More Doubts On Piltdown Man From Our Special Correspondent The story of the hoax practised upon the world of learning by the faking of a modern ape's jawbone to match the genuine cranium of Piltdown Man was carried a stage further over the weekend. Dr. K. P. Oakley, of !the Department of Geology, British Museum (Natural His- tory), who with the Jhelp of analysts perfected the tests that uncovered the fraud (reported in later editions of The Times on Saturday), stated that " we have other things up our sleeves in connexion with Piltdown." He has established that the second Piltdown Man as was to be expected, is as questionable as tie first. Many who began by being sceptical about the association in the first Piltdown Man of a humarn brain-case with an ape-like jaw and carnine tooth were con- verted to the belief that the association was genuine, and not fortuitous, when in 1915 other remains with the same characteristics were reported to have been found at a second site, reputedly two miles away from the site of the first discovery in 1912. In other words, it is hard to resist the infer- ence that the forger, whoever he was, had the coolness and scholarly skill to try to out- manoeuvre expert doubts about the 1912 remains by mabng possible in 1915 a dis- covery of a corroborative kind. A GENUINE FOSSIL Mr. Charles Dawson the Hastings solicitor makes his appearance in the second discovery,1 as in the first. Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, head of the British Museum Geology Depart- ment for 22 years, is said never to have been shown the second site, and Dawson died in 1916 before he had fixed it on a map Tests of two pieces of skull reputed to be from the second site show that one is a genuine fossil, the other piece (occipital) iscom-1 paratively modern and has been made to match the first by artificial staining. A tooth claimed to be from the second site shows sign of arti- ficial abrasion, and almost certairdy came from the spurious Piltdown mandible. The true fossil "'probably belongs to the skull from the first site." Nor, Dr. Oakley states, are the Piltdown implements " all they should be." Tests show that some of them have been stained artificially to look more than their age. The famous PUtdown bone implement, for example, is certainly a genuine fossil elephant bone, i' but it appears to have been worked in a way that would be impossible with a crude flint tool." It was, in fact, made too perfect. Mr. Dawson suggested that the tool might have been turned up in gravel by a workman and thrown into the hedge where it eventually came again to light. Dr. Oakley comments that " if you try to work a green bone with a ffint, you get no- where; but a fossil that has been waterlogged will cut like cheese." MUSEUM EXHIBIT During the weekend the museum staff were preparing an odd exhibit: a display illustrating the fraud that imposed on the good faith of many scholars who worked there, and upon which, after patient investigation, the scholars of a later day have now brought startling retribution. Those scholars who were deceived, often against their judgment, have more in their defence than the extraordinary skill brought to bear by the creator of the cheat. Their successors point out that since 1912 and 1915 many more links in the chain of human evolu- tion have been discovered to serve as a guide. One of them is the pre-Neanderthal Swanscombe Man, which has been given a complete true bill under the fluorine tests that prove the Piltdown ape-man to be bogus. The Swanscombe Man was discovered in 1935 and 1936, when two fragments of human skull were found in gravels of the 100ft. terrace of the Thames, at Swanscombe, Kent. In some details they resemble the bones of the Piltdown skull. Swanscombe Man is placed in the Middle Pliestocene period, between the second and third glaciations; Piltdown Man is put between the third and last glaciation. In spite of the forgery of the mandible, the Piltdown brain-case can still be regarded as a genuine fossil of Upper Pleistocene age. Although less old than the Swanscombe skull, "it is nevertheless important as representing an early member of our own species," but not nearly so early as was originally claimed for it. PROBLEM CLARIFIED The experts emphasize that the removal of the ape-jawed Piltdown Man from the fossil record, in fact, clarifies the problem of human ancestry by disposing of what seemed to be an evolutionary aberration. The ape's jaw-bone and tooth that had been falsely associated with the human cranium were so entirely out of character that, even allowing for different parts of the human skull having evolved at different rates, it had become increasingly difficult to reconcile them with the evidence since found elsewhere. What manner of person was Charles Daw- son, who died with the honour upon him of being primarily responsible for the Piltdown discoveries ? Sir Arthur Smith Woodward gave a sketch of him in The Earliest English- man (The Thinker's Library): " Charles Daw- son was one of those restless people, of in- quiring mind, who take a curious interest in everything round them. . . . Nothing came amiss to his alert observation. When I first met him, in 1884, he lived at Hastings (St. Leonards) and was collecting fossil bones of extinct reptiles from the quarries in the Wealden sandstone round the town, and his collection was soon important enough to be accepted by the British Museum. " He always took care, indeed, to submit his discoveries to experts, who discussed them and stimulated him to further exertions. He was a solicitor by profession, but during his leisure he lived in the world of scholars who were engaged in research. It was while per- forming one ofAis professional duties that Mr. Dawson w71 led to discover the fossil human skull at Piltdown. The Piltdown ape-man is not the first forgery to deceive scholars. In archaeology there has been a number of deceptions. One was the eighteenth-century case of Beringer, whose students carved objects and hid them for their unsuspecting master to find. Another case, in zoology, involved the Austrian Kammerer, who sought to prove the so-called inheritance of acquired characteristics. In lay terms; it turned out that somebody- had made the swellings in male newts on which the proof of, the theory depended by injecting Indian ink. _ _ _ MORE DOUBTS ON PLuTDOWN MAN SECOND DISCOVERY SUSPECT IMPLEMENTS STAMED ARTIFICIALLY