Category: in the news

The Piltdown Hoax at 100

December 18, 2012 • 12:16 pm

by Greg Mayer

The Geological Society (London) is having a special meeting today to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Piltdown  hoax. There will also be a tour of a new special exhibit at the Natural History Museum (which also has a nice Piltdown website). It was exactly 100 years ago today that Charles Dawson, a Sussex antiquarian, along with Arthur Smith Woodward and Grafton Elliott Smith, both accomplished biologists, announced the discovery of the remains of a heretofore unknown hominid in a gravel pit in Piltdown, East Sussex.

Piltdown skull
A reconstruction of the Piltdown skull. Bone dark, reconstructed elements in white. Note that the skull consisted of parts of the braincase, nasals, and a right mandible, with no connections between the parts. Note also that the mandible is missing the anterior teeth.

Dawson claimed that the right mandible (broken anteriorly) and the braincase pieces had been recovered from the gravel pit. It appeared to show that in the Pleistocene of Britain there occurred a large-brained but ape-jawed ancestor of man. Many of Britain’s most prominent paleontologists, anatomists, and zoologists concurred with this analysis.

Piltdown gang
The “Piltdown gang”. Standing: F.O. Barlow, Grafton Elliot Smith, Charles Dawson, Arthur Smith Woodward. Seated: A.S. Underwood, Arthur Keith, W.P. Pycraft, and Sir E. Ray Lankester.

From the start, however, there was controversy as to whether the man-like cranium and ape-like jaw were from the same species. The fact that the intervening parts of the skull were missing made it impossible to demonstrate the case morphologically. Regardless, the general conclusion was to accept the association of the jaw and cranium. When Australopithecus was discovered in Africa by Raymond Dart in the 20’s, the significance of his find was underestimated since the African form had a man-like jaw and an ape-like cranium– the opposite of Piltdown. As further discoveries showed that Piltdown man was aberrant, it came to figure less prominently in accounts of human evolution.

Beginning in the late 1940’s a series of investigations were begun that explained the source of the anomaly– the Piltdown remains were not only not associated, they were relatively recent, had been stained to look old, and filed down to change their appearance– they were a deliberate forgery!  In 1953, J.S. Weiner, K.P. Oakley, and W. Le Gros Clark published their results in a Natural History Museum monograph (reference below), and, appropriately, presented their results a few days later at a meeting of the Geological Society. A longer monograph appeared two years later.

Exposure of Piltdown hoax
Meeting of the Geological Society on 25 November, 1953, at which K.P. Oakley presented evidence for the fraudulent nature of the Piltdown specimens (Daily Mail; the Mail only identifies the photo as of the meeting at which the hoax was exposed; The Times for 26 November 1953 gives the further details of the meeting).

There had, in fact, long been doubts about the provenance of the Piltdown specimens. In 1914, W.K. Gregory (1914: 190-191) expressed it pretty directly:

It has been suspected by some that geologically they are not old at all; that they may even represent a deliberate hoax, a negro or Australian skull and a broken ape-jaw, artificially fossilized and “planted” in the gravel-bed, to fool the scientists. Against this suggestion tell the whole circumstances of the discovery as above related.

At the time, Gregory accepted the story of discovery. The following year, G.S. Miller strongly stated that the specimens were not associated, declaring unequivocally that the jaw was simian, the cranium human. More elliptically, he wrote (1915: 1):

Deliberate malice could hardly have been more successful than the hazards of deposition in so breaking the fossils as to give free scope to individual judgment in fitting the parts together.

Colin Groves was told that Miller actually thought it was a hoax, but that decorum prevented him from saying so without proof, and so he contested the find on scientific grounds; it would be interesting to see what is written in Miller’s papers about the matter (perhaps someone has already looked). Another American zoologist, W.D. Matthew, readily accepted Miller’s conclusions (Matthew in Eastman et al., 1916: 107):

In the present reviewer’s opinion [W. D. M.] Dr. Miller’s argument is convincing and irrefutable; the jaw belonged to a chimpanzee and the skull to a species of man comparable with that represented by the Heidelberg jaw. It is hardly to be expected, however, that this conclusion will be readily accepted by the European writers, who have with but few exceptions committed themselves more or less deeply to the opposite view.

And, changing his previous view, so did Gregory (1916: 313):

In an earlier paper (1914) I have reviewed the controversy over the Piltdown remains (Eoanthropus dawsoni), emphasizing the entirely human character of the brain-case, the essentially ape-like character of the lower jaw and teeth and the doubts as to their association already expressed by several authors.

While I take no delight in the predicament of those taken in by the hoax, I do delight in the fact that Miller, Gregory, and Matthew were among those to see the true nature of the material: I have had occasion to refer and use their work in my own researches and teaching, and Gregory is one of my academic grandfathers.

After the exposure of the hoax, the incident became chiefly of historical rather than scientific interest, and the question of who perpetrated the hoax has been of recurring interest. Suspicion first fell on Dawson, but has included Smith Woodward, Arthur Keith, Teilhard de Chardin, and even Arthur Conan Doyle!  Miles Russell of Bournemouth University has discovered that Dawson was involved in a number of frauds and fakeries, and an extensive summary of his case against Dawson is online. He is speaking today at the Geological Society, and has just published a new book on the subject (reference below).

In addition to the new exhibit and the conference, Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum is leading a team that will conduct further tests on the bones that they hope will allow them to produce more definitive evidence of who was involved in perpetrating the hoax. Both the conference and the further testing have drawn considerable media interest in the UK (Guardian, Telegraph, BBC, Daily Mail). Further online information on the Piltdown story can be found at the late Richard Harter’s website, a Clark University site with transcripts of many original papers, and at the Talk Origins archive.

h/t Sigmund

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Dawson, C., A. Smith Woodward, and G.E. Smith. 1913. On the discovery of a palæolithic human skull and mandible in flint-bearing gravel overlying the Wealden (Hastings Beds) at Piltdown, Fletching (Sussex). Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 69:117-147. (transcription)

Eastman, C.R., W.K. Gregory, and W.D. Matthew. 1916. Recent progress in vertebrate paleontology. Science New Series 43:103-110.

Gregory, W. K. 1914. The Dawn Man of Piltdown, England. American Museum Journal 14:189-200. (pdf)

Gregory, W.K. 1916. Studies on the evolution of the Primates. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 35:239-355. (pdf)

Matthew, W.D. 1916. Note on the association of the Piltdown skull and jaw. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 35:348-350. (in Gregory, 1916)

Miller, G.S. 1915. The Jaw of the Piltdown Man. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 65(12):1-31. (Biodiversity Heritage Library)

Russell, M. 2003. Piltdown Man: The Secret Life of Charles Dawson. Tempus Books, Stroud, UK. (Amazon)

Russell, M. 2012. The Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed. History Press, Stroud, UK. (publisher)

Weiner, J.S., K.P. Oakley, and W.E. Le Gros Clark. 1953. The solution of the Piltdown problem. Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) Geology 2:139-146. (Biodiversity Heritage Library)

Kaitlin Roig, heroine; John Lott, moron

December 18, 2012 • 7:54 am

Teachers in the U.S. don’t make much money: they’re woefully underpaid despite their onerous work and responsibility for educating the next generation. But there’s not enough money to pay teachers like Katilin Roig, who saved her classroom during the Newtown shootings. She describes what happened in this interview with Diane Sawyer. Listen to how well she protected her kids:

And although much of the attention on this tragedy has focused on the children, let’s not forget the heroism of those teachers who didn’t make it as well—the ones who died in acts of pure altruism, defending their charges.

In contrast, here’s the odious John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, paying lip service to the tragedy while calling for less gun control and freer access to semiautomatic weapons. CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, who has four children, isn’t having it. Then read the comments on YouTube, which largely support Lott.

It’s gonna be a tough job to pry the guns from Americans’ cold, dead hands.

h/t: Geoff

Women strike back: some good news about Islam at last

September 20, 2012 • 4:11 am

I’m not an advocate of violence to settle disputes (I was a certified conscientious objector as a youth), but the behavior of Muslim extremists—nay, Islam in general—against women has been so vile that it’s hard not to suppress a frisson of pleasure when the tables are turned.  Here’s a new report from CNN. The title is clever, too.

Putting the ‘jab’ in ‘hijab’: Girls beat up Iran cleric when he tells them to cover up

Tehran, Iran (CNN) — They may be a far cry from their Western counterparts fighting for the acceptance to breast feed — or go topless — in public, but two girls clobbered a cleric recently in a small town in Iran, when he admonished one of them to cover herself more completely.

The cleric said he asked “politely,” but the girl’s angry reaction and some pugilistic double-teaming with her friend landed the holy man in the hospital, according to an account in the semi-official Mehr News Agency.

Hojatoleslam Ali Beheshti says he encountered the girls on his way to the mosque in the village of Shahmirzad for noon prayers in late August.

He told one of the girls to cover up, the report said.

“She responded by telling me to cover my eyes, which was very insulting to me,” Beheshti said. So he asked her a second time to cover up and also to put a lid on what he felt was verbal abuse.

She hit the man of the cloth and he hit the ground.

“I don’t remember what happened after that,” he said. “I just felt her kicks and heard her insults.”

I love this bit: “She responded by telling me to cover my eyes, which was very insulting to me”.

h/t: Sigmund

Nik Wallenda walks the falls

June 16, 2012 • 2:24 pm

Here’s a video of Nik Wallenda’s 1800-foot tightrope walk across Niagara Falls Friday evening.

Granted, he’s wearing a safety harness, by stipulation of the ABC television network, but it’s pretty amazing nonetheless.  He’s walking at night, and through heavy mist.

From the New York Times:

Some numbers: Mr. Wallenda is 33 years old, a seventh-generation acrobat who first tackled a tightrope at age 2. He crossed 1,800 feet of wire in a little over 25 minutes, ending just after 10:30 p.m. Friday, suspended 200 feet above the gorge and becoming the first person to walk directly over the falls. Five of his forebears have perished performing such stunts.

. . . Afterward, he promised to follow up his exploit with a walk across the Grand Canyon in the next few years.

That should be something, for a Grand Canyon travers has never been done.

Wallenda walks Niagara Falls on a tightrope; hopes to bring people to God

June 15, 2012 • 7:55 am

Today’s the day that Nik Wallenda of the famous “Flying Wallenda” family will walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope.  He needed a special exemption from the state legislature to do this, since it’s normally forbidden. As the New York Times reports:

In some ways, Mr. Wallenda’s walk is more audacious than those of his 19th-century predecessors. His rope has been set right above the falls, which throw off enough spray to drench those on the shoreline. By comparison, walkers like Jean Francois Gravelet, better known as “the Great Blondin,” walked across a tamer part of the gorge.

From the Boston Herald:

“It’s happening. This is going to be the biggest event on the planet!” said Jim Diodati, mayor of Niagara Falls, Ontario. Such hyperbole has fueled Wallenda mania, bringing flashing highway signs warning of Wallenda-related traffic jams and crowds gawking at cranes holding Wallenda’s 2-inch-wide cable taut over the roiling blue water.

Stadium-style lights were focused on the cable, which will sway several inches back and forth in the wind and bounce up and down. Midway through the 40-minute walk, Wallenda is expected to be wrapped in a bone-chilling fog far harsher than the soaking mist that showers visitors to the Falls.

The walk should take about 40 minutes.

But unlike his predecessors, some seen in the video below, Wallenda isn’t in much danger, for he’ll be wearing safety equipment (he damn well should—he’s got three young children).

Along the falls, there was much discussion of the safety harness that ABC, which is televising the walk Friday night, has insisted Mr. Wallenda wear. The Disney Corporation, which owns ABC, does not want a man to fall to his death on live television.

Here’s a brief video history of Niagara Falls daredevils:

But for me, the whole stunt was spoiled by Wallenda’s insistence that he’s doing God’s will:

There is no hope for America

June 10, 2012 • 5:28 am

My friend Steve sent me a list of the most popular stories in Wednesday’s New York Daily News, highlighting Orville, the dead helicopter-cat that I refuse to discuss (I have eliminated the link below).  His comment:

Note that half of these are about zombies and/or cannibalism.  (Well, one of them is borderline L “‘Vampire’ Skeletons found in Bulgaria.”) Note that number 8 is going mainstream. WEIRD!

Here they are.  I weep for my country:

Most Popular

Koch to fund renovation of Smithsonian’s dinosaur hall

May 4, 2012 • 6:11 am

by Greg Mayer

David Koch, billionaire industrialist and bankroller of right wing causes, has announced that he will donate $35 million to the National Museum of Natural History (aka the USNM) for an overhaul of its dinosaur hall. The New York Times’ Patricia Cohen writes:

In 2009 he gave the Smithsonian $15 million to create the museum’s Hall of Human Origins. And in 2006 he gave the Manhattan museum [i.e. the American Museum of Natural History in New York] $20 million to create the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing. This latest gift, the largest donation in the museum’s 102-year history, will result in the new dinosaur hall in Washington also being named for Mr. Koch. The total cost of the new hall, with 25,000 square feet of exhibition space, is estimated to be $45 million, a museum spokesman said.

According to this longer AP piece, it seems as if the renovation will extend to the other adjacent fossil halls, and not just the dinosaurs.

As noted by Cohen, Koch funded the Hall of Human Origins at the USNM, which Jerry (here and here) and  I reviewed here at WEIT. Koch’s funding also elicited some controversy, regarding whether his climate denialism would be included in the exhibit, which we also noted (here, here  and in the PS here) at WEIT.