370 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1954 



The ready initial acceptance of the Piltdown discovery at its face 

 value, at least by a majority of interested scientists, can probably be 

 attributed to the philosophical climate that invested the problem of 

 human evolution at that time. In September 1912, before the an- 

 nouncement of the discovery of "Piltdown man," the distinguished 

 anatomist Elliot Smith, in an address before the Anthropological 

 Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at 

 Dundee [22], expressed a prevailing point of view when he developed 

 the theory that the brain led the way in the evolution of man and that 

 modification of other parts of the body followed. Thus the stage was 

 set for the ready acceptance of the Piltdown fragments as constitut- 

 ing a single individual, a "dawn man" possessing a human cranium 

 housing a human brain, but with phylogenetically laggard, hence 

 simian, jaws and teeth. To quote the paleontologist Sollas [23] : 



The surprise which was first excited by what appeared to be a monstrous 

 combination disappears on further reflection. Such a combiuation had, indeed, 

 been long previously anticipated as an almost necessary stage in the course of 

 human development. ... In Eoanthropus Daivsoni we seem to have realised 

 precisely such a being . . . , one, that is, which had already attained to human 

 intelligence but had not yet wholly lost its ancestral jaws and fighting teeth. 



And, as Sir Arthur Keith, perhaps the most vocal champion of 

 "Eoanthropus," argued in supporting this view : 



. . . before the anthropoid characters would disappear from the body of primal 

 man, the brain, the master organ of the human body, must first have come 

 into its human estate. Under its dominion the parts of the body such as the 

 mouth and hands, the particular servants of the brain, became adapted for 

 higher uses. Looking at the problem from this point of view, we cannot reject 

 the Piltdown mandible because as regards the mylo-hyoid ridge it is simian and 

 not human in character [10]. 



Recent finds of fossil men and other primates, however, indicate 

 that it is the brain that was the evolutionary laggard in man's phy- 

 logeny; indeed, the studies of Tilly Edinger [24] of the phylogeny 

 of the horse brain suggest that this may well be a general rule in 

 mammalian evolution. It was such concepts as this, leading to a 

 change in philosophical climate, that evoked an increasing skepticism 

 toward the validity of the monistic interpretation of the Piltdown 

 fragments and led in turn to what appears to have been the prevail- 

 ing recent opinion, namely, that the fragments should, as expressed 

 in 1949 by Le Gros Clark [25], "be laid aside without further com- 

 ment until more evidence becomes available." This view, enhanced 

 by the redating of the remains by Oakley and Hoskins, provided the 

 proper psychological setting for the coup de grace delivered by 

 AVeiner, Oakley, and Clark. 



As the three latter point out, the solution of the Piltdown enigma 

 greatly clarifies the problem of human evolution. For "Eoanthropus," 

 both morphologically and geologically, just simply did not fit into 



