1. The Question of Complicity
- Author
-
J. S. Weiner and Chris Stringer
- Subjects
Political science ,Environmental ethics ,Complicity - Abstract
In 1908 (as far as we can ascertain), long before he went to see his ‘old friend’ the Keeper of Geology at South Kensington, some time before he met Teilhard de Chardin, Dawson had in his hands the first piece of the skull of Eoanthropus. This piece, we know, had been chemically treated, by iron sulphate, to produce the brown colour, and in the process the bone had undergone the change in its crystal structure revealed by the X-ray diffraction method. This piece was part of the braincase, the ‘coconut’, smashed by the labourers, according to the story the origins of which are by no means clear. Once again a question faces us which raises sharply and finally the issue of Dawson’s complicity. We might put the question as the ‘Piltdown Riddle’:—Was the pit completely barren at the birth of Piltdown Man or did he begin life there as a burial? Was the cranium genuinely in the gravel or had it been planted where the workmen found it? In the first stages of the investigation, before we fully appreciated the artificiality of the iron-staining, we were inclined to regard the skull-case in the gravel as a genuine though not very ancient fossil. The fluorine values, while not really high, taken with the reduced content of organic matter, certainly gave grounds for accepting a semi-fossilized condition in the cranium. So it was presumed at first that the hoax had been based on a genuine discovery of portions of an ancient skull in the gravel, and that the ape jaw and canine and the other animal remains and implements had been subsequently planted. As the investigations went on, stage by stage, this view became untenable. The iron-staining threw serious doubt on the skull’s derivation from the gravel; the sulphate in the bone, in the form of gypsum, is the result of artificial and deliberate chemical treatment, and gypsum does not occur in the Piltdown or Barcombe Mills gravel. The chemical conditions in the Piltdown subsoil and gravel water are not at all such that this unusual alteration in the bone could have taken place naturally in the gravel.
- Published
- 2003