Father Figure by J A Henderson

Author:J A Henderson [Henderson, J A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Hart
Published: 2020-06-07T22:00:00+00:00

The broken body of a seagull twitched on the ground below them, flapping weakly as it died.

From the Journal of Donny Marigold

If you are clever and you know your business you can fake a bone as easily as you can a photograph.

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World

Between 1876 and 1881, Edinburgh resident Arthur Conan Doyle studied at the Medical School, next to the graveyard, where he became friends with Robert Louis Stevenson. It was also when he started writing properly.

He is famous, as everyone knows, for his stories about Sherlock Holmes – a man who prized reasoning and logic over everything else.

Here’s a strange thing, though. Despite creating the most rational character in literary history, Doyle was convinced of the existence of supernatural beings. For much of his life he travelled the world looking for evidence of paranormal events and eventually became one of the world’s leading champions of Spiritualism, the idea that humans could communicate with the ‘other side’. He also suffered from severe depression and fits of hysteria.

What was up with these writers who hung around Greyfriars? What was torturing them so much? I can see ghosts, but that’s just the way it is. I don’t have a hissy fit about it.

Then I found something else.

Arthur Conan Doyle used to live near a village called Piltdown and had befriended two scientists, Charles Dawson and Arthur Woodward, who happened to be carrying out geological excavations nearby. Because of that friendship Conan Doyle frequently gained access to the site when nobody else was around.

At the time, it didn’t seem odd. Doyle was a respected doctor and an amateur anthropologist and geologist.

Dawson and Woodward then began to unearth prehistoric bones and teeth at the site. They used the fossils to construct the now famous Piltdown Man – a human skull with a Simian like jaw. This was accepted to be absolute proof that man was descended from apes and the final nail in the coffin for those who still doubted Charles Darwin’s claims about human evolution.

In 1952 the discoveries were found to be fake. Dawson got the blame, yet I wasn’t so sure he was the culprit. The Piltdown jaw was actually an Orang-utan’s with the teeth filed down - and it had been cleverly broken to hide the fact it didn’t really fit the rest of the skull.

Conan Doyle was an expert on jaws, having inherited a vast collection of casts from a dentist whose house he lived in.

The Piltdown bones were chemically stained to make them appear much older than they actually were.

Conan Doyle was an accomplished chemist.

The other fossils found at the site turned out to have come from different parts of the world. They matched the places that Arthur Conan Doyle had visited on his obsessive quest to find genuine paranormal occurrences.

For God’s sake, the man believed in Fairies! So why would he want to fake a missing link and give Charles Darwin a much needed helping hand? Did he think science and the supernatural, somehow, went

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