Ruth Moore

[342] One of the elephants, Elephas planifrons, and the mastodon undoubtedly belonged together, in one of the early warm, lush intervals that came between the ice invasions of the Pleistocene. The later species of elephant and the hippopotamus had flourished in the tropical jungles that covered England in an[343]other and later glacial interlude. The beaver probably belonged to a still more recent time.

[343[ Did Piltdown man belong to the time of the oldest animals or to the period of some of the others? Upon the answer depended a vast difference in his age.

Another England. "Elephas planifrons," a hippopotamus, and beaver, all of whose bones rested beside those of Piltdown man on the prehistoric Piltdown Common.

The authorities clashed. One faction cited impressive evidence to prove that the man whose skull lay buried in the gravel pit must have gone back to the Lower Pleistocene; perhaps he was the hunter of Elephas planifrons and the masto[244]don. Others were equally firm in placing him with the later-comers of the Middle or Upper Pleistocene. ...

[345] ... Piltdown man was given a forehead of almost human proportions. To reconstruct what the remainder of the face must have been was a difficult problem, for the experts had only the forehead, the brow ridges, some of the nasal bones, and part of the lower jaw with which to work.

While this puzzle was being studied, Dawson found three fragments of a second Piltdown skull only two miles distant from the first site. Clearly they belonged to the same type of being, and luckily provided some further clues to the shape of the face.

When the two were put together, the anthropologists concluded that Eoanthropus's face was not overlong nor unduly projecting. Although the skull was thick, the nose flat, and the jaw massive, it was an essentially human face that looked out on the world again. ...

[346] ... Oakley proposed a fluorine test. He hoped a fluorine determination might shed enough light on the age of the skull to settle the major points in the dispute. Furthermore, all the requirements for a successful use of fluorine seemed to be met–a mixture of remains in the same bed, and conditions under which fluorine fixation would have been slow.

In October 1948 the Keeper of Geology of the British Museum authorized the sampling of the precious Piltdown specimens. With a dentist's drill, a tiny bit of material was dug out of every available bone and tooth in the Piltdown and neighboring deposits, and seventeen samples were taken from the Eoanthropus bones and teeth. *

* Strangely enough, after the drill bit through the discolored surface of the teeth, the dentine was as white as new.

One of the most difficult feats was getting enough material from the highly important canine tooth. Chemists who made the complicated fluorine tests asked for twenty milligrams of powdered bone or tooth with which to work and about one [347] milligrams if possible. Of the canine, they

managed with a scant three milligrams. But large or small, samples were obtained and the tests completed.

Once more the results were striking. All of the bones of Piltdown man showed approximately the same fluorine content. And so did the remains of the "second individual" found more than two miles away.

There had been no "miracle" mixing of bones. Jaws and cranium could have belonged to the same being; the jaw was not that of an ape and the skull that of a man. Both were quite certainly contemporary. And so one important point in the long-standing Piltdown dispute was settled.*

* Oakley emphasizes that it is still possible that the remains represent two creatures, though this does not now seem likely.

Of even greater significance, the fluorine content of the Eoanthropus bones was low. It averaged only 0.2 per cent. The bones could not have been in the gravels for very long.

In startling contrast, the bones of the older elephant and of the mastodon–the Lower Pleistocene remains–showed 1.9 to 3.1 per cent of fluorine. In the many millennia since they had been in the brown Piltdown gravels, a great deal of fluorine had crept deep into their cells. ...

[348] Oakley at first attempted no closer dating of the Piltdown man At the Wenner-Gren International Symposium in New York in [349] 1952, however, he expressed his opinion on the basis of further study that Eoanthropus had lived not much more than 50,000 years ago. Before the fluorine test was applied to the remains of Piltdown man, many authorities had suggested that they were about 500,000 ears old and perhaps a million!

Did Piltdown man live in the time of the mastodon, 500,000 or more years ago, or did he belong to the time of the beaver, around 50,000 years ago? Fluorine dating placed him definitely with the beaver and thus gave him–the first man of accepted human intelligence–an age of not much more than 50,000 years.

Tremendous consequences hinge upon this finding. It means, no less, that modern man is much younger than science previously had thought. For Piltdown man is the first man known with a completely modern-sized brain case. None of his known precursors–Swanscombe man, Peking man, Java man, or any of the others–had reached that status, though some maintain that Swanscombe man approached it.

To date the arrival of modern man at about fifty thousand years ago instead of the one million previously set for him shakes anthropology, history, and the theory of evolution.