Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
nothing new. Many of the paleoanthropologists who were players (or
were “played”) in the Piltdown episode were every bit as adamant and
defensive about their favored evolutionary theories as some who prac-
tice in the field today. Another thing that may have been true then, as
I believe it is now, is that the closer to the brain (or braincase) one's
prized specimen is, the more intense the debates about its interpreta-
tion. The brain makes us human, and the uniqueness of humanity
has always been at the heart of the boisterous debates about human
origins.
The disagreement between two leading scientists, Arthur Smith
Woodward and Arthur Keith, about how to reconstruct Piltdown Man
shows just how acrimonious these debates can be. Woodward had first
crack, having been invited by Dawson to supervise the initial recon-
struction and description of the fossil. Appropriately enough (since the
mandible was from an orangutan), Woodward reconstructed the missing
front parts of Piltdown's lower jaw to be consistent with the rest of its
apelike morphology. His reconstruction therefore had large projecting
canines. When Keith set out to “correct” Woodward's reconstruction, he
focused on Piltdown's braincase, which he rightly believed Woodward
had made too small. In his version of the skull, Keith expanded Pilt-
down's braincase and, reasoning that an ancestor with such a modern-
looking braincase couldn't have such an apelike jaw, reconstructed the
Piltdown jaw, including its canines, to be more humanlike. In a sense,
both scientists were right: Woodward's reconstruction of the ape jaw was
appropriate, as was Keith's reconstruction of the human cranium.
At a pivotal meeting of the Anatomical Section of the International
Congress of Medicine in London on August 11, 1913, Woodward pre-
sented his reconstruction of Piltdown's skull and conceded that Keith
may have been right that its braincase should be larger but stood by his
amphitheater at the Royal College of Surgeons, where Keith presented
his own model of the skull and gave his reasons for reconstructing its
braincase to be 400 cm
3
larger than Woodward's model:
