This is a first reconstruction
of the skull of one
of our remote ancestors.
found in fragments in East Africa
by one of the famous
Leakey team in 1972.
This primitive skull is perhaps
three million years old.
It is a real missing
link in human evolution.
A modern discovery like this
is subjected to a powerful array
of scientific tests.
Here, for example,
in a Cambridge laboratory,
samples of the rock
beds in which it was found are being
accurately dated by an advanced
physical method.
Thanks to methods
of investigation like these,
applied over the whole range
of natural sciences, a vast amount
of objective data is soon available
on any modern find in this field.
70 years ago,
things were very different.
70 years ago,
in a laboratory setting far
removed from that of Department
of Geodesy
and Geophysics in Cambridge,
it was possible for some person
or persons unknown to embark
on an elaborate piece of forgery
in the field of human evolution.
And because the scientific tests
of today were then not available,
it was possible for them
to get away with it.
Around the turn of the century,
or a little later,
someone got hold of some pieces
of an unusually thick human skull
and set about staining them
in various chemical brews.
One of the treatments involved
boiling these skull fragments
in an iron sulphate solution.
The same person or persons
unknown also obtained
the jaw of an orang-utan.
Orang is one of the Great Apes
and lives in the jungles
of the Far East.
The specimen in question
was more or less a modern one,
perhaps a few hundred years old,
certainly not a fossil.
Our forger, or forgers,
went about removing all the most
distinctly ape-like
features of this jaw,
like the region of its chin
and the knob that hinges the jaw
onto the skull.
These features would have told
a competent anatomist
immediately that he was dealing
with the jaw of an ape.
So would the teeth that
remained in the jaw.
These teeth were filed right down,
so that the ape cusps were
completely removed
and a much more human-looking
state of wear was obtained.
After all these modifications had
been carried out,
the orang jaw too was stained
in various chemical solutions.
Some bogus flint tools of a very
primitive looking sort were
made and likewise stained and added
to the forger's growing collection.
The fraudulent assemblage was
rounded off with a careful
selection of old animal bones,
some of them genuine fossils
of genuine antiquity from various
foreign sites.
The whole bag of tricks was stewed
up to a consistent colouring.
Why were all these things
being done?
What was it that the forger or
forgers were trying to make?
They were trying
to make...the Missing Link.
"I was walking along a farm road
close to Piltdown Common when I
"noticed the road had been mended
with some peculiar brown flints,
"not usual in the district.
"Upon inquiry, I was astonished
to learn that they were dug from
"a gravel bed on the farm
and shortly afterwards,
"I visited the place,
where two labourers were at work,
"digging the gravel for small
repairs to the road.
"I asked the workmen if they'd found
bones or other fossils there.
"I urged them to preserve
anything that they might find."
These are the words
of Charles Dawson,
the lawyer antiquarian
of Uckfield in Sussex.
One of his professional duties
brought him
roughly every four years the short
distance from Uckfield
to the Piltdown area where he was
Steward of the Manor of Barkham
and where he presided over
the local Court Baron.
We do not know in which year
Mr Dawson alerted
the workmen to the possibility
of any finds in their gravel pit.
It may have been 1889, 1904 or 1907.
The date of the next move
is not quite so vague.
It was probably in 1908.
"Upon one of my subsequent visits to
the pit, one of the men handed to me
"a small portion of an
unusually thick human parietal bone."
A piece of the side
wall of the skull.
"I immediately made a search,
but could find nothing more.
"Nor had the men noticed
anything else.
"In fact, the bed seemed to be
quite unfossiliferous."
The gravel diggings by the side
of the road are grassed over now.
The actual finds were made
roughly where the hedge now runs.
"It was not until some years later,
"in the autumn of 1911 on a
subsequent visit to the spot,
"that I picked up among the
rain-washed spoil heaps
"of the gravel pit another
and larger piece."
One of those who saw a piece
of the skull around this time was
the young Teilhard de Chardin.
He'd been at the Jesuit
seminary in Hastings since 1909
and had met Charles Dawson
in the course of fossil hunting.
The jeweller and fanatical amateur
archaeologist Lewis Abbott
also saw the pieces.
He even implied in later years
that he'd had them
in his possession at one stage
and had helped Dawson to treat them
in some sort of preserving
chemicals.
The first thing from Piltdown
to come to the attention of the
scientific establishment was this
fossil tooth of an ancient form
of hippopotamus.
Dawson sent
it in March 1911 to an old friend
in the British Museum, Arthur
Smith Woodward, asking him
to confirm its identification,
which proved to be correct.
Sir Arthur was keeper
of the Department of Geology
at South Kensington.
Smith Woodward had vaguely
known about Dawson's skull
fragments for about a month when he
got the hippo tooth in March 1911.
He knew that Dawson regarded
the gravel bed at Piltdown as very
old, having been deposited
by the Sussex Ouse at a time
when it flowed at a much higher
level across the countryside.
Now this hippo tooth seemed to
confirm that the gravel belonged to
the very beginning of the Ice Age,
maybe up to a million years ago.
Dawson and Woodward wanted
to visit the site
together as soon as possible,
but bad weather,
flooding at Piltdown
and Woodward's work delayed them.
Eventually, Dawson brought his bits
and pieces to London.
He was very proud of his thick
fragments of human skull
and Smith Woodward was impressed.
Dawson and Woodward,
together with Teilhard de Chardin,
a local workman and a goose
began digging at the Piltdown pit
on Saturday, June 2nd, 1912.
Unfortunately, no real plans were
drawn and no photograph records
the finding of any object, but many
new and startling finds were made.
Arthur Smith Woodward personally
recovered some more
fragments of the thick human skull,
so that now, in addition to Dawson's
original pieces, five new
pieces of the same thick skull were
available, making nine in all.
A rough reconstruction of the
Piltdown skull was now possible.
There were side pieces,
pieces from the back, there was
a fragment of the eye socket
and brow
and a fragment from the region
of the temple.
These four pieces belonged to the
left side of the skull.
The new pieces found
by Dr Smith Woodward
belonged to the right-hand side.
They were plainly
part of the same skull.
All had the same thickness of bone
which Dawson thought
a primitive feature.
There were other finds.
Teilhard de Chardin found this
piece of tooth belonging to
an extinct form of elephant.
Some crudely worked flint
tools turned up.
They did not belong to any
of the recognised forms of ancient
stone implements.
They were, for the most part,
very primitive.
This one, which was also
found by Teilhard de Chardin,
is one of the better examples.
One day in the June of 1912,
we do not know which day,
there came flying out of the gravel
as they dug this remarkable jaw.
We do know that Dawson and
Smith Woodward were digging alone
when this discovery was made.
So that now there was this strange
jaw to add to the thick human skull.
In December 1912,
the fruits of the Piltdown gravel
pit were gloriously announced to the
Geological Society of London
in their own meeting room
in Burlington House.
And shortly afterwards,
under the prophetic
eye of Charles Darwin,
a group portrait was painted of the
men associated with the discovery
and scientific investigation
of the Piltdown remains.
Dawson and Smith Woodward gaze
proudly upon their Missing Link.
Only Teilhard de Chardin, who had
returned to France, is absent.
At the meeting of December 1912,
Smith Woodward put
forward his own interpretation
of the Piltdown evidence.
He took the view that
the thick skull pieces
and the jaw all
came from the same creature.
True, the jaw was very ape-like,
except for its teeth, which Smith
Woodward said were nothing like an
ape's and much more like a man's.
Unfortunately, the parts of the jaw
were broken off,
which would have settled whether it
hinged upon a human or an ape skull.
An ape's jaw can really only move up
and down and the shape of the hinge
knob reflects this limitation.
Whereas a human jaw can
chew from side to side as well
and the knob is shaped
so as to articulate in this way.
If the Piltdown jaw
belonged to the Piltdown skull,
the knob should be
shaped like a human one.
But of course, it was missing.
If you took Smith Woodward's line,
then you had a sort of human being,
blessed with a noble brain,
but still lagging behind a bit
in the refinement of his jaw.
The crudely worked flints
from Piltdown were just what you
could expect from this ape man.
And the bones of the animals with
whom he had shared his world
showed that he lived long enough
ago to be an ape man.
Smith Woodward's view was accepted
by most people at the meeting and
Eoanthropus dawsoni was christened
that day of the Geological Society.
At that meeting in 1912, and on the
society's visit to Piltdown
soon afterwards,
was 84-year-old Mr George Sweeting.
We stood there almost in awe and
perhaps reverence to think that we
were at the spot where early man
and perhaps the earliest man of all
time, including those remains
found in Africa and elsewhere...
But it was such a solemn occasion
that you almost thought you
were attending a funeral service.
Erm...
At the end of the discussion
and the questioning that took place,
a number of us
took several samples of the material,
the gravel and sand from which
the skull had been unearthed,
took them away and they were kept,
I think, for quite a number of years.
Even I kept mine
for a considerable time.
Newspapers and magazines of the day
took up Piltdown Man with
relish and vied with one another
in imaginative reconstructions.
Interest in the earliest
Englishmen was worldwide.
The reporting was,
as is usual in these matters,
not altogether accurate.
The prejudices of the day
got an airing.
Nothing wrong was seen in inviting
the reader to compare this
faked up orang's jaw with the jaw
of a Kaffir from Southern Africa.
Note the weakly-developed chin.
The other major prejudice
was exploited too.
To understand why the Piltdown Man,
or Woman,
was so gleefully received by both
science and the lay public,
we need to look back a little
into the history of anthropology.
For most people in the early 19th
century, including scholars,
the Biblical account of Creation
remained unquestionably true.
The world had been
created in 4004 BC.
But the field work of men
like William Smith done in the
early years of the century gradually
revealed in the stratified
record of the rocks that the Earth
had passed through many
different geological epochs -
it must be therefore much older than
the Biblical calculations allowed.
In France, Georges Cuvier sought
a compromise between geology
and the Bible. He concluded that
there had been several distinct
creations before Genesis.
You might find the fossil
remains of these previous creations,
but Cuvier was certain you would
never find any
trace of man in the record
of the rocks.
In England, a country gentleman
named John Frere did just that.
12ft down and among the bones
of extinct animals,
he found some flint implements
which prompted him to observe -
"The situation in which these
weapons were found may tempt us
"to refer them
to a very remote period indeed,
"even beyond that
of the present world."
Frere's sensible observations
were ahead of their time.
Another Frenchman, Boucher
de Perthes, was the man
whose patient efforts finally
established
the real antiquity of man.
In the stratified gravels of the
ancient watercourse of the Somme,
Boucher turned up literally hundreds
of manmade flint implements.
His abundant finds in these ancient
gravels demonstrated that man
had indeed lived in remote
geological epochs.
The work of two Englishmen
in the middle of the 19th century
finally stabilised
the picture of man's antiquity.
Charles Lyell vastly extended
the geological
estimate of the age of the Earth.
He insisted that the long record of
the rocks could be explained only
in terms of the slow natural
processes
we observe in the world today.
And Charles Darwin
argued for a similar
explanation of the world
of living things.
He showed how they too could be
the result of a long,
slow process of natural change.
In the 1870s, a German disciple
of Darwin's was able to picture
the evolution of man himself.
"The story of human evolution
begins with the amoeba.
"Little blobs of protoplasm
floating in the primordial ocean,
"millions of years ago.
"The next stage is represented
by the emergence of the Tunicates,
"of which the sea squirt
is the modern example.
"In adulthood, the sea squirt is
firmly anchored to the rock,
"but the larval stage swims free
and has a beginning of a backbone.
"After the epoch of the fishes,
"the first amphibians began
to colonise the land,
"leading to the era of the giant
reptiles and the famous dinosaurs.
"Among the reptiles, the first
primitive mammals eventually emerged.
"The egg-laying duckbilled platypus,
for example.
"Then we have the early primates.
"The prosimians,
like the lorises and the lemurs,
"with the development
of binocular vision
"and the opposable thumb.
"After that, the Great Apes -
the gibbons, orangs and gorillas.
"And among them,
our own ape ancestors.
"Next comes the ape man himself.
"Pithecanthropus,
which means "ape man".
"the Missing Link.
"And he leads on to true humanity,
"here represented by one
of its lowliest examples,
"the modern Papuan."
It was the ape man that everyone
was interested in.
His actual physical remains have
never been identified.
On the one hand, we have the modern
races of man and on the other,
the Great Apes
and tribes of monkeys.
But the fossiled remains of the ape
man link were still missing.
The Missing Link was a plausible
but elusive hypothesis whose precise
features could only be guessed at.
Meanwhile,
the evidence of his handiwork,
in the form of flint axes,
was cropping up in great abundance.
If only his bones would turn
up among them.
Ironically, in 1856,
three years before the publication
of Origin Of Species, a skull cap
had come to light in Germany
which really did belong to
an earlier type of man,
the famous Neanderthal Man,
but he was not
recognised for what he was.
In time, more and more
of his remains were discovered,
but by then, it was
obvious that he was too recent
and too like ourselves to
qualify as a missing link.
In the Somme gravels,
Boucher de Perthes thought that
he'd at last come across
a very ancient jaw.
Unfortunately,
three Englishmen were able to prove,
partly by chemical tests, that he'd
been the innocent victim of a hoax.
The jaw was not a fossil at all,
but a modern bone.
What was at that time genuinely
the oldest and most primitive
form of man discovered was unearthed
in Java in the 1890s by a Dutchman.
Again, neither the Great Apes
nor the true evolutionally
character of these remains
were recognised.
Even their discoverer came
to doubt them
and locked them
away from all inspection.
1907 saw the find of a human fossil
that really did impress
the students of human evolution.
It was an ancient human
jaw from a place called Mahle,
near Heidelberg in Germany.
Its most noticeable feature
was that it was very massively made
and it was evidently very old.
So, there you have the
state of affairs in the years
before Piltdown Man.
The only real candidates for the
role of remote human ancestor was
the solitary massive jaw from Mahle,
announced to the world in 1908.
Consequently,
the announcement of Piltdown Man
in 1912 at the Geological Society
of London filled a great vacuum.
This really did look like the long
sought after Missing Link.
But there was some
sceptics at that meeting.
A professor of anatomy
and a dentist,
to their eternal credit,
said simply that the skull
and the jaw could not
be of the same creature.
The skull was altogether too human
and the jaw was much too ape-like.
They must have accidentally come
together in the gravels.
Some people even thought that they
could detect a slight
difference in the state of
preservation of the skull and jaw.
What was more, according to the
dentist, whose views were not
properly respected, the state
of wear on the teeth was very odd.
You just couldn't get flat wear
like that on teeth that appear to
have only just been cut.
His shrewd observations were
not followed up.
There were more
finds to come from Piltdown.
In 1913, revisiting the pit,
Teilhard de Chardin was lucky
enough to find an eye tooth,
absent in the jaw as found in 1912.
He found it in a spread
of gravel where Dawson
and Smith Woodward had missed it.
Curiously enough,
it fitted predictions made about it
at the 1912 meeting to a T.
A unique and extraordinary implement
made from a piece of the leg bone
of an elephant showed
up under a hedge.
There is some evidence to suggest
that Smith Woodward, Dawson
and Teilhard were not the only
people poking around at Piltdown.
Miss Mabel Kenward, now 87 years
old, lived in the manor at the time.
Dr Smith Woodward said,
"we don't want all the world hunting
"here till we've had more time
to sift this gravel.
"So will you keep a watch?"
Well, one evening, I was in the
dining room, I looked out of the
window and I saw coming across the
field, not even off the road,
walking across the field,
a very tall man.
So extremely nervous,
I walked down and said,
"Excuse me,
are you an authorised searcher?"
The man had a sort of black bag,
he picked up his little black bag
with tools in it, packed them in,
turned round, walked off.
He did not utter one single
word to me. Not one.
In 1917, Smith Woodward was able
to make the spectacular
announcement of the finding of the
remains of a second Piltdown Man,
near Sheffield Park,
where there is a station
on the famous Bluebell Line.
Charles Dawson had died in 1916.
But before that, he had told his old
friend of his fresh success
in finding the bones
of another Piltdown Man,
a couple of miles from Piltdown.
Smith Woodward never learned
the exact spot from his ailing
friend and though he visited
the place with Dawson before going
to France, Teilhard
could not afterwards
remember the exact circumstances.
Even for a number of the
former doubting Thomases,
this second find clinched it.
These must be the remains of two
genuine missing links.
This was Piltdown Man's finest hour.
This utterly bogus
and composite monster now
took his place in the textbooks.
A monolithic memorial
to his discovery was set up
at Piltdown in 1938.
But in time, Piltdown Man's
place in the textbooks became
increasingly uneasy.
His line began to look like
a side branch of the family
tree of human evolution.
New finds began to build up
a particular picture of human
evolution that didn't square
with Piltdown at all.
From South Africa came
the remains of a creature called
Australopithecus whose jaw
and teeth were more human
in form than Piltdown's,
but whose brain was by contrast
quite inferior to the human
status of the Piltdown brain.
The old Java finds were rediscovered
and new finds were made.
Similar remains came
to light in China.
This stage of human evolution
followed naturally enough
upon the South African one.
Teeth and jaw were much less
ape-like than Piltdown's,
but the brain was still
inferior in size to modern man's
and to Piltdown's brain.
Piltdown Man was the odd man out.
And then in the early 1950s,
something happened to change
the whole situation.
In 1955, an edition
of Buried Treasure on BBC Television
told the story of the scientific
debunking of Piltdown Man.
In 1949, Dr Kenneth Oakley
of the British
Museum of Natural History
applied an entirely
new method of dating
fossils, the fluorine method,
to the material from Piltdown.
Fluorine is a poisonous element,
rather like chlorine, which is
absorbed by bones from the water
in soil or subsoil,
in which they are buried.
Fluorine testing can sort out
bones which have only
been in the ground for a short time,
say as a result of a later burial,
from bones that have
been in the soil long enough to
absorb a quantity of the substance.
At first, Dr Oakley's results
suggested that Piltdown Man
was much younger than the animal
bones from the site.
But then a later test
showed a distinct
difference between his jaw
and skull.
This new and more refined fluorine
test was not the only
indication of a difference
between skull and jaw.
More samples were
taken for other tests.
Drilling into the jaw produced
a smell of burning,
like a recent bone.
The cranial fragments did not
give off a smell of burning at all.
The jaw moreover yielded little
shavings of unstained bone,
like a recent specimen.
The skull fragments gave up fine
powder, more like a fossil.
Once again, a clear distinction
between the compositions of jaw
and cranium.
A test for organic content
was carried out.
Organic content in the form
of nitrogen distilled as ammonia.
Once more, the jaw and the cranium
showed divergent results.
Two separate creatures
were indicated.
All these new tests were prompted
by suggestion of Dr JS Weiner
at Oxford.
Well, then it occurred to me
that one possibility would explain
this extraordinary wear, the single
feature, might well be that someone
had deliberately placed the parts
of the cranium, a human cranium,
with a broken jaw of a modern ape.
And had disguised the modernity
of this ape by staining it
and by filing the teeth.
The jaw was indeed a heavily
doctored piece.
So was the eye tooth,
stuffed with packing
and painted with Van Dyke brown.
The flint tools were as phoney
as the jaw and the teeth.
In fact, they had been
stained in a similar way.
The application of acid
produced patches through
the superficial staining.
The animal fossils from Piltdown
were an extraordinary
collection too.
They seemed to have been gathered
from several exotic locations,
as well as sites in this country.
For example, the extinct elephant
tooth that Teilhard picked up.
When tested for radioactivity,
this gave an extremely high
reading on the dial.
In fact, there is
only one fossil locality known
in the world where a tooth of this
sort could originate with such high
radioactivity - in Tunisia.
It is radioactive enough to speedily
expose a piece of photographic
paper without a camera.
Finally,
the skull fragments themselves,
which had at first seemed
to be possibly genuine
fossils of some sort, went
down under X-ray crystallography.
Minute samples suspended on nylon
fibres revealed that the
structure of the skull itself
had been drastically
altered by boiling in an iron
sulphate solution.
Dr Glyn Daniel summed up.
There you are - skull, tooth, tools
and animal remains, all fraudulent.
And who, you ask,
was responsible for all this?
First of all, have another look
at the picture of Dawson. Here it is.
This is the face of a fanatic who
would mislead his colleagues
so cunningly for so long,
or is it the face of an enthusiastic
amateur who was hoaxed
and misled by some ill-wisher?
Perhaps we shall know for certain one
day, but perhaps we shall never know.
What we do know even now
is that by inspiring
the development of all these
methods of studying fossils,
Piltdown Man has been a remarkable
stimulus and a benefactor to science.
I spoke those words 20 years ago
and in the last 20 years,
of course, endless discussion has
been going on about the Piltdown
controversy
and particularly about whodunnit.
Now, the three people who were
in that programme are here again.
Joe Weiner, who is now a professor
in the University of London,
and who was one of the main people
responsible for the debunking
of Piltdown, and here is Kenneth
Oakley, recently retired from the
British Museum of Natural History,
who was the other main protagonist.
We are sitting in the
Geological Society where the great
meetings took place in 1912
and again in 1953.
That meeting in '53 was reported
in Science Service in Washington
as follows -
"When the Piltdown hoax was
exposed at the meeting
"of the Geological Society of London,
it precipitated a violent discussion.
"The meeting soon broke
up into a series of fist fights,
"the fracas resulted in the expulsion
of several members."
Well, that wasn't quite true
but it indicates
the interest in the world in what was
going on at that time.
Now, Kenneth, what new scientific
techniques have happened since the
debunking that have altered in any
way your evaluation of the problem?
Well, I was anxious to get
the Piltdown mandible
and cranium dated by radiocarbon.
In 1953, when we debunked Piltdown,
that wasn't possible
because techniques then available
would have required the
destruction of the whole mandible to
provide enough carbon to date it.
But by 1959, the late
Professor De Vries in Groningen
in the Netherlands had developed
radiocarbon dating technique
to such an extent that he was able
to date one gram of bone
and it was really very exciting,
I thought, because it didn't come
out as just a few years old, but as
500 years old, plus or minus 100.
That's the actual determination.
Which means a date of AD 1450,
a medieval bone.
Well, I went into it and I found
that in fact this date of 500 years
old made rather good sense,
insofar as a very large amount
of orang-utan material had been
collected and brought over
to Great Britain in 1875
and when one examined
some of this orang-utan
material from the Borneo caves,
one found that the preservation
of the bone was very, very
similar to the Piltdown mandible.
Not in colour, but in texture.
The surface of the bone was crackled
and fissured and so on and much more
porous than modern bone is,
but it is there is a question
mark in one's mind as to where it
came...was collected by the forger
but it does seem just
possible that it was
a Natural History Museum connection.
What about the carbon
dating of the cranium?
I know that the cranium
underwent very severe
treatment by boiling,
chemical treatment,
at the time the fraud was
perpetrated,
but has anything happened to change
your opinion about the dating?
You've had some estimations made.
Professor De Vries did a radiocarbon
date on one of the cranial
fragments and got a figure of 620
years, plus or minus 100.
I don't think that can be regarded
as a very reliable date just because
of the very...drastic treatment
that the cranial bones had.
As you say, boiled in order to
stain them dark brown and so on.
One could perhaps easily
estimate that it was
one of the order of 1,000 years, but
still recent, of course, not fossil.
I mean, it could have been
a skull from a Saxon graveyard,
something like that.
We do in fact find that a small
percentage of crania in Saxon
graveyards, the skeletons do have
excessively thick cranial
bones, for some pathological reason,
and so on,
so I would say that it was a skull
that order of magnitude that
was used for the hoax
and you combine a thick skull with
an ape jaw
and there you've got the ape man.
Now, whodunnit -
there are many suspects.
In fact, my list is between
13 and 16 and some of them,
of course, are quite impossible
and hopeless,
just ridiculous fantasy to put them
in the list.
But there are three or four people
that should be considered.
Now I know that some people firmly
believe that it was
Smith Woodward,
but I can't believe this was
so and I can't believe that a man
when he retired from the British
Museum of Natural History took
up a house near Piltdown so that he
could go on excavating there,
looking for more fragments of bone.
Surely nobody in their senses who had
perpetrated a hoax or
assisted in perpetrating a hoax could
have gone in that way.
One person that is always mentioned
in this is the great
Teilhard de Chardin.
Now, he was certainly in a Jesuit
seminary at Hastings
during most of the period concerned.
He loved Hastings,
he called it the Cannes of England.
And he wandered around,
he collected fossils,
he met Dawson and curiously enough
on two of the five visits that he
was at Piltdown, he found important
and interesting things.
Whether he put them there, whether
they were planted there for him
to find, it is curious that they were
found on two of his visits.
Now, one or two people have been
quite convinced that it was
Teilhard who was responsible.
He was known to be a practical joker.
But, you know, if you come
and analyse the historical facts,
if you read his letters, he could not
have been the person concerned.
He wasn't there until late 1908,
he didn't meet Dawson for a whole
year,
and he was not present at the end.
So I really think that Teilhard is
out. Now, I didn't know him.
Many of my friends did and he was
certainly known to Dr Oakley
and Professor Weiner. He really does
present some difficulties.
When I spoke to him in 1954,
just before the publication
of the book,
at that time he...was quite firm
in his opinion that Dawson couldn't
have done it, that it
was all some kind
of accidental bringing
together of the material and so on,
but the more I spoke to him
about those days, the more surprised
I was at the way that he,
if I may put it this way,
was disassociating himself
with the whole episode,
as if he felt
really...troubled by it
and I personally feel that
some time in the late '20s
or something like that, he
may have tumbled to the truth
of this matter or at least suddenly
conceived very strong
suspicions and for that reason,
that would explain why he was not
anxious to write about Piltdown
and he wrote very little about
Piltdown from about 1920 onwards.
My interpretation, sort of thinking
it over very deeply,
is that he found it very
embarrassing to have been
an unwitting agent
in the production of the material,
the eye tooth was found by him
and this was forged
and as a palaeontologist, I mean,
for him not to have noticed
anything funny about it,
it must have been a very
sore point with him
and he liked to dismiss the whole
thing from his mind.
Now, Joe, in 1955,
you produced a book,
published by the
Oxford University Press,
called the Piltdown Forgery,
which was described
by the Ellery Queen organisation,
no mean judges in these matters, as
the best detective story of the year.
Now, most people who read that book
thought you had established
very clearly whodunnit.
Most people who read that book have
gone away thinking you said
very clearly that it was
done by Charles Dawson.
But, a more discerning reading
of the book shows that you don't say
that at all.
You say in a very complicated
and delightful sentence
on the last page but one,
"It is not possible to show that
Dawson was not a possible hoaxer."
Now, that got away with it
very nicely.
What do you think about it today?
Well, since I wrote the book,
I have of course frequently
gone back to
thinking about Dawson's role and
very little in the way of positive
evidence incriminating Dawson has
really appeared in these 20 years.
When I say that, I mean in regard
to the Piltdown forgery itself,
various things have come to light
which, as in my book,
throws light on Dawson as the sort
of man who would very likely
to have done it because of his
curious activities in other fields.
I felt that it was very necessary
in 1955 to be as...accurate
and judicious as possible
about the evidence
and that's why I came to not exactly
to a non-proven verdict, but as
you said, it would be impossible to
prove that anybody else had done it,
that the person who was in the right
place at the right time,
and I think, with the right
sort of knowledge
and I also think with the right
motive was Charles Dawson.
All these things, aspects,
have got to be
satisfied before anybody can be
established as the perpetrator.
Let me be angel's advocate
for a moment, curious enough.
Could Dawson have got
hold of the things that were
necessary for perpetrating
the hoax himself?
Could a country solicitor get hold
of this fairly old orang-utan skull?
Yes, I think as far as the...human
material is concerned,
he should have had
very little difficulty.
Certainly, he had in his possession
several skulls
and as he was an assiduous
archaeologist
and responsible
for a number of digs,
and had contact with people
in natural history societies in the
south of England, no
difficulty at all, I think, as far
as getting hold of some Anglo-Saxon
material, as Kenneth has explained.
The orang-utan jaw, well,
as I said in my book, you could
actually buy material of this sort
from various dealers in those days.
And of course, one must face it, he
was often at the British Museum and
nothing to have stopped him
perhaps persuading somebody there
to let him have some material
and indeed, I sometimes wonder
whether he didn't have one or
two unwitting accomplices of that
sort in the British Museum.
Before I wrote this book,
I went down to Lewes
to make some inquiries -
I had no particular feeling
about Dawson or anybody else,
they were all just names to me -
and I was amazed when I discovered
that 40 years before,
that's to say 1912, there had been
quite a number of people
who at that time regarded Dawson
with extreme suspicion.
In fact, I met Mr Salzman,
who had been president of the local
society at Lewes, at a time
when we were still doing the final
tests and without telling him
that Dr Oakley
and myself had come to this
conclusion about a forgery,
I said I was interested in
Charles Dawson and he then taxed me
and I said, in fact,
if you treat it confidential...as
confidential information,
I don't mind telling you
that we think
that a forgery's been perpetrated.
He said,
"Well, you don't surprise me!
"I've been waiting for 40 years
for you to come along and tell me
"this because I've always
had my suspicions."
So, you see, there was
quite...on various grounds,
not only personal
but in a way technical,
the evidence against Charles Dawson,
circumstantial evidence,
remains, I think, very,
very strong indeed
and I think other bits of evidence
have been coming along which
simply strengthen the suspicions.
Well, they certainly have and in the
last ten years before he died,
Salzman kept writing to me, as editor
of Antiquity, expressing all sorts
of suspicions that he had
and near proofs that he had
and several people in the last few
years have been trying to
associate Dawson with
the extraordinary
business of the forged
birds from Hastings, you see.
Well, this may not be proof.
It may be that suspicion attracts
itself to one person that
every kind of thing is then
attached to him,
but recently I have had some evidence
which is very exciting indeed
and I'm going to publish
it in the next
number of Antiquity on the 1st of
June and this is an article
by David Peacock who is a lecturer
in archaeology in Southampton.
He's been working on the Pevensey
tiles for some while.
These were things,
three of them were found by Dawson,
allegedly in excavations, and one was
found by Salzman in his excavations.
And they're supposed to prove
certain things in literary
sources at the end of History
of Roman Britain.
Now, by thermoluminescence dating,
Peacock with
the assistance of the Oxford
and London laboratories have
shown that these tablets are not,
as they should be, 2,000 years old,
but are entirely recent.
In fact, they are between the period
of 1900 and 1910,
when the Piltdown forgeries
were happening.
Well, now, you can see that
if these three forged tablets were
put there by Dawson and if one was
put in Salzman's excavations, you can
readily see why Salzman was
so cross, if he had
suspicions about many things.
Now, of course, this I'm sure is a
proof, there's no problem about this.
If we have proved that Dawson was
a forger, I think this casts a
slight darkness of suspicion
over his character,
but it doesn't necessarily
mean that he was the person who
perpetrated the Piltdown hoax,
does it, Kenneth?
No, I don't think so.
I think I'm very anxious to be
fair in this matter not to
sort of load all
the blame on to Dawson.
I feel that this point
mentioned by you, Joe,
that perhaps there were unwitting
accomplices and so on that
whether unwitting or knowing
accomplices that there is some
evidence quite strongly suggesting
that other people were involved,
playing, in fact,
a key role in the Piltdown hoax.
In 1953,
when the debunking took place,
Professor Mobius in Harvard
wrote a curious article
in the university paper there saying
it can't possibly have been Charles
Dawson, "I am convinced it was
"somebody in the British Museum
of Natural History,"
Now this was a very extraordinary
and alarming thought at the time
and one or two people have
thought about it since.
And the other day, John Irving,
who was a BBC producer
until very recently,
told me of an interview he had with
Martin Hinton, in his retirement.
Hinton had been Keeper of Zoology
in the BM Natural History
and Hinton apparently said to him,
"I know who was the Piltdown hoaxer.
"I know, but I
cannot reveal the name.
"A man has to die
with his secret."
And here is a simple fact,
and he could obviously be not
referring to Dawson.
Now, we've all said our pieces
and we haven't all agreed about this
but there is the question -
could this happen again
in the same sort of contexts?
Well, I don't think it could
because when Piltdown Man was found,
it was an isolated fossil.
Now, we have hundreds of fossil
men from all over the world
and there is a record against
which to match any new find.
But secondly, now there are all
these scientific techniques
that can be applied to any new find
and the interesting thing
is that they have come into existence
and been developed because of the
debunking of Piltdown Man.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
