Of Paleopolitics and Missing Links - The Fossil Chronicles - page 14

Evidently, sometime in 1908, while working the gravel bed at Barkham Manor,
an object resembling a “coconut” was accidently shattered by a labourer's
pickaxe. A fragment of the “coconut” was retrieved and later handed to Daw-
son who identified it as a portion of a thick human cranium (left parietal). . . .
According to Dawson's recollection of this venture, they found only “pieces
of dark brown ironstone closely resembling the piece of skull.” 51
Could it be that the perpetrator(s) of the hoax set out to emulate or
mock the discovery of another missing link, Pithecanthropus erectus, some
17 years earlier by another crew in other gravel beds, that time along the
Solo River in Java? There, in October 1891, workmen
turned up a strange bone; it was about the size of a large coconut —not the
green outer part, but the dense, hairy seed itself—and it was similar in shape
to half of a coconut that had been split longitudinally, except that the fossil
was more pear-shaped than ovoid. . . . It was a dark rich chocolate brown in
colour and thoroughly fossilized, heavy with the stony matrix that encrusted
many surfaces. . . . They packed the fossil . . . with the others from the last
few weeks' work, and sent it off to Dubois. 52
This possibility fits with the suggestion that doctored artifacts that were
salted in the Piltdown gravels, such as an elephant bone that had been
carved to look like a cricket bat (“a fitting accoutrement for the 'first
Englishman'”), were part of an elaborate joke gone awry. 53
Certainly, the Piltdown committee was well aware that Pithecanthropus
was considered by many to be a missing link that bridged the gap
between apes and humans when the Piltdown “coconut” was discovered
around 1908. In fact, Arthur Keith, at the dawn of his career, was present
when Dubois defended his interpretation of Pithecanthropus at a meet-
ing of the Royal Dublin Society on November 20, 1895, where he was
“the only scientist to come close to wholeheartedly endorsing Dubois's
interpretation.” 54 (Keith would later change his mind by favoring big-
brained Piltdown Man as the direct ancestor of modern humans to the
exclusion of Pithecanthropus, whom he relegated to a “small-brained . . .
survival from some earlier phase of evolution.”) 55 Keith and two other
members of the Piltdown committee, Grafton Elliot Smith and Arthur