Piltdown Forgery by Weiner J. S.; Stringer Chris;

Author:Weiner, J. S.; Stringer, Chris;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2008-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

11 Entanglement

Remove you skull from out the scattered heaps: Is that a Temple where a God may dwell? Why ev’n the worm at last disdains her shattered cell!

Look on its broken arch, its ruined wall Its chambers desolate, and portals foul: Yes, this was once Ambition’s airy hall…

BYRON: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

To Professor Teilhard de Chardin the idea that either Dawson or Woodward was in any way wittingly implicated in this business is completely unthinkable. He holds both of these men in the greatest respect, and indeed is inclined to doubt whether a real hoax occurred at all. It seems to him not impossible that the pit at Barkham Manor was used as a rubbish dump where, over a course of years, all sorts of objects including bones from some discarded collection could have been deposited. The heavily iron-bearing water of the gravel would soon stain the bones dark brown (for Professor Teilhard says that fresh bone left in the water of the Weald does stain easily). To be sure, the queer accumulation must have come from some collector’s hoard! But this suggestion of a rubbish dump leaves, of course, too much unexplained and far too many coincidences. It would be an amazing accident that would bring together an unusual cranium, the jaw, the remarkable canine, a bone implement of unique character, a number of flints of spurious workmanship (one of which is stained with chromate), and bones partly changed to gypsum and radio-active fossil teeth of a sort never found in England! That all this curious medley, this ‘accidental’ assemblage, should be uncovered in a particular sequence—as Sir Arthur Keith said to us, ‘as if to confute me personally!’—is straining our acceptance of coincidence too much.

Miss Kenward, who lived at Barkham Manor for many years, is positive that the pit was not a general rubbish dump and that the gravel was being dug from an unbroken surface. Lady Smith Woodward, too, rules out the suggestion. There is nothing to commend this rubbish dump theory, for we have seen that hardly anything of the whole collection of material can with certainty be said to have come from gravel originally, although this does not rule out the possibility that at least the cranium, even stained as it is, may not have been genuinely found in the pit and that after treatment it was redeposited in the gravel pit. This we shall have to consider in due course.

We have learnt that in treating of the cardinal events at Barkham Manor, in dealing with the dates of the first discovery of the gravel bed, and of the first cranial piece, the provenance and particulars of the objects brought to Woodward, the crucial question of which finds were actually in situ, and the exact location of the bone implement, Dawson’s own statements fall far short of establishing beyond question the validity of most of the basic documentary evidence.

The credibility of the early finds was in fact called into question publicly. Mr. A. W. Oke (an

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