PILTDOWN HOAX — STRAUS 365 



tioiis of reconstruction raised the capacity upward to about 1,400 cc. — 

 close to the approximate average for living men [10, p. 596]. 



A number of scientists, however, refused to accept the cranium and 

 jaw as belonging to one and the same kind of individual. Instead, 

 they regarded the brain case as that of a fossil but modern type of 

 man and the jaw (and canine tooth) as that of a fossil anthropoid 

 ape which had come by chance to be associated in the same deposit. 

 The supporters of the monistic view, however, stressed the improb- 

 ability of the presence of a hitherto unknown ape in England dur- 

 ing the Pleistocene epoch, particularly since no remains of fossil apes 

 had been found in Europe later than the Lower Pliocene. An anat- 

 omist, David Waterston, seems to have been the first to have recog- 

 nized the extreme morphological incongruity between the cranium and 

 the jaw. From the announcement of the discovery he voiced his dis- 

 belief in their anatomical association [11, p. 150]. The following 

 year (1913) he demonstrated that superimposed tracings taken from 

 radiograms of the Piltdown mandible and the mandible of a chim- 

 panzee were "practically identical"; at the same time he noted that 

 the Piltdown molar teeth not only "approach the ape form, but in 

 several respects are identical with them." He concluded that since 

 "the cranial fragments of the Piltdown skull, on the other hand, are 

 in practically all their details essentially human ... it seems to me 

 to be as inconsequent to refer the mandible and the cranium to the 

 same individual as it would be to articulate a chimpanzee foot with 

 the bones of an essentially human thigh and leg" [12]. 



In 1915, Gerrit Miller, then curator of mammals at the United 

 States National Museum, published the results of a more extensive 

 and detailed study of casts of the Piltdown specimens in which he con- 

 eluded that the jaw is actually that of a fossil chimpanzee [13]. This 

 view gradually gained strong support, e. g., from Boule [14] and 

 Ramstrom [15]. Miller, furthermore, denied that the manner of 

 wear of the molar teeth was necessarily a peculiarly human one; he 

 stated that it could be duplicated among chimpanzees. That some 

 other workers (Friederichs [16]; Weidenreich [17]) have ascribed 

 the jaw to a fossil ape resembling the orangutan, rather than to a 

 chimpanzee, is unimportant. T\^iat is important, in the light of recent 

 events, is that the proponents of the dualistic theory agreed in pro- 

 nouncing the jaw that of an anthropoid ape, and unrelated to the 

 cranial fragments. Piltdown II remained a problem; but there was 

 some ambiguity about this discover}^, which was announced after the 

 death of Dawson "unaccompanied by any direct word from him" [5]. 

 Indeed, Hrdlicka [18], who studied the original specimens, felt con- 

 vinced that the isolated molar tooth of Piltdown II must have come 

 from the original jaw and that there was probably some mistake in its 

 published history. 



