Beschreibung
First edition, very rare offprint issue, of the first American publication on 'Piltdown man', the 'missing link', and the first to suggest in print that it might be a forgery. In 1912, the amateur English archaeologist Charles Dawson uncovered some hominid bones at a site named Piltdown that greatly excited the authorities in England. 'Piltdown man,' as he came to be called, had a large human-size brain but an ape-like jaw, which suggested that it was perhaps ancestral to later hominids such as Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. Gregory was excited as well, and he mounted an exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and made a restoration of the Piltdown skull, using plaster casts from London. He published an article on the specimen in 1914 [the offered paper], essentially announcing Piltdown to the American public. The initial illustration [Fig. 1] was a charcoal drawing by James H. McGregor that attempted to breathe life into this distant human ancestor, Eoanthropus, the dawn human . Then Gregory provided a photograph of his skull restoration [Fig. 2], and a comparison of the Piltdown jaw with the jaw of an orangutan [Fig. 3] and a Negro [Fig. 4]. An account of the 'discovery' was published by Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward, the head of the geology department at the British Museum of Natural History, in March 1913. "During a trip to London in 1913, William King Gregory, distinguished vertebrate palaeontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, must even then have heard rumours that Piltdown might be a hoax. In September 1913, at Smith Woodward's own home in London, Gregory and Teilhard de Chardin were present at a gathering with other palaeontologists . . . It seems unlikely there would not have been lively discussion about everything to do with Piltdown, even perhaps about rumours of a potential fraud. Later in 1914, William King Gregory wrote about the Piltdown fossils that, "it has been suspected by some that they are not old at all; that they may even represent a deliberate hoax, a Negro or Australian skull and an ape jaw artificially fossilised and 'planted' in the gravel-bed to fool scientists" (pp. 190-191 of the present paper). Who, we might ask, was the source of this rumour? Harry Morris, a local bank clerk and amateur archaeologist, already had a flint from Piltdown which he claimed was faked, and by this time may have been openly talking about it. But William King Gregory quickly qualified his extraordinarily accurate observation by writing that none of the experts who had scrutinised the specimens, the site and its surroundings doubted the genuineness of the discovery" (Dean, De Groote & Stringer, 'Arthur Smith Woodward and his involvement in the study of Human Evolution,' in: Arthur Smith Woodward: His Life and Influence on Modern Vertebrate Palaeontology, 2016). Rumours aside, with the support of the British palaeontological establishment, Piltdown man was accepted as genuine. It was not until new technology for the dating of fossils was developed, in the late 1940s, that Piltdown Man came to be seriously questioned once again. In 1949, Dr. Kenneth Oakley, a member of the staff at the Natural History Museum, tested the Piltdown fossils and found that the skull and jaw were not that ancient. He joined forces with Professor Joe Weiner and Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark from Oxford, to apply stringent tests to all the Piltdown remains. They realised that the human-like wear pattern on the teeth had been created by artificially filing down the teeth from an orang-utan jaw. The skull pieces were found to have come from an unusually thick-boned but quite recent human skull. The identity of the hoaxers is still a matter of lively debate, but Piltdoen man is now one of the most notorious of all scientific frauds. 8vo, pp. [5], 189-200, with numerous photographic and other illustrations. Stapled into self-wrappers as issued (small closed tear to upper margin of last leaf, light soiling). Very good. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers ABE-1572785189288
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