Of Paleopolitics and Missing Links - The Fossil Chronicles - page 5

The difference between his model and that of Woodward's, he declared,
was not “simply a matter of opinion, but a principle of the most elementary
fact”. Seizing Woodward's model and holding it up to his audience, Keith
is reported to have said with “infinite scorn”, that such an individual would
have been prevented not only from eating but also breathing! “If a student
had brought up a skull like this one, he would have been rejected for a
couple of years”, he added mockingly. 10
In response to Keith's presentation, the renowned neuroanatomist
and anthropologist Grafton Elliot Smith said that he was not disturbed
by either Woodward's reconstruction of an apelike mandible or Keith's
of a large braincase, because, in his view, enlargement of the human
brain must have preceded the evolution of the face and jaw. Others con-
curred. In reply, Keith is reported to have said that
he did not think his audience quite realized the importance of the Piltdown
skull. It brought home the incontrovertible fact that at the commencement
of the Pleistocene, or perhaps more accurately at the end of the Pliocene,
the human brain had reached its full size. This fact, he said, opened up a
new insight into our past — “a vista of human cultures coming struggling
to us over perhaps a million of years.” 11
Dawson, however, was unimpressed. “When we have done with the
pick and shovel,” he told a reporter, “it will be quite time enough to call
in the doctors.” 12 Sure enough, a mere nine days after the meeting at the
Royal College, “proof ” of the accuracy of Woodward's apelike recon-
struction of the jaw came in the form of a new discovery from the grav-
els (made by the French Jesuit priest Father Teilhard de Chardin)—a
supposed right lower canine from the Piltdown mandible! In 1953 this
tooth would be shown to have been filed and stained to match the color
of the Piltdown remains. 13 Meanwhile, it contributed to the ongoing
acrimony among scholars who had become “dug in” about their particu-
lar views of Piltdown.
The 1913 controversy inspired an oil painting, The Piltdown Committee,
by John Cooke, which was unveiled at the annual exhibition of the Royal
Academy in London in May 1915 (figure 1). As “a celebration of the induc-