Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 6, 1990 TAG: 9006060059
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JUDIE GLAVE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
The Sherlock Holmes author was one of the more colorful "suspects" named over the years as perpetrating a hoax that threw many paleontologists off the trail of what is now recognized as the course of human evolution.
But Frank Spencer, an anthropologist who has worked on the famous whodunit since the 1970s, says diary entries and other information uncovered independently by himself and Australian historian Ian Langham points the finger squarely at Sir Arthur Keith, a well-respected English anatomist.
The Langham-Spencer theory is laid out in two books to be published this fall by Oxford University Press. Langham, who worked at the University of Sydney, died in 1984. His widow asked Spencer to continue his work.
Piltdown, a small village in England, made international news in 1912 when a skull and other artifacts were discovered by Sussex lawyer Charles Dawson in a gravel pit.
For those who believed that humans with already enlarged brains evolved earlier than had been supposed, the Piltdown Man was supreme proof. Spencer says Keith, conservator of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons who died in 1955, was one of the chief cheerleaders of the theory before Piltdown was unearthed.
The discovery was debunked in 1953 when scientists learned the remains were a human skull only a couple of hundred years old with an orangutan's jaw joined to it.
"The general feeling was it was contrived to bring somebody down, make someone in the scientific community look silly," Spencer said. "But if that was the case, why didn't they do that?" Instead, the theory floated around the scientific community for 41 years.
"It makes far more sense when beginning to look at the evidence that Piltdown was something made to withstand scientific scrutiny."
Spencer says the Piltdown bones were stained to make them look prehistoric and the orangutan teeth were filed down to make them look more like those of a meat-eating human, a ruse Keith had the knowledge and wherewithal to accomplish.
But the crux of the Langham-Spencer proof lies in Keith's diaries. In them, Spencer says, Keith "indicates he had information about the site and events at Piltdown . . . information which he wouldn't have had unless he was an inside member of the group."
Spencer said Keith also had met with Dawson a year before the discovery and again, just several months before.
by CNB