THE FORGOTTEN MAN

Look at it from Mr. Piltdown’s point of view.

Oft forgotten completely by the paleoanthropology set, or even more often called a”fake”, just to begin with his feelings must have been mighty hurt. Good old Charles Dawson, in Sussex in 1912 thought he was on to something and I am sure Piltdown felt the same. After his discovery of a partial very ancient skull, Dawson got in touch with that guy at the Natural History Museum and they teamed up in the Pleistocene diggings near Piltdown village and had themselves a time finding finds. They unearthed teeth, jawbones, skull parts and tools, claiming them all for that partial skull of first discovery.

Arthur Smith Woodward, the Museum guy constructed more skull out of the fragments. Dawson and he shareded their findings with a bunch of archeologists who saw in them a human ancestor that had lived 500,000 or so years ago.  This ancient gentleman was christened Eoanthropus Dawsoni, and nicknamed “Piltdown Man”. He was in Seventh Heaven after having been ignored for literally eons.  He was a Star! Everyone loved him! He became known as THE MISSING LINK!

So for just a little short of fifty years all was well for Piltdown Man. Then, dammit, along came that busybody Dr. Kenneth Oakley, a geologist who happened to also work at the Natural History Museum. Using some newfangled fluorine test thing, he declared that it proved poor Mr. Piltdown was an imposter, barely 50,000 years old and certainly not worthy of his assumed Missing Link title. Then more guys came along and insisted they too be allowed to do tests. It turned out that the skull fragments that Woodward had pasted together did not even belong to the same species, never mind the same person. And THEN they also said that somebody had filed down some of the teeth to make them look like they belonged to a humanoid ancestor and that they had also used some kind of coloring to match the Piltdown gravel site so it would all look legit. Eoanthropus Dawsoni was soon unstarred, unloved and hailed a complete phony by all.

Today Mr. Piltdown is either maligned or forgotten altogether. But consider his point of view. His paleolithic heart is surely broken.  Should he not be as widely acclaimed as Australopithecus Afarensis, the world’s beloved “Lucy”? Is he a  fake as all of those upstart latecomers so snidely proclaimed?? No. Eoanthropus Dawsoni knows his own skull and bones. He in his own mind is truly the MISSING LINK and always will be.

©2021 Deborah