgai fossil may well have suggested to the Piltdown hoaxer(s) the concoction of the second "Piltdown man", which, even more than the Talgai specimen, was construed as enhancing the reasonableness of juxtaposing a human braincase with a simian-style jaw.

______________________________________________________________________________

NOTES

1. I would like to record my gratitude to the following people who have helped me with this paper: my student, Mr. Philip Swan; Mr. Ren Parsons, Department of Anatomy, University of Sydney; Associate Professor Richard Wright and Mr. David Smith, Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney Dr. Randall Albury, School of History and Philosophy of Science, University of New South Wales; Dr. Noel Weekes, Department of History, University of Sydney; the late Professor N.W.G. Macintosh, formerly of the Department of Anatomy, University of Sydney; and especially Mrs. A. Macintosh, who has been extremely generous in allowing me use the original research materials upon which her husband based his definitive studies of the Talgai cranium.

2. For example, Macintosh and Larnach (1976:122), having given the minimum antiquity of Talgai as 14,000 to 16,000 years cite the following dates for other Australian finds. The Keilor cranium is dated at 12,900 years B.P. The Mossgiel skeleton may be inferred to be approximately 11,000 years B.P. The Kow Swamp population is apparently 9000-10,000 years B.P. Only the Cohuna cranium might, on the basis of comparisons of F.N.U. content, be regarded as possibly older than Talgai.

3. A readable, popular account of the Piltdown affair is provided by Millar (1974). A technically impressive (although historically uneven) account, written by one of the scientists responsible for the unmasking of the hoax is provided by Weiner (1955).

4. It is notable that many contemporary books on human evolution either do not mention the Piltdown affair at all, or else treat it dismissively.

5. My very brief summary of the facts relating to the discovery of the Talgai cranium is based upon the research of Macintosh (1965:47f; 1967a:95-7) and Gill (1979). Professor Macintosh's amazingly detailed reconstruction of the circumstances of Edgeworth David's visit to the site in 1914, and the presumptive location of the place where the cranium was picked up circa 1886, are contained in Macintosh (1967b).

[219] 6. Etheridge's 1890 article "Has Man A Geological History in Australia?" begins as follows:

"Are there any geological traces of man on this Continent, whereby ... the antiquity of the present race ... can be traced? The answer given by those most competent to judge is –No!"
And while of course it is one thing to deny that man has a geological history in Australia, and quite another to deny that he has a geological history anywhere in the world, it may be worth noting that, in a modern, anti-evolutionist pamphlet which I happened across recently, someone described as "Dr. Etheridge F.R.S., Palaeontologist, British Museum" is quoted as having written:

"In all this great museum there is not a particle of evidence of the transmutation of species. Nine-tenths of all the talk of evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by facts. This museum is full of the utter falsity of their views. There is no such thing as fossil man."

This quotation is, unfortunately, undated and undocumented. Although Robert Etheridge Jnr. was a palaeontologist in the Geology Department of the British Museum from 1874 to 1887, he was not a fellow of the Royal Society. His father, on the other hand, Robert Etheridge Snr., who was a palaeontologist in the British Museum from 1881 to 1891, was a Fellow of the Royal Society. Thus it would seem that the quotation should be attributed to him, rather than to the Etheridge who figures in our story. Even so, the belief expressed in the quotation may not have been without influence in determining the views of Robert Etheridge Jnr. on the question of human antiquity.

7. Etheridge's co-author was Robert Logan Jack. The index to the book contains eleven references to Talgai (the place, not the cranium). On p. 605, it is stated "No fossils are recorded as being found in Dalrymple Creek".

8. See for example David's tribute to Elliot Smith in the Jubilee number of Hermes 1902:104.

9. Following Wilson's death, the custody of his correspondence seems to have been entrusted to his son, Dr. Douglas Wilson (Hill 1948-49:657).

10. Abbie's detailed oration on Elliot Smith mentions that, in 1902, Elliot Smith paid his "first" return visit to Australia, and spent a month in Sydney (Abbie 1959:113).

11. The originals of Crawford's letters and of some associated material are in folders formerly belonging to the late Professor Macintosh, and now held in the Shellshear Museum, Department of Anatomy, University of Sydney.

12. Attempts by a colleague to find Crawford's original letter and photograph (and hopefully a copy of the British Museum's [220] reply) in the British Museum archives, have so far met with no success.

13. The official date of commencement for the British Association meeting was July 28th, but the great bulk of the official party did not arrive until the second week in August, when activities commenced in Adelaide. The earliness of Elliot Smith's arrival was presumably motivated, at least in part, firstly by the presence of relatives in Sydney, and secondly by the fact that he had agreed to give a series of four public lectures on Ancient Egypt for the Sydney University Extension Board, the first of which was delivered on July 21st.

14. Photocopies of the letters received by Crawford are in one of the folders formerly belonging to the late Professor Macintosh, and now held in the Shellshear Museum, Department of Anatomy, University of Sydney. A note in the folder would seem to indicate that the originals are the property of a Mr. Ken Crawford, who apparently lent them to the geologist Edmund Gill.

15. Viz. papers by Low on Scottish cists; Kenyon and Mahony on Aboriginal stone implements; Balfour on Stone Age Culture; Marett on excavations of a Palaeolithic cave; Elliot Smith on the brain of primitive man; Symington on cerebral reconstruction; David and Wilson on the Talgai skull; S.A. Smith on Solomon Island skulls; Wilson on the structure of the Australian Aboriginal skull; and Flashman on Aboriginal brains.

16. Viz. Low, Marett, Elliot Smith, Symington, David, Wilson, S.A. Smith and Flashman.

17. Copy in folder formerly owned by the late Professor Macintosh, and now held in the Shellshear Museum, Department of Anatomy, University of Sydney.

18. For a wealth of information about David's visit and the probable location of the site, see Macintosh (1967b).

19. It is interesting to compare this evaluation of the Talgai cranium with the one which Sollas gave in the Preface to the 1915 edition of his book on Ancient Hunters:

"Of direct evidence in proof of the antiquity of man in Australia there has hitherto been a remarkable deficiency ... Very welcome therefore is the discovery, announced too late for discussion in the text, which was brought before the meeting of the British Association in Sydney by Professors Edgeworth David, and J.T. Wilson, when they described a human skull, found along with extinct mammalia [sic ], from the Pleistocene deposits of the Darling Downs. For full particulars we must await the detailed account now in course of preparation; here it may suffice to say that judging by the face along this skull must have belonged to the same race as the existing aborigines; but the teeth point to a stage much more [221] primitive; apart from some peculiar simian characters presented by the canines there is a diastema in the dentition of the upper jaw which strongly recalls that of the Piltdown skull. This discovery, should it be confirmed, will not only carry the existence of the Australian aborigines back into the remote Pleistocene epoch but will at the same time afford important evidence of evolution in place (xi, xii).

20. This exchange between Etheridge and David is partially quoted by Macintosh (1969:192). Macintosh gives the year of Etheridge's letter as "1916", but a check of Macintosh's research folders in the Shellshear Museum, Department of Anatomy, University of Sydney, revealed that it was actually 1915. These folders contain photocopies of the letters, the originals being held in the archives of the Australian Museum.

21. Edgeworth David and Etheridge had co-authored a number of articles in the late 1880's and the 1890's, one of which describes an excavation which has been judged to be "not only a pioneering adaptation in Australia of the principles of geological stratigraphy to the problems of prehistory, but a landmark in field archaeology by any standards" (Megaw 1967:285).

22. See, for example, Elliot Smith's letters dated 25th April 1898, 5th February 1899 and 19th April 1900, in the J.T. Wilson Papers, University of Sydney Archives, Microfilm Reel 1.

23. For example, Smith nominates the year of discovery as 1884, and states that in this year there were exceptionally heavy rains in the district. The figure of 1884 Smith evidently obtained by the simplistic procedure of extrapolating back William Naish's 1914 statement that he had found the skull "about 30 years previously", following a severe flood. In fact, as Macintosh showed by consulting meteorological and pastoral records, the years 1880-1885 represented a period of appalling, continent-wide drought, the nearest year in which extended torrential rains occurred in the area being 1886 (Macintosh 1967a:95).

A further example of Smith's sloppiness is his statement that Crawford submitted a photograph of the cranium to Edgeworth David in "May 1914", the actual month being April 1914.

Most seriously of all there is Smith's discussion of the crown of an incisor tooth which had been broken from the cranium. Smith states that, since the tooth was heavily encrusted, measurements made over the crust could be too large. However, because "this tooth was not included in the purchase of the skull" (and therefore presumably was retained by Crawford after 1914), Smith claimed that he was not in a position to clean off the crust and obtain [222] more certain measurements. In fact, as letters in Professor Macintosh's folders reveal, the incisor was not retained by Crawford, but belonged to the Department of Anatomy (Macintosh to N.K. Crawford, 23rd January 1964 and 15th July 1968). Since the size and shape of the incisor were quite crucial in the anatomical evaluation of the Talgai dentition, this particular inaccuracy of fact is difficult to excuse.

24. Millar (1974:233) makes the false claim that there is no such place as Pilton "in the whole of Australia", and attempts to use this as part of his otherwise moderately impressive case for the assertion that Elliot Smith was the Piltdown forger.

25. I owe this point to Philip Swan and Ken Parsons. Some sources, notably Millar (1974:Plate 12 caption) and Howells (1967:301) have claimed that the non-alignment of the planes of the biting surfaces of the two molar teeth in the Piltdown jawbone represents a blunder on the part of the hoaxer(s). It was not. In this instance, as in most others, the expertise of the hoaxer(s) cannot be questioned.

26. On October 31st 1978, when I had virtually completed this article, a news item appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald alleging that the Piltdown forgery had been pinned upon William Sollas, the former Professor of Geology at Oxford. A more detailed account which subsequently appeared in Nature (276, 2nd November 1978:11-3) made it clear that the evidence against Sollas is extremely circumstantial, and that the problem of who perpetrated the hoax is still very much an open question. Readers whose interest has been stimulated by these recent allegations will probably find the present article quite informative, firstly because Sollas figures fairly prominently in the Talgai/Piltdown story, and secondly because Sollas is known to have been a longstanding colleague and confidant of Elliot Smith.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABBIE,A.A.,1959. "Annual post-graduate oration. Sir Grafton Elliot Smith." Bulletin of the Post-

Graduate Committee in Medicine, University of Sydney 15(3):101-50.

COOPER,C.,1945-48. "Arthur Smith Woodward 1864-1944." Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society of London 5:79-112.

DAWSON,R.,1938. Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, A Biographical Record By His Colleagues, London, Cape.

[223]

ETHERIDGE JNR.R.,1890. "Has man a geological history in Australia?" Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales (2nd Series) 5:259-72.

ETHERIDGE JNR.R.,and WOODWARD,A.S.,1891. "On the occurrence of the genus Belonostamus in the Rolling Downs Formation of Central Queensland." Transactions of the Royal Society of Victoria ii (2):1-6.

GILL,E.D.,1979. "Geology of the late Pleistocene Talgai Cranium from S.E. Queensland, Australia. Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania:: in press.

HILL,J.P.,1948-49. "James Thomas Wilson 1861-1945." Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society of London 6:643-60.

HENDY,C.H.,RAFTER,T.A.,and MACINTOSH,N.W.G.,1972. "The formation of carbonate nodules in the soils of the Darling Downs, Queensland, Australia, and the dating of the Talgai Cranium. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Radio Carbon Dating. Lower Hutt, Royal Society of New Zealand. Pp. D106-26.

HOWELLS,W.,1967. Mankind In the Making. Harmondsworth, Pelican Books.

MACINTOSH,N.W.G.,1963. "Origin and physical differentiation of the Australian Aborigines." Australian Natural History 14:248-52.

-------,1965. "The physical aspect of man in Australia. In BERNDT,R.M. and C.H.(Eds.). Aboriginal Man in Australia. Sydney, Angus and Robertson. Pp. 29-70.

-------,1967a. "Fossil man in Australia.. The Australian Journal of Science 30:86-98.

-------,1967b. "Recent discoveries of early Australian man." Annals of the Australian College of Dental Surgeons 1: 104-26.

-------,1969. "The Talgai Cranium: the value of archives." Australian Natural History 16:189-95.

-------,1974. "An Appreciation." In ELKIN,A.P.,and MACINTOSH,N.W.G.(Eds.). Grafton Elliot Smith. The Man and His Work. Sydney, Sydney University Press. Pp. 16-9.

MACINTOSH,N.W.G.,and LARNACH,S..,1976. "Aboriginal affinities looked at in world context." In KIRK, R.L.,and THORNE,A.G.(Eds.). The Origin of the Australians. Canberra, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Pp. 113-26.

[224]

MEGAW,J.V.5.,1967. "Archaeology, art and Aborigines: a survey of historical sources and later Australian prehistory." Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 53(4).

-------,1973. "Archaeology from down under. A personal view." Inaugural Lecture. Leicester University Press.

MILLAR,R.,1974. The Piltdown Men. St. Albans, Paladin.

MOYAL,A.M.(Ed.),1976. Scientists in Nineteenth Century Australia: A Documentary History. Sydney, Cassell Australia.

OARLEY,K.P.,1976. "The Piltdown problem reconsidered." Antiquity 50:9-13.

ORCHISTON,D.W., et al. ,1977. "A history of nineteenth century investigations at the Lancefield Megafaunal site." The Artefact 2(3):105-22.

OWEN,R.,1844. "Report on the extinct mammals of Australia ... large marsupial representatives of the Order Pachydermata." Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 13:223-40.

PRETTY,G.L.,1969. "The Macleay Museum mummy from Torres Straits: a postscript to Elliot Smith and the diffusion controversy." Man 4(1):24-43.

SMITH,G.E.,1929. The Migrations of Early Culture. Manchester, Manchester University Press (2nd Impression; 1st Impression 1915).

SMITH,S.A.,1918. "The fossil human skull found at Talgai, Queensland." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B208:351-87.

SOLLAS,W.J.,1915. Ancient Hunters And Their Modern Representatives. London, Macmillan (2nd edition).

WEINER,J.S.,1955. The Piltdown Forgery. London, Oxford University Press.

WOODWARD,A.S.,1920. "Robert Etheridge." Nature 104(2626): 700-1.

WOODWARD,A.S.,and WATTS,W.W.,1938. "William Johnson Sollas 1849-1936." Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society of London 2:265-81.