366 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1954 



A third and in a sense neutral point of view held that the whole 

 business was so ambiguous that the Piltdown discovery had best be 

 put on the shelf, so to speak, until further evidence, through new 

 discoveries, might become available. I have not attempted any- 

 thing resembling a thorough poll of the literature, but I have the 

 distinct impression that this point of view has become increasingly 

 common in recent years, as will be further discussed. Certainly, 

 those best qualified to have an opinion, especially those possess- 

 ing a sound knowledge of human and primate anatomy, have held 

 largely — with a few notable exceptions — either to a dualistic or to a 

 neutral interpretation of the remains, and hence have rejected the 

 monistic interpretation that led to the reconstruction of a "dawn man." 

 Most assuredly, and contrary to the impression that has been generally 

 spread by the popular press when reporting the hoax, "Eoanthropus" 

 has remained far short of being universally accepted into polite an- 

 thropological society. 



An important part of the Piltdown controversy related to the geo- 

 logical age of the "Eoanthropus" fossils. As we shall see, it was this 

 aspect of the controversy that eventually proved to be the undoing of 

 the synthetic Sussex "dawn man." Associated with the primate re- 

 mains were those of various other mammals, including mastodon, 

 elephant, horse, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, deer, and beaver [2]. The 

 Piltdown gravel, being stream-deposited material, could well contain 

 fossils of different ages. The general opinion, however, seems to have 

 been that it was of the Lower Pleistocene (some earlier opinions even 

 allocated it to the Upper Pliocene), based on those of its fossils that 

 could be definitely assigned such a date [2]. The age of the remains 

 of "Piltdown man" thus was generally regarded as Lower Pleistocene, 

 variously estimated to be from 200,000 to 1,000,000 years [19]. To 

 the proponents of the monistic, "dawn-man" theory, this early dating 

 sufficed to explain the apparent morphological incongruity between 

 cranium and lower jaw. 



In 1892, Carnot, a French mineralogist, reported that the amount 

 of fluorine in fossil bones increases with their geological age — a report 

 that seems to have received scant attention from paleontologists. Re- 

 cently, K. P. Oakley, happening to come across Carnot's paper, recog- 

 nized the possibilities of the fluorine test for establishing the relative 

 ages of bones found within a single deposit. He realized, furthermore, 

 that herein might lie the solution of the vexed Piltdown problem. 

 Consequently, together with C. R. Hoskins, he applied the fluorine 

 test to the "Eoanthropus" and other mammalian remains found at 

 Piltdown [20]. The results led to the conclusion that "all the remains 

 of Eoanthro'pus . . . are contemporaneous"; and that they are, "at 

 the earliest, Middle Pleistocene." However, they were strongly indi- 



