Phillip V. Tobias

Current Anthropology June 1992

Philip V. Tobias is Professor of Anatomy and Human Biology and Director of the Palaeo-anthropology Research Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand (7 York Rd., Parktown, Johannesburg 2193, South Africa). Born in 1925, he was educated at the University of the Witwatersrand (B.Sc., 1946; B.Sc., Hons., 1947; M.B .B.Ch., 1950; Ph.D., 1953; D.Sc., 1967). His research interests are hominid evolution, the history of bioanthropology, modern human variability in Africa, human genetics, and growth and the secular trend. Among his many publications are Olduvai Gorge, vols. 2 (The Cranium and Maxillary Dentition of Australopithecus (Zinjanthropus) boisei) and 4 (The Skulls, Endocasts and Teeth of Homo habilis) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967, 1991), The Brain in Hominid Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), The Meaning of Race (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1972), and Dart, Taung, and the "Missing Link" (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1984). The present paper was submitted in final form 4 x 91.

1. My esteem and gratitude are extended to Frank Spencer and I salute the memory of the late Ian Langham, who did not live to see all that has followed on our late-night conversation in 1984. Appreciation and grateful thanks are owing to my doughty assistant, Heather White, E. Langstroth, K.A.R. Kennedy, S.L. Washurn, A. Montagu, and the Secretary of the Royal Society (London). Fraud in science seems to have become more frequent (Broad and Wade, 1982, Jones 1990). According to Science (1991), "Fraud is a growth industry, if a spate of conferences on the topic . . . is a fair index of what’s to come in 1991." No fewer than five conferences on scientific misconduct were sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health between February and April 1991. As Kohn 11986:1) states, "The exponential growth of science and the increase in the number of practicing scientists [have] been accompanied by the appearance of individuals whose actions do not conform with the ethical standards of the scientific community." It would be wrong, however, to consider that breaches of the overriding normative rule of trustworthiness in scientific endeavour are a recent development. One of the most remarkable and most evil frauds, that of Piltdown, was perpetrated 80 years ago. What was remarkable about it was that it deceived many scholars for 40 years before the hoax was uncovered. What was evil was that the imposture was a major factor in holding up the advance of a branch of science, palaeoanthropology, for over a quarter of a century. As Campbell |199I:2I7) has put it, "The hoax occupied and misled anthropologists, stifled research, and seriously damaged British anthropology."

Ever since the fraud was exposed by Weiner, Oakley, and Clark 1953. 1955 ), professional and

amateur sleuths have sought clues to the identity of the forger(s). Some have wondered whether the continued quest for the identity of the perpetrator is worthwhile, since the exposure of the hoax effectively removed the troublesome Piltdown remains from the stockpile of hominid fossils. Thus Chippindale (1990) deprecates "yet more raking of old gravel" and asks, "Who still cares, in the year 1990, who dunit?" The criticism of the search for the culprits seems not unreasonable, but there are very good reasons for pursuing such investigations.

First, the search for the perpetrator(s), for example, by Spencer (1990a), has furnished countless insights into aspects of the scientific process and the role of honesty in scientific endeavour and has enabled us to see the events centred around Piltdown from a philosophical perspective. Such aspects are addressed as the motives of scientists and the degree to which a prevailing paradigm may influence and even dominate not only thinking but even discovery. The quest for the forger(s) has placed Piltdown as an episode in the history and philosophy of science.

Secondly, as Clark (1968:211) has stressed, detailed enquiry is necessary "not so much because it is important to know who was the culpnt, but because it obviously is a matter of importance–in order completely to exonerate others of all trace of suspicion–to know who could not have been the culprits."

Thirdly, the search for the culprit(s) has shown us that "it is as important to look at people's

Fourthly, the investigation sheds new light on the factors determining acceptance and rejection and conversion in science (Tobias1985, 1991a , b ). Piltdown has taught us that dishonesty and fraud have to be included among the agencies promoting rejection or retarding acceptance of a new discovery or concept, as, for example, we have seen in regard to the largely hostile reception accorded to such African fossils as the Kanam mandible and the australopithecines.

These and other reasons thoroughly justify the rigour and diligence with which the enquiry has been and continues to be prosecuted.

Langdon (1991) has recently claimed that "Eoanthropus" was "merely an imitation fossil that an amateur with common sense might have devised," while Kennedy (1991) has suggested that the hoax was not beyond the capacities of one man {Charles Dawson). In contrast, many, probably most, investigators have seen the full scope of the forgery (which went far beyond linking an ape jaw to a human cranium) as intricate, involved, and calling for expertise in a number of fields–in Campbell's (1991) words, "a complex and sophisticated fraud." These conflicting views demand another look at the fraud in all its ramifications.

Although Daniel (1985) has hailed Costello's (1985) case against Samuel Woodhead as "the proper and final solution," other investigators have held that "the best case to date has been made against Teilhard de Chardin" (e.g., Campbell 1991). While Robert Essex and L. S. B. Leakey believed that Teilhard was responsible for the Piltdown hoax, it is Gould (1980, 198I) who has presented the most systematic and carefully analysed case against Teilhard, and his main arguments deserve reexamination.

The most detailed and penetrating analyses of the Piltdown forgery and of those possibly inculpated have been those of the late Ian Langham and of Frank Spencer, the results of which have been presented in two comprehensive and scholarly volumes by Spencer (1990 a b). These two scholars–one a historian and the other an anthropologist–were independently drawn to the same surprising conclusion, namely, that it is most likely that the scientist-member of the team of forgers was none other than Sir Arthur Keith. The evidence on which they based their claim and one of the motives proposed have been contested by several eminent authorities, including Zuckerman ( 1990, 1991), Grigson (1990b ), and Smith (1990).

Examination of their criticisms and of the main bases of the case against Keith has, however, led me to conclude that ( I ) the forgery was wide-ranging, for the most part elegant and even magisterial, intricate, and predicated upon specialised knowledge in a number of fields, (2) Gould's case against Teilhard is seriously flawed; (3 the Langham- Spencer case against Keith is logical convincing, and indeed the case is even stronger than present it; and (4) the incrimination of Keith provides an explanation of the hidden agenda behind his 22 years of vocal, vigorous, and authoritative rejection of Dart's (I925) claims for Australopithecus.

Piltdown and Human Evolution

On December 18, 1912, a historic meeting was held in the rooms of the Geological Society of Great Britain, in Burlington House, Piccadilly, London. At this meeting, Arthur Smith Woodward and Charles Dawson revealed to an expectant audience what was taken to be the first important discovery in England of a fossil skull bearing on human evolution. France and Belgium had long boasted their Neandertal skeletons; from Germany there had come the original Neandertal cranium and the Mauer mandible. England, however, had been barren of fossil men, and much sadness there had been over this lack. The Piltdown skull laid bare at that meeting of the Geological Society was hailed as England's first great and historic find in palaeoanthropology and as the world's earliest man. Forty-one years later, it was revealed as "a fantastic piece of forgery," "an incredible imposture," and probably "the greatest archaeological hoax of its kind ever perpetrated" (Clark 1968:210-11). It may well be enquired, "How came it that so many distinguished scientists were deluded for so many years?" (Clark 1968:2II).

There are many reasons for my interest in Piltdown. One of them has to do with the Taung skull of Australopithecus africanus and its prolonged rejection by the world of science. Why was Taung not accepted when Dart published the first account of the epochal discovery in 1925? Washburn (1985) has drawn attention to the sharp contrast between the hostile reception accorded Taung and the enthusiastic welcome given to Peking man (Homo erectus pekinensis ) Was Australopithecus simply a premature discovery, in the sense described by Stent (1972:84), namely, that "its implications cannot be connected by a series of simple logical steps to canonical, or generally accepted, knowledge"? Or was there another factor militating against the acceptance of Dart's claims for Taung? It has long been plain to me that, as Leakey and Goodall (1969), Halstead (1978), and Washburn (1985) held, the Piltdown "remains" had much to do with the rejection of Taung.

Piltdown fulfilled the expectations of the day for at least some influential anthropologists. In

The Piltdown "Discoveries"

The discovery of the Piltdown remains has been described so often (Dawson and Woodward 1913; Keith 1915; Woodward 1948; Weiner, Oakley, and Clark 1953; Weiner 1955; Vere 1I955, 1959; Zuckerman 1970; Millar 1972; Costello 1985; Blinderman 1986; Spencer 1990a; Thomson 1991a ) that only a summary need be given here. 1911 (or perhaps 1908) and 1915, some supposedly very ancient hominid remains were found in a gravel pit at Piltdown in Sussex. Most of them were found by Dawson, who practiced as a solicitor in Uckfield. They comprised parts of a modem- human-looking calvaria and the broken right half of a very apelike mandible. He drew his finds to the attention of Smith Woodward, who was the keeper of geology at the British Museum (Natural History). Together the two men explored the gravel pit during 19I2, being joined on a few occasions by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was then at the Jesuit seminary Ore Place at Hastings and who was later to become a professional palaeontologist. A great age for the gravel deposit seemed to be testified to by associated prehistoric finds, including isolated teeth of a mastodon, a stegodon, a beaver, and a hippopotamus and flint and bone implements. A reconstruction of the skull was prepared by Smith Woodward and his assistant Frank Barlow, the cranium and mandible being combined as though they were parts of the same skull. As only two molar teeth were in position in the mandible, the restoration included models of the missing teeth. Most of these materials were revealed to that packed meeting of the Geological Society on December 18, 1912. Smith Woodward proposed that the skull represented a new hominid genus and species, to which he gave the name Eoanthropus dawsoni ("the dawn man of Dawson").

In August 19I3, Dawson found a pair of fragmentary nasal bones and nasal conchae at Piltdown, while Teilhard de Chardin, on a return visit to Hastings from Paris, recovered an isolated, worn apparent canine tooth resembling in form the right lower canine that Smith Woodward and Barlow had modelled. Although Smith Woodward and Keith accepted that the tooth was a canine belonging to the Piltdown mandible, Osborn (1921) and some other investigators considered it an upper canine and Weidenreich (1I943:2I6) denied that it belonged to the Piltdown jaw or even was the lower canine of an anthropoid: "Its real nature remains to be determined."

Whereas Smith Woodward, Keith, and some other scientists were convinced that the cranial

pieces, the mandible, and the canine tooth belonged to the same individual, others were at pains to point out the apelike features of the jaw and the human characteristics of the calvaria (Montagu 1951a )). Among those who considered the mandible to be that of an anthropoid ape there were two schools of thought, one seeing chimpanzee affinities and he other orang-utan traits. The chimpanzee school included D. Waterston 1913), professor of anatomy at King's College, London, M. Boule of Paris, author of Les rommes fossiles (1921), M. Ramstrom (19I9) of Uppsala, Sweden, and Gerrit S. Miller of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Miller |(1915, 19I8) went so far as to claim that the mandible represented a new species of chimpanzee, which he proposed to name Pan vetus. Exponents of the orang-utan school included Weidenreich (1943) as well as Frasetto (1977) and Friederichs (1932). The argument put forward by these investigators whom Spencer (1990a ) has dubbed the "dualists") was that both a hominid and an ape were represented in the Piltdown gravel; we have no evidence that any of them seriously doubted that they were dealing with genuine fossil specimens reflecting creatures that had lived in the Weald of Sussex a long time ago.

On July 3, 19I3, Dawson wrote to tell Smith Woodward that he had that day picked up "the frontal part of a human skull" in a gravel about 40 to 50 ft. above the present River Ouse. This second locality was "a long way from Piltdown." It was later presumed to have been the site of Barcombe Mills, some 6.5 km south-west of Piltdown (Oakley, entries under Royaume-Uni in Vallois and Movius 1952). Dawson showed the frontal bone to Smith Woodward a day or two later, but curiously the specimen was ignored. After Dawson's death in 19I6, a cluster of specimens were found in his collection under the label "Barcombe Mills." They comprised two modem human calvarial fragments (frontal and parietal), a molar tooth, and two zygomatic bones of a second individual (Montagu 1931b ).

The picture was complicated when, early in 1913, Dawson reported finding human remains at a third site, presumed to be Sheffield Park, some 3.2 km north-west of Barkham Manor. This find comprised two parts of a brain-case (frontal and occipital) and a mandibular molar tooth, as well as the tooth of an archaic rhinoceros. For some palaeoanthropologists, such as Boule (1I923), the doubts they had entertained that the cranium and jaw of Piltdown I belonged to the same species and individual were lessened if not entirely dispelled by this discovery of a supposedly second individual of Eoanthropus , subsequently designated Piltdown II.

Following Dawson's death on August 10, 1916, Smith Woodward made further excavations at the Piltdown sites, but nothing more was ever found there.

Piltdown was still considered fairly respectable when I was a student and a young staff member under R. A Dart, familiarising myself with fossil men and women in the late 1940s. For example, the genus Eoanthropus was listed among the genera of the family Hominidae (Simpson 1945), and Piltdown was included in the Catalogue des hommes fossiles edited by Vallois and Movius (1952'). In 1953 nine talks on "Africa's Place in the Human Story" were presented by the South African Broadcasting Corporation with Dart (1954) as editor of the series. My talk, the sixth in the series, dealt with "The Very Ancient Human Inhabitants of Africa," and it was broadcast on June 14, 1953. I compared the African fossils with some from Europe and Asia, and so it came about that I made what may have been one of the last published statements about the Piltdown remains before Joseph Weiner came to suspect that a hoax had been perpetrated (Tobias 1954):

some anatomists say the jaw belongs to a fossil ape which somehow became mixed up in the gravel deposit with the human skull fragments. Quite recently, Dr. Kenneth Oakley has found that the fluorine content in both the skull and the jaw are virtually identical and this indicates that the bones are of the same age. Of course, this does not prove that the two bones belonged to the same individual and so, even today, the 40-year-old puzzle of Piltdown Man remains unsolved. If the jaw really belongs to the skull, it is a most unexpected combination; if it does not belong to the skull, it is an almost unbelievable coincidence that the human and the ape cranial bones should have remained so close together in the same gravel patch!

The Hoax Suspected and Uncovered

Only 46 days later, on July 30, 1953, the participants in a Wenner-Gren Foundation conference on early man in Africa visited the British Museum (Natural History) and there, in the Geology Department, viewed the celebrated Piltdown remains. Among those who saw them for the first time was a Pretoria-born man who had completed his earliest degree under Dart at the University of the Witwatersrand Medical School, Joseph Weiner. Sitting at dinner in the evening with Oakley and Washburn, he found himself increasingly worried by the puzzle of Piltdown. Back at Oxford, he could not sleep that night, and, weighing up all the possible explanations, came to the realisation that the mandible must have been forged.

There followed several months of intense study by him, his head of department at Oxford, Sir Wilfrid Edward LeGros Clark, and Kenneth Oakley of the British Museum (Natural History). On November 11, 1953, the proofs of a hoax were announced.

There were clear scratch marks on the molars and the canine. Both molars had sharp margins instead of the bevelled edges which usually accompany attrition or the crown surfaces. Both the first and second molars showed, unusually, the same degree of occlusal wear (usually the first molar is more worn than the second) The medial part of the crown surface of both molars was more worn than the lateral part, the opposite of the usual pattern. Although the canine was heavily worn on the crown surface, the X-rays showed that the pulp cavity was wide open, as in a young tooth, and quite unlike what would be expected in so heavily worn a tooth. Tests of the amount of fluorine and nitrogen in the various bones showed that the mandible and canine were essentially recent, whereas the cranium was older. Signs were detected that the mandible and canine had been artificially stained to make them similar in colour to the cranium.

Treatment of the stone implements likewise was exposed, whilst a bone implement in form like a cncket bat showed signs of having been shaped by an even-edged metal blade. The animal bones recovered from Piltdown proved to have been treated and planted at the site. Refined uranium testing of the elephant molar showed that it was chemically indistinguishable from a molar tooth recovered from a site near Bizerta in Tunisia but differed from all others with which it was compared. The Mastodon and Rhinoceros molars from Piltdown matched in colour, degree of mineralisation, and uranium content fossil bones from the Red Crag of East Anglia. It now seemed that every single bone found at Piltdown was an importation to the site.

Subsequent to the exposure of the forgery, several reports came to light of earlier suspicions that mischief had been afoot. W. K. Gregory, in his 1914 review, had referred to the possibility of a hoax, a suggestion that he had apparently picked up at the British Museum (Natural History) on a visit there in 19I3: the hint was that "a negro skull and a broken ape jaw" had been "artificially fossilized" and "planted in the gravel-bed to fool the scientists." Gregory had dismissed the possibility in view of the circumstances of the discovery.

A curious claim had appeared in the former Johannesburg morning newspaper the Rand Daily Mail on March 2, 1925. It was just over four weeks after the revelation of the Taung skull, and repercussions were still appearing in the correspondence columns of the daily press. Over the name A. W. Baker, of P.O. North Rand, in the midst of a letter in which the author inveighed against the idea of evolution, there appeared these sentences:

I suppose the correspondent who cites the Piltdown man as one of the links in the assured facts of modem scientific discovery is aware that this wonderful man is a fake. Part of a frontal bone, part of a jawbone, and one tooth, found in a quarry, sufficed. With these the scientists built up all the rest of a body to suit their theory, making it as like as possible to what they conceived a missing link ought to be.... Although several distinguished scientists have declared that the tooth and the jaw do not belong to the same creature as the frontal bone, this colossal fake is still exhibited in the name of modern science.

According to Oakley (1979), the first man to be sure in his own mind that the Piltdown skull had been forged was Gerrit S. Miller, who in 1915 had created the new species Pan vetus to accommodate the Piltdown mandible. He is said to have realised quite suddenly in 1930 that the Piltdown remains were forgeries but to have been dissuaded by his colleagues in the United States from publishing this conclusion without adducing proof. When C. S. Coon visited the British Museum (Natural History) in 1951, he noted striae on the grinding surfaces of the molars that looked "suspicious," but he informed only his wife (Oakley 1979). Apart from these few exceptions and some suspicions and rumours, no documentation has come to light that anyone knew or suspected that a deliberate forgery had been perpetrated. The hoaxer(s) had got away with it, and for 40 years most scholars were taken in.

The Search for the Perpetrator(s)

For the almost 40 years since the hoax was uncovered, amateur and professional sleuths, scientists, historians, and others have been searching for evidence to reveal the identity of the forger(s). At least 21 suspects have at one time or another been inculpated on circumstantial evidence of varying degrees of confidence. Whoever did it would have needed to have motivation and opportunity, the knowledge and the skill to plan and perpetrate the deed, and access to the materials that were planted.

The following summary covers 11 of the suspects named during the period 1955 to 1991:

1. Charles Dawson. Weiner (1955) built a strong case against Dawson, who had found most of the Piltdown "specimens" from all three sites. He left open the question of whether Dawson could have had access to the planted specimens and whether he possessed the requisite knowledge and skill. He raised the possibility that Dawson might have had a scientist-accomplice but did not pursue it. Although not everyone was convinced that Dawson was guilty, an overwhelming majority of those who have studied the question accept Weiner's case against him. He had a powerful motive and abundant opportunity, but many scholars question whether he possessed the materials, the knowledge, or the skill. Thos e desiderata, in the minds of a number of scholars, lead to the inference that a scientist must have been involved, either solo or as Dawson's accomplice. A1though some aspects of the faking were sloppy or clumsy, many others are so intricate and the totality, embracing far more than the breaking and staining of a cranium and a jaw, is so elaborate as to point to the involvement of the brain and eye of a specialist.

2. Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard has been inculpated by various scholars in at least four different ways. It has been suggested that he was solely responsible, that he was the scientist-accomplice of Dawson and the mastermind behind the operation, that he planted the "canine" tooth that he found, perhaps in an endeavour to force the hoax into the open, and that he knew that a forgery had been perpetrated but was not personally responsible.

Among those who tried to draw the heat off Dawson was "Francis Vere'' (nom de guerre of Bannister, according to Mabel Kenward, cited by Spencer 1990a :239). In his 1955 book The Piltdown Fantasy, Vere pointed an accusatory finger at Teilhard, as did Essex (1955, cited by Spencer 1990a ). At the time of the 1911-12 discoveries, Teilhard, while studying at the Jesuit seminary at Hastings, had been befriended by Dawson and had several times searched in the Piltdown gravels with him and Smith Woodward. Thus he had had the opportunity to devise and plant the fakes. Indeed, he is reported to have found, in addition to the canine, a flint implement and part of an elephant tooth.

Bowden (1977) and Gould (1980, 198I) later espoused the case against Teilhard. The most important foundation of Gould's case was furnished by certain apparent errors or inconsistencies in three letters written by Teilhard to Oakley on November 28, 1953, January 29, 1954, and March 1, 1954, supported by the contents of a letter from Teilhard to Mabel Kenward on March 2, 1954. These letters betray apparently confused memories of an event–Teilhard's visit to "the second site"–some 40-41 years earlier. A careful reading of the passages quoted by Gould from these letters does not seem to me to betray a pattern running through them (as Gould repeatedly claims). What impresses me in these letters is that they betray the foggy, confused mind and memory of an aging man. Teilhard's health was declining from early 1954 (Barbour 1956), and the letters in question were written 16-1/2 to 13 months before his death. This aspect alone seriously weakens Gould's case.

Lukas (1981b ) also argued that Barcombe Mills was the site to which Teilhard must have been referring in his 1953 letter to Oakley. In that event, Teilhard's memory of the date of his visit to "the second site" was approximately correct. Gould (198I:30) rebutted Lukas's claim in these words: "each of three times that Teilhard mentions this second find, he refers to it explicitly as the place 'where the two small fragments of skull and the isolated molar were supposedly found in the rubble.' Only one place yielded two skull fragments and a molar: the second site, "discovered' by Dawson in 19I5." Strictly speaking, Gould is wrong in this latter statement, for the Barcombe Mills remains also comprised two cranial fragments and an isolated molar; in addition, they included two zygomatic bones (Montagu 1951a, b; Oakley in Vallois and Movius 1952). Thus it is very likely that Teilhard was referring to Barcombe Mills but that he omitted to mention the zygomatic bones either because he had forgotten about them or because they were "discovered" only after Teilhard's visit, sometime between September 1913 and Dawson's death in August 19I6.

If Barcombe Mills was the second site referred to by Teilhard in his letters to Oakley, as now seems highly likely, the major basis of Gould's case against Teilhard falls away. The letters of Teilhard's last year and a half (he died on April 11, 1955) were called to the witness box not to support a case based primarily on other evidence but to constitute Gould's strongest evidence against Teilhard. A failing memory, clouded by deteriorating health, would surely suffice to explain Teilhard's replying about Barcombe Mills (the historically correct second site) when Oakley was enquiring about Piltdown II or Sheffield Park (historically, the third site) and omitting mention of the two zygomatic bones. Teilhard recognised that his memory was clouded when he wrote, "Concerning the point of 'history' you ask me, my 'souvenirs' are a little vague: . . . my visit . . . to the second site . . . must have been in late July 19I3" (letter to Oakley, January 29, 1954, cited by Gould 1980:18).

Gould's second most important line of "evidence" against Teilhard was the latter's lifelong silence about Piltdown, save for a short article in 1920 and rare, scattered references in his extensive oeuvre scientifique. An alternative explanation for his silence, as Dodson (198I) points out and Gould (198I) agrees, is that Teilhard knew that Piltdown was a fake but did not participate in the forgery himself. Gould (198I) acknowledges that this line of "evidence" is not as strong as that of the 1953-54 letters: "The silence indicates his knowledge of fraud; had I found this alone, I would not have implicated iTeilhard] directly" (p. 28).

Another scenario involves minimal involvement of Teilhard in the fraud. Both Matthews (198I) and Thomson (1991a ) believe that M. A. C. Hinton of the British Museum (Natural History) filed and stained the canine tooth and persuaded Teilhard to plant it and "discover" it in August 19I3. Hinton's motive, it is suggested, was to force the hoax into the open. By this palpably ham-handed modification of the canine and the use of Vandyke brown to darken it (in contrast with all the other planted specimens, which had been stained with potassium bichromate), he hoped to expose the forgery which he either suspected or knew had been committed. On this view, Teilhard was persuaded by such a seemingly laudable purpose and agreed to be the conveyer, planter, and "discoverer" of the canine. Save for the known facts that Teilhard did find the canine and that it had been coloured by a different stain, the rest of this story, devised with great ingenuity by Matthews, is "all fiction" (Blinderman 1986:152). Thomson's recent revival of a modified version of Matthews's scheme involves Teilhard as well, in two scenarios as carrier, planter, and "discoverer" and in a third as a co-conspirator not with Hinton but with Dawson. Entertaining and even amusing as these diabolical schemes are, the complete lack of evidence is the missing link. Although discussion on the role of Teilhard continues, the available testimony does not convince me that he was implicated as a member of the conspiracy of forgers. However, the evidence makes it likely that he knew a fraud had been committed.

3. Grafton Elliot Smith.. A case against Elliot Smith, who had described the endocranial cast of Piltdown (in Dawson and Woodward 19I3), was put forward by Millar (1972) and Langham (1978, 1979). Few were convinced, and Langham abandoned the case some years later in favour of another suspect.

4. William /. Sollas. This professor of geology at Oxford was inculpated in a tape-recording left by his successor in the chair at Oxford, J. A. Douglas, and the case was vigorously promoted by Halstead (1978, 1979) and supported by von Koenigswald (1I98I) and, to a degree, by Dodson (198I). The evidence is tenuous.

5. Arthur Smith Woodward. The case for Smith Woodward's having been involved as "a willing accomplice" was briefly explored by Weiner (1955) and Langham (1979)– and then dropped. It was mooted also by J. C. Trevor in an unpublished and apparently ill-informed letter in 1967 (Spencer 1990a ::232). Most scholars of the subject feel that Smith Woodward was the innocent dupe, to be pitied rather than deprecated, though it is not impossible that he suspected that some of the Piltdown specimens had been planted (Bowden 1977:23- 24).

6. Arthur Conan Doyle. Lukas (1981a ) and Winslow and Meyer (1983) put forward the possibility that Conan Doyle might have been involved. He lived nearby at Crowborough, knew the Dawsons, and was interested in human evolution. The case has been dismissed by most critics as far-fetched.

7. Samuel Allison Woodhead. Woodhead was public analyst at Lewes as well as a consulting analyst and bacteriologist, and he was once, it seems, consulted by Dawson on how to stain bones. Costello's (1985) case against him was supported by Daniel (1985) as "the most convincing of all." This version lays the entire blame at Woodhead's door and makes Dawson an innocent dupe. For a motive it is suggested that Woodhead, a devout Presbyterian, hoped that exposure of the hoax would destroy the theory of evolution (Blinderman 1986). Costello's projected book on the evidence against Woodhead has not yet seen the light of day: until it does we have only a shaky basis on which to appraise Woodhead's possible role in the Piltdown affair.

8. William James Lewis Abbott. Abbott was a jeweller from Hastings, and Blinderman (1986) has found circumstantial factors to suggest that he was involved.

9. Martin Hinton. The case against Hinton put forward by Matthews (1I98I) and lately supported by Zuckerman (1990) has been mentioned above. Hinton was a voluntary worker in the British Museum (Natural History) who was later to become keeper of zoology. Hinton was said to have been a prankster, and in Who's Who he stated that he was interested in hoaxes, of which he had "studied many"–a point considered of great moment by Zuckerman. Moreover, Hinton might have borne a grudge against Smith Woodward. Although he might have had knowledge, materials, and opportunity, the suggested motive seems trivial and evidence is lacking.

10. Frank Barlow. Working as assistant to Smith Woodward, Barlow, the preparator in the Geology Department of the British Museum (Natural History), made–and sold–casts of the Piltdown remains and was described by Keith as "a prince of modellers." Grigson (1990a ) has proposed that Barlow was the man in the museum, with access to fossil bones and with the necessary skills to have prepared the "specimens" with which the gravel pit at Piltdown was salted. Did he have the considerable knowledge of anatomy, palaeontology, archaeology, geology, and geochronology which the totality of the hoax presupposed? It is doubtful, and this, together with a lack of evidence, seriously weakens Barlow's candidature.

Several theories involve a conspiracy involving two or even more of these persons. If Dawson is accepted on overwhelming evidence as a forger and three of the five desiderata demand that we posit the participation of a well- qualified savant as co-perpetrator, was he any one of the ten other suspects listed above? ' Or was he another, hitherto unsuspected personage?

In April 1984, I received a telephone call from Ian Langham in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. This was followed up by a letter on April 26, 1984: he was leaving that night for London and wished to visit me on his return, en route back to Australia. In that letter he wrote:

My current research projects are (1) a biographical work on Sir Arthur Keith; (2) a revaluation of the events surrounding the Piltdown forgery. Project (2) is the thing that is burning a hole in my brain at present, as I have amassed evidence relating to the culpability question which is, I believe, an order of magnitude "harder" and less circumstantial than anything that anyone else has managed to come up with so far. And before I bring the wrath of God down upon myself by publishing it, I would like to first check it out with the cognoscenti.

So it came about that Langham and I, in Johannesburg, spent Thursday afternoon and evening, May 24, 1984, in a seven-to-eight-hour conversation on Piltdown and related matters. During this chat Langham divulged his theory of the identity of the scientist-member of the two-man team of forgers he was postulating. It struck me that as far as I knew this was about the only one of all of the "Piltdown men" who had not so far been incriminated. I subjected his proposal to stringent criticism, on the one hand, and enthusiastic encouragement, on the other. I drew attention to the dangers inherent in a two-person theory: each could have betrayed the other, and the great man would have exposed himself to enormous danger. "And," I speculated, "would there not have been some passing reference in some letter or diary entry, by one or the other7" I urged him to continue with his researches and write up the fruits of his labours on original unpublished archival material in London, including the Keith papers.

As I was convinced that the acceptance of Piltdown by leading figures in British anthropology had played a major part in delaying the acceptance of Dart's (1925) claims for the Taung child, I invited Langham to attend the international symposium I was organising, which was to take place early in 1985, on the 60th anniversary of Dart's announcement of the discovery of Australopithecus africanus. Langham's next letter to me, dated May 3I, 1984, after his return to Australia, intimated that he would be delighted to give a paper on "the history of hominid studies, with special reference to Piltdown and how it caused the African finds to be misinterpreted." He added, "My Piltdown revelations should have appeared in print by then and I imagine that your Symposium would represent an unequalled opportunity to get oral feedback from the leading practitioners of the discipline."

In a subsequent letter to me, Langham withdrew from the Taung Jubilee Symposium, as he was not able to raise sufficient funds to cover the high cost of the airfare. He agreed on the difficulties I had raised about a two-man team of forgers and commented, "Actually I think I can show that the dynamics of the two-man system were unstable, and very nearly led to one man giving the game away." In the same letter a few alarm signals appeared: "I feel wretched about doing this [withdrawing from the Taung meeting].... my writing up of the Piltdown article has been going falteringly.... this is being written under conditions of stress." It was the last letter I received from him. His tragic death occurred on July 20, 1984.

The subject of Taung and Piltdown did come up for discussion at the Taung Diamond Jubilee International Symposium. I briefly discussed the historical relationship between Taung and the Piltdown forgery (Tobias 1985:37- 38), though I did not divulge Langham's suspicions as to the identity of the hoaxer. Inter alia, I said, "The exposure of the Piltdown remains as fraudulent dealt a final, fatal blow to the notion that the increase of absolute brain-size had been first in the field. Piltdown had helped to delay the acceptance of Dart's claims for Australopithecus. In some people's minds, it produced a hold-up of 28 years–from 1925 to 1953!" By coincidence, at the same meeting Washburn (1985), in the 23d Raymond A. Dart lecture, made some penetrating comments on the same topic, including this one: "it is of interest to note that some of the strongest critics of Dart were advocates of the forgery known as Eoanthropus [Piltdown}.. If one believed that the large human braincase came first in evolution, then there was no place for Taung" (Washburn 1985:5).

Nearly a year after Langham's death I received letters from Kathie Langham, Peter Cochrane, and Tim Murray asking my views on their choice of Frank Spencer of Queens College, the City University of New York, to bring Langham's researches on the Piltdown forgery to completion. Having known and admired Spencer's (1979) two- volume study Ales' Hrdlicka, M.D., 1869-1943, I had no hesitation whatever in replying that Mrs. Langham and Ian's Australian colleagues could not have chosen a more reliable, conscientious, and scholarly person than Spencer to develop, write up, and publish Langham's incomplete work on the Piltdown forgery. Moreover, Mrs. Langham gave me permission to pass on to Spencer the correspondence that had passed between her late husband and myself.

The books that Spencer produced were Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery (1990a ) and The Piltdown Papers (1990b ). The former is a closely reasoned analysis and a work of profound scholarship. The latter presents a minutely catalogued, meticulously indexed, and comprehensive compilation of all the relevant documents of which either Langham or Spencer or both had studied the originals. By placing these on record, Spencer has made it possible and easy for other scholars to examine the evidence for themselves and either corroborate the Langham-Spencer hypothesis or reach other conclusions.

In Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery, Spencer has produced a penetrating study of Piltdown as an episode in the history of science, based partly on Langham's unpublished notes and largely on his own researches on the Piltdown papers in the British Museum (Natural History), on the Keith Papers in the Royal College of Surgeons, and on other original sources. Not content with recounting the facts and the theories about Piltdown, he analysed the prevailing paradigm in the early part of the 20th century and the discoveries and hypotheses which, during the previous century, had led up to that state of knowledge. Eiseley (1956), in reviewing Weiner’s (1955) book, had written, "It is . . . a pity that as part of the story something more of the general intellectual climate of the period might not have been analyzed. This sort of effort takes time, however, and the time unfortunately was not available." This lacuna Spencer's book has superbly filled. In skillfully limning this conceptual background, Spencer has enabled us to see the events centred around Piltdown in historical and philosophical perspective. His searching account of the response to Piltdown reveals it as a case study in the sometimes subtle and often blatant interaction of personalities, motives, and events, theories, facts, and supposed facts, reputations and egos, enmities and fair-weather friendships, simulations and dissimulations. He shows us that a paradigm can be so powerful as to dictate the course of discovery, interpretation, and scientific history and that it may, in the event, delay progress in a field of research by years and even decades.

Although Kuhn (1962) has argued strongly for the relatively non-rational basis of revolutions in scientific thought, the Piltdown history shows that it was the sheer weight of newly discovered evidence that made it impossible to sustain the Piltdown paradigm after 1950 and led to its replacement. The hoax could succeed in hoodwinking and convincing many scientists in 1912, before Africa had thrown its ancient hominid fossil surprises into the scale-pan and perhaps when, as Zuckerman (1970:73) observes, "anatomists were . . . deluding themselves about their capacity to diagnose marginal human and ape-like characters in bones and teeth." It had become untenable by 1950, when men like Clark had come to accept the hominid status of the australopithecine fossils from South Africa. The total incompatibility between the newly emerging paradigm of the1950s and the Piltdown concept forced the pace in the reexamination of the Piltdown remains. It was against this background that Weiner, a member of Clark's Department of Human Anatomy at Oxford, had come up with the hypothesis that a forgery had been effected. As Bronowski (195I) and others have pointed out, the assumption of truthfulness in science is the very leitmotif, almost the religion, of the scientist. We may think our colleagues have been mistaken, foolish, ignorant, ill-advised, pig-headed or simple-minded, but the very last thing we tend to suspect them of is dishonesty.

Langham scoured the original sources for evidence, probably more thoroughly than had ever been done before his time. As a result he came up with the most surprising, indeed shocking, and at the same time most seemingly logical conclusion as to the identity of the scientist-member of the team of forgers. I believe that Spencer has done full justice to Langham's work and reasoning in presenting his brief on the hoaxer's identity. Spencer has thoroughly reworked all of the original source material over a number of years, and therefore his presentation of Langham's theory is informed by his own researches and reasoning. Indeed, his powerful commitment to Langham's brief is based not on loyalty to a "friend," as one critic avers (Zuckerman 1990)–for Spencer (1990a ) tells us that he had met Langham but once, though they had kept up a correspondence–but on his earlier readings of the Hrdlicka-Keith papers, which had independently aroused his own suspicion that Keith was the scientist-forger. From my short acquaintance with Langham and his thinking in the last months of his life, I cannot help believing that he would have approved warmly of the critical, objective yet supportive treatment that his brief is accorded in Spencer's book.

Nine Pointers to Keith's Guilt

A number of items have been uncovered some of which individually could have had an innocent explanation, such as a lapse of memory, but which collectively point in the same direction–namely, to a determined effort by Keith to cover up any suspicion of his acquaintance or familiarity with Dawson, the Piltdown site, or the "specimens" in the period when the "specimens" were first being uncovered. To distance himself he resorted to several apparent lies and misleading statements. The following lines of evidence fall into place as parts of such a pattem.

Zuckerman and Grigson claim that full details of the whereabouts of the site were revealed at the meeting of December 18, which details Keith could have added to his article or to the proofs after the meeting. However, their claim is not corroborated by Dawson and Woodward's (1913) article: no specific description of the location of the site is given, the only clues being a plan of the basin of the Sussex Ouse, a diagrammatic section of the Weald, some vague general remarks by Dawson ("a gravel-bed on the farm"; "about 4 miles north of the limit where the occurrence of flints overlying the Wealden strata is recorded"), and a brief acknowledgement in a footnote of the courtesy of G. M. Maryon-Wilson, the lord of the manor, and Robert Kenward, tenant of the farm, in granting permission to excavate–though the farm and manor house (Barkham Manor) are not named in the acknowledgement or anywhere else in the article.

Indeed, it is clear that neither Dawson nor Smith Woodward revealed the exact locality at the meeting. On the contrary, they appear to have gone out of their way not to betray the whereabouts of the site. Thus, Mabel Kenward, the tenant's daughter, wrote to Smith Woodward on January 3, 19I3, "In spite of the actual spot not being mentioned we have had several visitors–and one local shopkeeper is doing a great trade in postcards" (Spencer 1990b :49). On February 5, 1913, Dawson wrote to Maryon-Wilson, "So far, I have not mentioned the ownership of the land or the exact spot because I did not wish Mr. R. Kenward to be troubled by trespassers" (Spencer 1990b :50). It seems reasonable to infer that the references to the locality given in the published version of the Dawson and Woodward report were deliberately vague and faithfully reflect the minimal amount of information which was given at the meeting on December 18. This controverts Zuckerman's and Grigson's unsupported assertions–"All had been revealed in detail at the meeting–maps and all" (Zuckerman 1990:14) and "It had been described at the meeting" (Grigson 1990b :1343). Zuckerman's reference to "maps and all" is not accurate: figure I in the Dawson and Woodward (19I3) article is the only map I have found in the Quarterly Journal, and it shows the position of Piltdown near the centre of an area of the south of England which is 24 miles east-west and 28 miles north-south. A map on that scale could scarcely be said to show in detail the location of "a little roadside pit" (Woodward 1948:6). Nor is Dawson's text any more informative. Moreover, we have no evidence whether or not the map in question was shown at the meeting. The only other relevant illustration in the Dawson and Woodward article (which might have led Zuckerman to use the term "maps and all") was their figure 2, not a map at all but a diagrammatic north-south section of the Weald from Tatsfield to Newhaven, a distance of some 38 miles. The position of Piltdown is shown just over one-third of this distance north of Newhaven– hardly a precise localisation.

There is every reason to infer that, at the Burlington House meeting, Dawson and Smith Woodward were at pains to reveal no more detail of the locality than subsequently appeared in print.

Now let us examine how precise were the details given in [Keith's] article in the British Medical Journal. Here are his ipsissima verba (1912:1719):

The scene of this "find" lies some nine miles north of Lewes, in the valley of the Sussex Ouse, which, rising in the Weald, breaks through the South Downs at Lewes, and enters the sea at Newhaven. After flowing eastwards past Sheffield Park the Ouse bends southward. On the north bank, at the bend, about a mile from the river and on a flat field near Piltdown Common, in the parish of Fletching, situated 80 ft. above the level of the river, there is a superficial bed of gravel 4 ft. thick. It is in this bed of gravel that the fossil bones were found by Mr. Charles Dawson of Lewes....

A noteworthy difference between [Keith's1 and Dawson's articles is the inclusion by the former of the tale of a "thing like a cocoa-nut" having been dug out by farm labourers "four years ago." The pieces were said to have been thrown on a rubbish heap nearby, and "it was from this rubbish heap that Mr. Dawson recovered the greater part of the skull" ([Keith] 19I2:I7I9). According to the account published in the Quarterly Journal, this story was not told at the Burlington House meeting, and its inclusion in [Keith's] article could well point to prior collusion between Keith and Dawson. Smith Woodward's curiosity was aroused sufficiently to lead him to make enquiries about the authorship of the British Medical Journal article. One of these was addressed to A. S. Underwood, whose help in the initial study of the Piltdown remains Smith Woodward acknowledged (Dawson and Woodward 19I3 139) and who published an account of the Piltdown mandible in the British Dental Journal (19I3): Underwood replied on December 30, 1912 "No I didn't do the BMJ" (Spencer 1990b :47).

From this restudy of the critical question that had aroused Langham's suspicions, I have pinpointed several items related to Keith's description in the British Medical Journal of the locality and site and of the history of the discovery which Keith almost certainly did not glean from the meeting on December 18, 1912. The only likely source of these items of information would have been Dawson himself, colluding with Keith, or prior knowledge of the site gained from an earlier visit by Keith to the site. On either interpretation, strength is given to Langham's contention that Keith had had additional and prior knowledge of the site and its history.

The anonymity of the article in the Journal is not a serious point, save in one respect. The fact that the article was accorded the status of the "main weekly editorial" and that such editorials were customarily unsigned, as Zuckerman (1990) points out, afforded Keith the cloak of anonymity that, on the Langham-Spencer hypothesis, he required.

2,. His apparent inability to find Piltdown. A diary entry for January 4, 1913, describes a visit Keith and his wife paid that day to the Piltdown area. The diary conveys the impression that they could not find the Piltdown site and had to ask some boys: then Keith recorded, "didn't see the gravel bed anywhere," and they returned home. Langham believed that this was deliberately misleading: it is strange, indeed, to imagine the Keiths going all the way from London and turning back within a few metres of their goal. Yet we can be reasonably sure that Keith knew where the site was, either from what was revealed at the meeting (on Zuckerman’s unsupported assertion) or from what Keith already knew when he wrote his article for the British Medical Journal. . It seems to me to be even stranger that Keith have gone there without making a prior arrangement with either Dawson, the man on the spot, or Smith Woodward, who with Dawson had "scientific ownership" of the site. On the Langham-Spencer hypothesis, Keith went through the charade of getting lost when he took his wife to see the site as another attempt to create a smokescreen and to distance himself from giving the impression that he had prior knowledge of the site.

3. His account of his supposed first meeting with Dawson. In his Autobiography Keith (1950:378) appears to go out of his way to create the impression that he first met Dawson early in 19I3, after the Burlington House meeting:

It may not be amiss if I recall now some of the happy sequelae which came out of the Piltdown controversy. One morning early in 19I3, when I entered my office at College [the Royal College of Surgeons], I found a gentleman waiting for me. He introduced himself as Mr. Charles Dawson. We had a pleasant hour together. His open, honest nature and his wide knowledge endeared him to me. He quite appreciated the attention I was giving to his own special child–Piltdown man!

There seems little doubt that Keith must have met Dawson previously on several occasions. First, in July 1911 Keith had taken part in an excursion, as a guest of honour, to Hastings, hosted by W. R. Butterfield, Dawson, and Lewis Abbott: it is inconceivable that Keith, one of three guests of honour, and Dawson, one of three hosts, would have failed to meet. Secondly, there must have been at least one or two meetings in connection with the occurrence of a 13th thoracic vertebra in a small number of human skeletons in Keith's collection at the Royal College of Surgeons. On this subject Dawson wrote a paper (1912). One does not study and write a paper on specimens in another scientist's collection without first obtaining explicit permission from the scientist in question. Therefore, it must be assumed that this study was not made behind Keith's back and that, when Dawson visited the Royal College, it was with Keith's blessing and that he met Keith on such occasions. Thirdly, Keith was present and took part in the discussion at the Burlington House meeting at which Dawson and Smith Woodward presented their account of Piltdown and the "remains." Thus it seems amazing that Keith (who kept not one but two diaries) should have tried to convey the impression that he first met Dawson early in 1913. It is astonishing, moreover, that he should have underlined his prior supposed unfamiliarity with Dawson by stating that "he introduced himself as Mr. Charles Dawson"–as if Keith did not know who he was.

All of this evidence–the entry in the Autobiography, the ignoring of the earlier occasions of almost certain encounters, and the correcting of the slip of the tongue both orally and in writing–shows how far Keith went to create the impression that he had not known Dawson prior to January 1913, despite much evidence to the contrary.

4. His prevarication to Hrdlicka. Spencer uncovered another inconsistency or prevarication. On October 28, 1912, Hrdlicka had written to Keith asking him for information about the Piltdown "discovery." Keith replied only on December 23, 1912, explaining that he had not replied earlier as he had not been permitted to see the material until it was made public on December 18 at Burlington House. We know that this was untrue–that Keith had been shown the material at the British Museum (Natura1 History) on two occasions, on December 3, 1912, and "a week before the famous meeting on December 18" (Keith's letter to Weiner, November 22, 1953, cited by Spencer 1990a :193)). Either Keith's statement to Hrdlicka was a "white lie" or it is to be seen as part of the pattern carefully created by Keith to distance himself from Piltdown, from the "remains," and from Dawson pnor to December 1912.

5. His destruction of his correspondence with Dawson.. Keith, who was such a meticulous archivist and diarist, had nonetheless destroyed all of his correspondence with Dawson, as well as all of his notes related to Piltdown and Dawson. Both Oakley and Weiner noted, in their respective reports on their interview with Keith at Downe on November 21, 1953, that Keith told them that all his letters from Dawson had been destroyed "by himself in a bonfire some years ago" (cited in Spencer 1990b :207, 220). This destruction of the Dawson-Keith correspondence was apparently so thorough that when Spencer, between 1983 and 1986, catalogued all of Keith's pnvate and professional papers in the library of the Royal College of Surgeons, he failed to unearth any surviving correspondence between Keith and Dawson (Spencer 1990b :2-8) –though hundreds of other letters and notes survived. The completeness and the evident selectivity {Spencer 1990b ) of Keith's destruction of the Dawson correspondence are remarkable and most suspicious.

6. A tale of 13 vertebrae. An extraordinarily convoluted pathway of association between Keith and Dawson is suggested by the story of the 13th thoracic vertebra referred to above. We know that Dawson had been visiting the Royal College of Surgeons prior to May 12, 1912, on which date he wrote to Smith Woodward telling him so. We know also that, although it seems that Dawson had no prior record in human anatomy, he was apparently permitted to study–with a view to publication–certain human skeletons in Keith's collection. It is, as I have said, inconceivable and would have been scientifically improper for Dawson to have studied and tried to publish upon materials in Keith's charge without Keith's having determined his credentials to do the work in question and given consent. Yet we find Dawson, in his May 12 letter to Smith Woodward accompanying the manuscript of his paper on the 13th vertebra, declaring, "I am very anxious to get it placed at once because I have had to work the photographs under the nose of Keith and his assistant. I gather from the latter that Keith is rather puzzled what to make of it all, and I want to secure the priority to which I am entitled" (Spencer 1990a :195). Since we must assume that Keith gave permission for Dawson's study, this strange statement is clearly a blind on Dawson's part, evidently designed to conceal the prior acquaintance and collusion between himself and Keith.

It is difficult to understand why Dawson had been visiting the College in the first place unless it was to have discussions with Keith and, possibly also, to obtain materials with which to salt the Piltdown gravel. Moreover, it is most difficult to comprehend how Dawson came to be counting vertebrae in human skeletons in Keith's collection–such a study could not conceivably have arisen out of Dawson's previous archaeological and palaeontological collecting in Sussex–unless Keith had put Dawson onto the project of examining human skeletons with 13 thoracic vertebrae. Why should Keith have done this?

Perhaps, thought Langham, the project of the 13th vertebra provided the alibi needed to explain Dawson's several or repeated visits to the Royal College. In submitting his paper to Smith Woodward, Dawson said, "if you think well enough of it I should be very much obliged if you would introduce the paper for me at the Royal Society" (Spencer 1990a :194-95). It is possible that by encouraging Dawson to undertake the study and to believe that it might be presented to the Royal Society, Keith was playing upon Dawson's passionate desire to become a Fellow of the Royal Society and conveying to Dawson that he was prepared to help advance this aim. Thereby Keith would have been buying Dawson's loyalty.

7. His repeated assertion that "Dawson was an honest man." In reading the writings of Keith, I have been struck by the frequency with which he refers to Dawson's "honesty" and "sterling" personal qualities. For instance, in his Antiquity of Man (1925), he refers to "the sterling ability and unselfish personality" of Dawson (p. 486). We recall his spirited encomium to Dawson at the unveiling of the Piltdown monument in 1938, and we have seen the description in his Autobiography (1950) of their purported first meeting, citing Dawson's "open, honest nature." Again in the same work, Keith describes how, in the early days of the Piltdown discovery, he and Smith Woodward were open antagonists– "enemies, I might almost say" (p. 654)–but that "as years went by we were gradually drawn together by two circumstances: he and I never differed as to the genuineness and importance of the discovery made at Piltdown; and we had both the same love and respect for Charles Dawson" (p. 654). Yet a further illustration of Keith's seeming preoccupation with Dawson's integrity is furnished in Oakley's report on the meeting of himself and Weiner with Keith on November 21, 1953. Oakley writes, "Dawson had seemed to him [Keith] a quiet, respectable, honest man" (cited in Spencer 1990b :207). Weiner's separate report on that interview cited Keith as saying that Dawson was "an open, honest chap."

Why does Keith seek so assiduously to be supportive of Dawson? One is reminded of Hamlet's mother's words, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." Was Keith trying to uphold Dawson's reputation not simply out of loyalty to an old friend but as part of the camouflage, the "cover-up"? Keith's reasoning could have been along these lines–the more honest Dawson was seen to be, the less likely it was that the legitimacy of Dawson's "own special child," Piltdown, would be called into question.

8. His protests of Piltdown’s genuineness. Keith seems also to have been preoccupied with asserting the genuineness or authenticity of the Piltdown remains; something one does not find in the writings of Smith Woodward. Indeed, he sometimes interprets investigators' doubts whether the cranium and mandible be longed to the same species as attacks on the "authenticity" of the specimens. For example, in A New Theory of Human Evolution (1948) Keith states that Weidenreich (1943) had proposed "to deny the authenticity of the Piltdown fossil remains." However, a careful perusal of the full discussion (jpp. 216-20) shows that Weidenreich did not question whether the Piltdown hominoid specimens were authentic. On the contrary, he questions the compatibility of the cranium, the mandible, and the supposed lower canine with one another: this human vault, simian mandible, and anonymous "canine," he averred, could not possibly have belonged to one and the same form. Their combination into a single individual dubbed Eoanthropus, had created a chimaera–and "the sooner the chimaera 'Eoanthropus' is erased from the: list of human fossils, the better for science" (Weidenreich 1943:220). This is not to question the authenticity (as Keith states) if by "authentic" we understand "trustworthy" or "genuine." Again, on p. 654 of An Autobiography, we have already seen Keith's statement that he and Smith Woodward "never differed as to the genuineness . . . of the discovery made at Piltdown."

Why was Keith at pains so often to stress that the Piltdown remains were "genuine" or "authentic"? It could be argued that nobody wrote more often about Piltdown or at greater length than Keith did–Piltdown occupied ten chapters filling 204 pages of The Antiquity of Man 1915)–and that his references to the genuineness of the Piltdown remains were by happenstance alone. On the other hand, in the context of all the other lines of evidence assembled here it is pertinent to suggest that Keith animadverted to the authenticity of the remains so frequently because he either suspected or knew that they were not authentic. His reasoning could then have been that the more the remains were said and believed to be trustworthy and of undisputed origin, the less likely it was that the fake would be uncovered.

9. His misrepresentation of Shattock's results. One further highly relevant untruth has been discovered by me. While Keith was conservator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, S. G. Shattock (1857-1924) was in charge of the largest section of the museum, that on pathological lesions of the human body. When the 17th International Congress of Medicine met in London in July 1913, Shattock presided over its Pathological Section. He presented a lengthy disquisition on cranial thickening in modem human subjects and in "certain Pleistocene crania." Naturally he commented on the very thick Piltdown cranium: it was only seven months since Smith Woodward had drawn attention to this thickening of the vault bones as the only significant feature of the specimen which would not be expected among modem human crania (Dawson and Woodward 1913).

An interesting feature of the thickening of the Piltdown calvaria was described by Smith Woodward: "The thickening is due to the great development of the cancellated diploe, the outer and inner tables of the bone being everywhere comparatively thin" (Dawson and Woodward 1913:124). Such thickening of the diploe is feature of certain pathological conditions (Shattock (1914), Weidenreich (1943), including some binopathies (Adeloye, Kattan, and Silverman 1975). As Weidenreich (1943:164) has pointed out, it sharply with the form of thickening found in Peking man. In the latter hominid, "all three constituents of the bone take equal part in the thickening, the two tables slightly more than the diploe." The structure in the Piltdown bones would thus point strongly to the original skull's having been pathological. Oakley (1960) has mentioned two recent crania in the British Museum (Natural History), one of an Ona from Tierra del Fuego, and the other of a Bronze Age person from Sutton Courtenay in Berkshire, England, which show thickening similar to that of Piltdown I.

Despite these statements in Shattock's 44-page article, where Keith refers in The Antiquity of Man (1915)) to the "surprisingly thick" Piltdown bones he makes the following assertion: "The bone is naturally formed; there can be no question of disease. My colleague Mr. Shattock definitely settled this point" (Keith 1915:320, italics mine). The accompanying footnote refers to Shattock's contribution to the Pathological Section of the International Medical Congress that had been held in London in August 1913. Keith's untruthful assertion is repeated in his second edition, where he uses the words "The late Professor Shattock definitely settled this point" (Keith 1925). We may be certain that Keith knew of Shattock's study: they worked in the same institution; Keith (1925) cited Shattock's supposed opinion on Piltdown and gave the reference to Shat tock's publication in a footnote (p. 370). Yet Keith's statement, published in both editions of his book, is clearly a misrepresentation of Shattock's position. This provides one example of the lies of which both Elliot Smith and Sollas accused Keith (see below).

The first and more obvious reason Keith was at such pains to deny any possibility that the Piltdown calvari was pathological seems to me to be that, if some feature of Piltdown I had been the outcome of earlier pathology the cranium might have been unsuitable to provide direct fossil evidence for Keith's particular theory of the pattern of hominid evolution–one of the motives that. have been suggested for the forgery. The second is that if the Piltdown calvaria had been pathological, it would have pointed to a link with the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. It is known that the museum had a fine collection of anomalous and pathological skeletons, including the Gloucestershire specimen and others described by Bamard Davis in his Thesaurus Craniorum (1867). ). I have already referred to the five skeletons with supernumerary vertebrae. Field (1953) commented on this treasury of specimens when describing his first visit to Keith at the Royal College in 1921: "he showed me around. Here was the world's finest collection of acromegalic casts of faces, hands, and feet.... Here were the dwarfs, their casts and skeletons . . . at the opposite extreme of endocrine disorder, we came to the giants . . " (pp. 36-37). On this reasoning, if the specimen were indeed shown to be pathological, other scholars might infer that it was highly likely to have stemmed from the Royal College, and exposure would have been on the cards. It was most important, therefore, for Keith to assert that, despite its thickness, the Piltdown specimen was nominal, even if this meant his resorting to false presences in respect of Shattock's view.

The following scenario proposes itself: it would have been relatively easy for Keith to select an old, thickboned cranium (?another mediaeval cranium from Gloucestershire or elsewhere) from the museum's immense collection of specimens as the counterfeit evidence to be planted, after due treatment, at Piltdown. At the time the cranium was chosen (?1911 or earlier), neither Keith, Dawson, nor anyone else would have known the results of Shattock's great study on calvarial thickening. The choice of a thick calvaria was deliberate; early hominid crania were generally thick. However, the choice of this particular thick cranium proved to be a mistake because of its probably pathological character. As though to cover up this mistake, we find Keith not acknowledging what Shattock really said but asserting that Shattock had "definitely settled" the normality and freedom from disease of the Piltdown calvaria. Whether anyone, including Shattock, ever pointed out Keith's "mistake" to him we do not know, but it is alarming to find the same false assertion–so necessary to Keith's case–being repeated in the second edition of The Antiquity of Man, ten years later, after Shattock had died.

The list of nine lines of evidence against Keith is not exhaustive. The present analysis includes topics (items 7, 8, and 9) over and above those adduced by Spencer and Langham, new validations of item 1, which has been questioned by two of Spencer’s critics, and item 3, and fresh perspectives on items 2 and 6. Collectively, these items all point in the same direction: (1) that Keith knew about and had been involved in the goings-on centred upon the site of Piltdown; (2) that, to cover his tracks, he took every possible measure to convey the impression that he had had no acquaintance with the site, the Piltdown "remains," or Charles Dawson prior to December 1912; (3) that he sustained this misleading and camouflaging pose right up to the time when he wrote his Autobiography (1950) and, apart from a momentary slip in his old age, even when he was visited by Weiner and Oakley on November 21, 1953; (4) that he took every opportunity to attest to the integrity of Dawson and the genuineness of the Piltdown "discoveries"; (5) that he vouched for the normality or freedom from pathology of the Piltdown hominoid "remains," even to the point of outright imposture. On some of the [257] above lines above lines of reasoning and yet others, Spencer, from his own lengthy and scholarly analysis, and Langham, from his, were drawn to the same conclusion, namely, that Keith resorted to all of these "cover-up" actions, evasions, and misrepresentations because he was indeed the scientist-member of the team of forgers.

Evidence as to Keith's Character

Although at the time Keith was becoming one of the great names in anthropology and anatomy in Great Britain, a number of his colleagues distrusted him. Several examples suffice to make the point:

On April 8, 1914, Grafton Elliot Smith wrote to A. C. Haddon about inter alia "Keith's game of deliberately fouling the pitch" and his tendency "to publish stuff which he (knew) to be false" (Spencer 1990b :3.1.13).

In May 1925, William J. Sollas wrote to Robert Broom (during the height of the altercation that followed Dart's publication of the Taung child), "Keith may be keeping things back." In July 1925, Sollas wrote again about Keith, "who is indeed the most arrant humbug and artful climber in the anthropological world.... He makes the rashest statements in the face of evidence. Never quotes an author but to misrepresent him, generalises on single observations, and indeed there is scarcely a single crime in which he is not adept.... He has gone up like a rocket, and will come down like the stick" (Findlay 1972:53). As a member of the last Medical B.Sc class at the University of the Witwatersrand to receive lectures from Robert Broom, in 1945, I often heard Broom inveighing against Keith in censorious and some times unprintable terms.

We know of the bitter personal enmity that subsisted for long periods between Keith, on the one hand, and both Elliot Smith and Smith Woodward, on the other as Keith attests in his Autobiography j (1950). Are these simply instances of professional jealousy, or was there fire behind the smoke of his colleagues' suspicions? We have seen instances of such "fire" among the nine pointers enumerated above.

In fairness to Keith, it may be mentioned that he had and still has his supporters and admirers. For example Henry Field, in his autobiography The Track of Man 1953) wrote, "Since 1931, when I first met Sir Arthur in the Royal College of Surgeons, I had been under the spell of his charm and encyclopedic knowledge on anatomy and physical anthropology. For thirty-two years I have been encouraged by his sincere interest in my work. If I had to designate 'the greatest living anthropologist' it would be Sir Arthur (Keith), and most of my colleagues would concur (p. 137). T. D. McCown, who collaborated closely with Keith in the study of the Mount Cammel remains in the 1930s, spoke well of him and seems to have enjoyed a happy relationship with him, according to Elizabeth Langstroth (McCown’s widow) and K. A. R. Kennedy (a former student of McCown’s) (personal communications).

Motives

The Langham-Spencer hypothesis includes Dawson as a johnny-on-the-spot member of a team of two forgers.. It is important to point this out because Zuckerman (I990:I4) has quite erroneously stated that Spencer has exonerated Dawson.) An overweening desire for recognition and to become a Fellow of the Royal Society is adduced by Spencer as Dawson's motive. There is evidence that Dawson craved such recognition. Indeed, he achieved nomination for election to the fellowship of the Royal Society in 1913, and his candidature was renewed each year until 1916, though without success up to the time of his death (Spencer 1990b :103).

On Spencer's (1990a) analysis, two principal motives governed Keith's participation in the fraud: one was the materialisation of a particular concept of human evolution, the other career advancement and ambition. A few critics have denied the validity of the second motive.

Keith (1915, 1925) held to the view that ancestral hominids were men with essentially modem-looking crania, and he agreed with Elliot Smith that they would have possessed an essentially modem form and size of brain. He held further that creatures with such modern-looking crania were of great antiquity. The human cranium that was doctored and planted at Piltdown was of this nature, while the planted fossils of the associated fauna pointed to a Tertiary or Pliocene age. In other words, the planted specimens placed an essentially modem human cranium in an ostensibly most ancient, supposedly Tertiary deposit. The choice of specimens with which the gravel was salted provided the veriest transmogrification into "hard facts" of Keith's theory about the evolution of the cranial vault and brain.

The skull vault whose parts were planted in the Piltdown gravel was in all respects similar to the same parts of a modem human cranium save for the "surprisingly thick" calvarial bones (Dawson and Woodward 1913; Keith 1915, 1925; Boule 1973; Weidenreich 1943). Smith Woodward drew attention to this feature in his initial description of Piltdown I, citing values of 8-12 mm for the thickness in different parts of the calvaria (Dawson and Woodward 1913). These values were repeated by Keith (1915, 1925), and the point of the "extraordinary thickness"

was stressed again by Weidenreich (1943), who had had the opportunity to study the original Piltdown specimens. Keith held that "in no normal modem skull are all the bones so uniformly thick as in this recently discovered specimen," whereas this feature characterises many "ancient skulls" (Keith 1915:320) and "primitive skulls" (Sollas 1924:186).

Therefore, I put the case that a thick-boned skull was deliberately chosen with two closely related designs in mind. First, while the modernity of the fomm and size of the cranium was in keeping with Keith's preconceived idea of hominid evolution, the thickness if considered normal) offered support for the great antiquity of the specimen to which the "associated" faunal remains tes[258]tified. Secondly, the supposedly archaic feature of marked cranial thickness helped to avert any inference that the otherwise essentially modem-looking cranium was simply that of a recent or present-day subject whose body or bones had become incorporated into the "ancient" gravels.

If the desire to show the great antiquity of a mainly modern-looking cranium and brain were the intellectual part of Keith's motive, why then was the mandible chosen to accompany the cranium that of an ape? I think the principal reason for this was given away by part of Keith's comments in the discussion following Dawson' and Smith Woodward's papers at the Burlington House meeting, as faithfully recorded in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society (Dawson and Woodward 1913:I48, italics mine):

[Prof A. Keith] agreed that the reconstruction of the skull had been executed with great skill, the only point in the restoration about which he was not convinced being the chin-region of the mandible and the form of the incisor, canine, and premolar teeth. The restoration approached too nearly the characters of the chimpanzee. The very simian characters of the sub-symphysial region of the mandible, the undoubtedly large anterior teeth, the primitive characters of the skull and brain, seemed to him altogether incompatible with the Chellean age assigned by the Authors. In his opinion the skull must be assigned to the same age as the mammalian remains, which were admittedly Pliocene. In the speaker's opinion, tertiary man had thus been discovered in Sussex. In coming to this conclusion the speaker was influenced by the fact that in the Heidelberg jaw, which was of early Pleistocene date, the symphysial region of the jaw was essentially human in its markings and characters; whereas the same features in the [Piltdown] remains just described were simian, and therefore presumably much earlier.

In other words, had a modem type of mandible been included, it would have been reasonable to conclude that the entire skull (cranium and jaw) was no older than that of Heidelberg, that is, of the Pleistocene epoch. It might even have been averred that the Piltdown remains represented a morphologically modern man of later or recent times whose bones were intrusive into the supposedly very early or Pliocene beds. By the choice of so "archaic-looking" or "simian" a mandible, the case was strengthened that Piltdown man was presumably much earlier than Heidelberg man from Germany. This argument, inferred from the "apelike" jaw, was restated and developed by Keith in The Antiquity of Man (1925: 507-8). He summed up with the statement that the simian chin region of the Piltdown mandible (in contrast with what he called the human-like chin region of the Heidelberg jaw) "suggests that Piltdown man represents, as the animal remains accompanying him suggest, a Pliocene form. I am of the opinion that future discoveries will prove that the remains found at Piltdown represent the first trace yet found in Europe of Pliocene man" (Keith 1925:508).

Secondly, a somewhat different aspect, namely, the influence of the mandible on the inferred place of Piltdown in hominid evolution, was stressed by Keith in New Discoveries Relating to the Antiquity of Man (1931): "It must be remembered that if we had found only the cranial parts of the Piltdown man we should never have hesitated in regarding him as the direct ancestral type of modern man; the simian features of his lower jaw and of his teeth led us to exclude him from this position" (pp. 455-56).

A third reason for the choice of an ape mandible to accompany the manifestly human skull was to create the impression that here, at last, was the long-sought part-ape, part-human being envisaged as an ancestor. In Keith's (1925:503) own words, "the skull thus reconstructed by Sir A. Smith Woodward was a strange blend of man and ape. At last, it seemed, the missing form– the link which early followers of Darwin had searched for–had really been discovered."

One of Keith's major motives, on this scenario, was to establish the case for a particular kind of human ancestor, as conceived by him, but also a fossil man whose provenance and morphology showed that it was earlier and therefore more important than any other fossil hominid then known, at least in Europe.

The second suggested motive was Keith's powerful ambition and strong desire for career advancement. With hindsight, there is little doubt that of all the Piltdown men it was Keith whose career benefitted most from Piltdown. The trend started, perhaps, with Keith's very words at the Burlington House meeting: "Prof. A. Keith regarded the discovery of fossil human remains just announced as by far the most important ever made in England, and of equal, if not of greater consequence than any other discovery yet made, either at home or abroad" (Dawson and Woodward 1913:148). Of the various discussants whose views were cited in the Quarterly Journal, Keith alone greeted the discovery with unalloyed enthusiasm. He maintained his almost effusive and exaggeratedly fervid estimation of it in The Antiquity of Man (Keith 1925), in which he called the skull "the most important and instructive of all ancient human documents yet discovered in Europe" (p. 486} and "one of the most remarkable discoveries of the twentieth century" (p. 501).

From his Weekly Diaries (1I907-70) and from his Autobiography we know that Keith's candidature for fellowship of the Royal Society had been rejected in 1911I and again in 1912. Thus, on March 25, 1911, this entry appears in the Weekly Diaries: "The Royal Society gave me a slap in the face by rejecting me as a prospective fellow...." Again, on March 3, 191(2, Keith writes, "Royal Society still left me out so I have made up my mind to be content without it. Rather foolish a man at 46 needing qualifications and fellowships. Besides I don't think the men already elected are really quite capable of judging good and bad work" (Spencer, personal communication). However, in the Autobiography, Keith makes clear how much he had craved a fellowship (p. 363, italics mine):

In the spring of 1913 there came to me an honour for which I had waited impatiently . . . election to the Royal Society. Perhaps my impatience at being kept waiting so long ... was unreasonable.... The note which I made in my diary when rejected in 1911 reads thus: "So I have made up my mind to be content without the fellowship; it is rather foolish for a man at the age of forty-six to be in need of qualifications and fellowships." The truth is, I was not content. The note made in 1913, when I was elected, is somewhat different: "Thus one of the goals I expected to reach ten years ago comes now."

How important The Antiquity of Man was to rate in Keith's career is testified to by Keith himself: "my chief claim to recognition as a man of science–my extensive researches into the anatomy of anthropoids and of man–remained unpublished [in 1913]" (p. 363) . Tha work started out to be a full account of Piltdown and metamorphosed into The Antiquity of Man (1915).

By these three criteria, one must conclude that Keith had not reached the top of the tree when this elaborate hoax was conceived, planned, and prepared and whne the Piltdown "remains" were planted, presumably during1911 or perhaps earlier. At that stage of his career Keith still had much to which to aspire.

The twofold motivation attributed by Spencer (1990a ), to Keith is thus strongly supported and, I submit, strengthened by the present analysis.

Summation on the Case against Keith

From my study of the available evidence on the Piltdown affaire I conclude, first, that, although some aspects of the forgery give the impression of ineptitude such as the preparation of the "mandibular canine" and of the cricket-bat implement–the conception as whole and the choice of materials, hominoid and other, betray an elaborate and ingenious plot. The design of the fraud requires knowledge of human and primate anatomy and probably pathology, of archaeology, palaeontology and palaeoanthropology, of geology and geochronology, and of the interplay of those factors. I have ended my survey with a healthy respect for the breadth of knowledge and insight displayed by those responsible and with the conviction that Charles Dawson is most unlikely to have been able to conceive the broad plan and to plot the minutiae of its execution on his own, however enthusiastic and wide-ranging his interests and activities as a natural historian, collector, antiquarian, and seeker after knowledge (pace Langdon 1991 and Kennedy 1991). I therefore support the notion, first flirted with by Weiner (1953)' that Dawson had a scientist-accomplice.

Secondly, from a close study of the Langham-Spencer case against Keith, during the course of which I have brought to light several new lines of argument, I conclude that, of all the proposals that have been made as to the identity of a scientist-accomplice of Dawson, the hypothesis incriminating Keith is the most convincing and logical and is supported by the greatest body of evidence.

The most telling evidence against Keith relates to events and writings at or close to the time of the Piltdown "discoveries." This contrasts strongly with the main burden of Gould's case against Teilhard, in respect of which the evidence is based largely on writings and occurrences long after the Piltdown "discoveries" and even after the uncovering of the hoax. The contemporary evidence is more persuasive and cogent than the retrospective evidence. When to this principle is added the factor of age and declining vitality and memory at the time when the retrospective evidence was given, the conclusion seems inescapable that the evidence against Keith is far more compelling than that against Teilhard.

Keith undoubtedly commanded the wide and profound knowledge and evolutionary perspective which the intricacies of the hoax demanded, and he possessed such knowledge at the time in question. Keith had ready access to the materials that were prepared and planted. In his laboratory, Keith had the opportunity to modify and stain the specimens, or he could have done so through Dawson's home and office. Through his association with Dawson, Keith had the opportunity to salt the gravel beds of the Piltdown area. Preeminently, as a man of driving ambition and one with a very firmly held concept of how hominid evolution had occurred despite the lack of any fossils to support that concept, Keith had motives. No other colleague of Dawson fulfils the five desiderata enunciated above more plausibly, more logically, or more credibly than Arthur Keith.

Keith, Piltdown, and Taung

We detect another motivation, a hidden agenda, behind Keith's long-lasting and vehement opposition to Australopithecus.

Clearly if Taung and Australopithecus proved to be correctly appraised as early hominids or aspirant-hominids, Piltdown could not have been an ancestor, and its bona fides would have been suspected. On the other hand, if Piltdown were correctly seen as a very early (Pliocene) fossil hominid ancestor, then Taung would have had to be relegated to the status of no more than an unusual ape – and that was the burden of Keith's argument against Taung. Keith's authoritative acceptance of Piltdown and his equally authoritative rejection of Australopithecus were large responsible for delaying the world's acceptance of the Taung child and of all those other australopithecines that came later from Stterkfontein, Kromdraai, Makapansgat, and Swartkrans, as early members of the Hominidae (although Keith recanted (1947) after he had received Broom's and Scheper's (1946) monograph on the South African Australopithecinae).

Leakey and Goodall (1969:145) drew attention to this historical interaction between views about Piltdown and those about Taung:

the conclusions drawn from the Piltdown forgery undoubtedly played a part in causing

many people to reject the evidence of the Australopithecines that had been found by

Dart and Broom in South Africa. It was argued that if, by the beginning of the Pleisto-

cene, or even at the end of the Pliocene (which is where some people placed the

Piltdown find), man had had a brain of approximately modern size but associated with

an almost ape-like mandible, it was impossible to accept that the Australopithecines,

with such very small brains, could be man's immediate predecessors, especially since

their teeth were even more like those of man than were the Piltdown teeth.

Howells (1967:305) states that "our understanding of the australopithecines . . . were . . . a factor in forcing the exposure of Piltdown." In 1985 the interrelationship between the history of Piltdown acceptance and Taung rejection was reiterated (Washburn, 1985, Tobias, 1985).

Largely through the person of Keith, the history of the Piltdown forgery and that of the Taung skull (and of the other australopithecines) were almost inextricably interwoven for a considerable part of the present century. It would be no exaggeration to claim that the Piltdown fraud and Keith's avid espousal of the Piltdown remains held up the advance of palaeoanthropology for a quarter of a century. It is difficult to escape the view that at least one motive, perhaps the main one, behind Keith' s sustained and relentless opposition to Dart's and Broom's claims for Australopithecus was his perceived need to defend Piltdown, on which so much of his career and time were erected. Keith saw Taung and the others as a challenge to the mind-set crystallised in the Piltdown fake.

By the middle of the 20th century there was simply no place for Piltdown in the developing scenario of hominid evolution. Even Keith realised this: "If we could get rid of the Piltdown

fossil fragments, then we should greatly simplify the problem of human evolution" (Keith 1948:229). Weidenreich (1943:173) went straight to the bone: "Eoanthropus should be erased from the list of human fossils. It is the artificial combination of fragments of a modern-human braincase with orang-utan-like mandible and teeth." Whilst Eoanthropus appeared to fill a conceptual lacuna in 1912, by mid-century it was totally at variance with the prevailing palaeoanthropological paradigm. Its paradoxical position in the burgeoning store of fossil hominids forced its critical re-examination with the help of new analytical tools. Finally, as a tribute to the vigour of the scientific method, the hoax was uncovered, and the identity of the forgers has been revealed with a high degree of probability.

Comments

Peter J. Bowler

Department of Social Anthropology, Queen's University of Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland. 16 x 91

As someone who has described the Piltdown affair as a "trivial whodunit," I am less than enthusiastic about Tobias's article. My objections centre on the amount of scholarly effort (and publication space) that is being wasted on these apparently endless speculations and the fact tht close concentration on the minutiae of the Piltdown affair seems to distract from rather than contribute to serious historical study of early-20th-centruy palaeoanthropology.

My main reason for doubting the Spencer thesis is that Keith's theoretical position predicted the discovery of anatomically modern humans as far back as the Pliocene. Tobias tries to explain why he should have planted an ape jaw, and his claim that this helped to substantiate the antiquity of the remains is plausible at first sight. But we must remember that even Keith's own very modernized reconstruction of Eoanthropus was still too ape-like to count as the human ancestor within his own theory. If he had planted an ape jaw, he could hardly have been surprised that Smith Woodward and others should have reconstructed the finds in a way that emphasized their intermediate status even further. To plant an ape jaw and then spend the rest of your life trying to minimize its ape characters seems counterproductive to me. If Keith was a villain, he was a remarkably incompetent one when measured against his own hypothesis on human origins. He would have been better off without the jaw.

Tobias's claim that Kieth's guilt explains his hostility to the discovery of Australopithecus is a case of putting the cart a long way before the horse. Europeans had a deep-seated cultural preference for Central Asia as the source of human origins, coupled with a disgust for all things African based on racism (Bowler, 1986, 1989). Central Asia was promoted in the late 19th century by evolutionists such as W. Boyd Dawkins. In the early 20th century it was supported by palaeontologistgs such as W. D. Matthew and H. F. Osborn and by Davidson Black [the discoverer of "Peking Man"]. Of course, Piltdown fitted this paradigm, but to claim that Piltdown can explain Keith's own hostility to an African origin is to betray a complete lack of understanding of the cultural environment within which the discoveries were debated. Hardly anyone would have taken an African discovery seriously in the 1920s, even without Piltdown, because the Central Asian thesis expressed fundamental prejudices of the time. Central Asia remained the preferred location into the 1930s, by which time many experts were already beginning to ignore Piltdown as something of an anomaly.

Andrew T. Chamberlain

19 xii 91

According to a recent commentator, the continuing interest in the pursuit of the Piltdown forger(s) is more akin to a parlour game than to an attempt to contribute to intellectual history (Chippindale 1990). One perspective holds that the fake fossils were planted in the Piltdown gravels as an act of humourous or mischievous deception. Such hoaxes are by no means new to science and serve, inter alia, to warn specialists of the danger of complacency and overconfidence. The more serious charge is that of fraud–an act or course of deception deliberately practised to gain unlawful or unfair advantage. It is testimony to the continuing social naivety of Western science that even today there is a paucity of effective measures to detect and prosecute fraudulent actions (Smith 1991), whereas in other spheres of economic activity similar crimes merit lengthy investigation and the severest penalties. The complexity of the Piltdown deception may imply that the forger had access to specialist knowledge. Hence the belated pursuit of a perpetrator who must, by now, be comfortable in his or her grave.

In the most recent substantive contribution to the Piltdown inquiry, Spencer (1990a, b ) has constructed an elaborate coffin in which to bury the scientific reputation of one of the major Piltdown protagonists, Sir Arthur Keith. Tobias, in an instructive and characteristically eloquent postscript to Spencer’s work, endeavors to drive his own well-chosen nails into the casket bearing Keith’s name. I suspect, however, that both Spencer and Tobias have overstated the value of the circumstantial evidence that makes up the bulk of the case against Keith. For example, with regard to the charge that Keith had prior knowledge of the Piltdown excavations, as revealed by the details given in the editorial in the British Medical Journal published shortly after the Burlington House meeting, Tobias claims that the location of the fossil site and the nature of the initial discovery (the "cocoa-nut" incident) were not disclosed at that meeting. However, the subsequent written account of the meeting by Dawson and Woodward (1913) states that the farm where the fossils were excavated was located "close to Piltdown Common, Fletching"–words similar to those used by Keith (1912a ). Furthermore, while the "cocoa-nut" story was omitted from Dawson and Woodward’s official account, the incident is accurately recounted in contemporary newspaper coverage of the Burlington House meeting and is confirmed by notes prepared by Dawson for his oral presentation at the meeting (Spencer 1990a : 196, 1990b :15-16).

Keith’s purportedly misleading response to Weiner on being questioned about his first meeting with Dawson is also held to imply collusion between the two individuals. Yet Keith's letter to Weiner, written on the day after he was interviewed by Oakley and Weiner, states that January 28, 1913, was the occasion of the first personal meeting between himself and Dawson (Spencer 1990b :222). This statement presumably did not preclude earlier, professional encounters between the two men. Tobias further claims that Keith misrepresented the views put forward by Shattock (1913) on the pathological nature of the Piltdown skull. Shattock, however, subsequently changed his mind, as is shown by Woodward’s (1948:61) account of consultation with him concerning the Piltdown cranial fragments: "Dr. S. G. Shattock, of the Royal College of Surgeons, was especially interested in them, and it was not until he had examined them repeatedly that he was convinced that they were not diseased."

Christopher Chippindale

Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Downing St. Cambridge CB2 3DZ, England 22 xi 91

With Tobias, some of the reviewers of Spencer’s two Piltdown books have been convinced by the case against Sir Arthur Keith as the culprit, whilst other suspects remain under the shadow of suspicion. My own review in Science (Chippindale, 1990) grumbled instead about the whole Piltdown industry, which is why I called it "Piltdown: Who Dunit? Who Cares?" By Tobias’s arithmetic, at least 21 Piltdown suspects have so far been accused, "on circumstantial evidence of varying degrees of confidence," and the cases against 11 are thought worth mentioning in his paper. Some of these are thin to the point of absurdity. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote detective stories, lived near by, knew the Piltdown discoverer socially, interested himself in human evolution–and so he has been named as the Piltdown hoaxer. This case, Tobias notes, "has been dismissed by most critics as far-fetched." If it is one of his 11 more solid accusations, what are the slighter 10 like? Here is the trouble with the Piltdown industry: in part, it has been the imagination of amateur sleuths playing at "Piltdown: Who Mighta Dunit?" The scenarios they enjoy constructing are accusations of fraud, and this is why I am uncomfortable with watching the game.

Tobias, Spencer, and Langham are more serious-minded and more professional in their methods, but I do not read what they have published as now making a decisive proof. I doubt if the material to make a decisive proof anywhere exists. Tobias repeats and enlarges the Langham-Spencer case against Keith. It reads well. It may convince. It is very far from amounting to a proof that ends the affair. Consider, for example, the exchanges that have followed Spencer’s clinching evidence and the first of Tobias’s nine pointers to Keith’s guilt, the anonymous report published in the British Medical Journal on December 21, 1912. It was written by Keith, according to his diary, on December 16–two days before the meeting at which Piltdown was unveiled; to write beforehand in this way, Keith must have had inside knowledge, and therefore he must have been the forger. Grigson, reviewing Spencer (Grigson

1990b ) and in a later exchange with him in the Times Literary Supplement (Spencer 1991b , Grigson 1991), doubts if this is actually decisive. Like many weekly magazines, then and now, the British Medical Journal worked to a rapid production schedule that would have allowed an account written beforehand to be revised or enlarged in a proof stage after the December 18 meeting and before its publication. Grigson thinks (personal communication, October 1991) that this element to the case against Keith therefore fails. Tobias identifies in the BMJ article details which he believes were not presented at the meeting: as the article contains information that remained privileged after the meeting, the printing time-table is not decisive. Spencer (personal communication, October 1991) thinks that this element to the case against Keith therefore stands.

As do other workers in the Piltdown gravel-pit of detection, Tobias has to infer motive from material evidence which is not strong enough either to lead to a conviction or – equally – to resist an advocate’s belief in guilt. Grigson holds a position at the Royal College of Surgeons, where Keith was anatomist, so Spencer (1991b ) suggest that her questioning of the case against Keith follows from that institutional affiliation rather than a concern for historical truth. I suppose a glum view of the motives that direct colleagues may begin to grow if one spends one’s time in pursuit of chances for suspicion. What a criminal and a policeman have in common is that they both make their living out of crime. We would do better to recognize that reworking of everything so far dug out of the Piltdown quarries has not yielded and may never be able to yield a decisive identification.

The more important point, which Tobias states well, is the role of the Piltdown forgery in briefly deflecting the course of theory about human evolution. An admittance of Piltdown, "advanced skull plus backward jaw," discouraged or ruled out an admittance of Taung, "backward skull and advanced jaw." The real evidence won in the end and would surely have done so sooner if a decisive quantity of australopithecine finds had come to light earlier. This encourages me to persist in believing that fraud and other slippery carrying-on – however fashionable these are now said to be in biological science – are not and were not central to research as almost every one of us tries to practise it and that they rarely divert understanding far and long from a truer course. This aspect, a valuable part of Spencer’s book and of Tobias’s paper, cheers me. For the rest, I still don’t know who dunit at Piltdown, and I still won’t care until t here is a better class of answer t