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Piltdown: Cryptograms & Conan Doyle
Elementary, my dear scientists
By Jonathan Gornall
Is there proof that Conan Doyle was the Piltdown hoaxer?
FIFTY years ago this week, Dr J. S. Weiner, an eminent British palaeontologist, sat through a conference in London about early human beings, wondering idly why nobody had so much as mentioned Piltdown Man, the so-called Missing Link and Britain’s great contribution to the evolution debate. It was, he mused, as though Piltdown — a few bones and teeth unearthed in Sussex between 1912 and 1913 — was regarded by the palaeontology community as the relative whom nobody wanted to see at family gatherings: a skeleton, as it were, in the human family cupboard.
Examining the skull fragments, teeth and jawbone, he came to a shocking conclusion. Under a microscope, it was clear that the teeth had been shaped by a file. Piltdown Man was a fake. Far from being the Missing Link between people and their ape ancestors, the skull was barely 600 years old and the jaw, crudely amended and with teeth filed to fit patterns of human mastication, belonged to an orang-utan. In 1912, the whole question of human ancestry was open and, because Piltdown appeared to validate contemporary views, science saw what it wanted to see.
The story broke in The Times on November 21 of that year, and the witch-hunt was on. The finger pointed first at Charles Dawson, the lawyer who had dug up the bones in a Sussex gravel pit, but in the years since, almost nobody involved has escaped accusation. All along, though, one shadowy figure has haunted the margins of the case — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. He lived at Crowborough, a few miles from Dawson’s dig, which he visited. Read in the light of the hoax, his classic sci-fi adventure The Lost World, serialised in Strand Magazine just before the Piltdown find, appears to be littered with so many clues that even the dim Watson would have caught the drift. But, as Holmes was fond of saying: “You see, but you do not observe.” I was nudged back on the trail of Conan Doyle by the news that a vast cache of the author’s papers, bequeathed to the nation in 1997 on the death of his daughter Dame Jean, has remained unseen in mysterious legal limbo. Perhaps it contained a hint, or even a full confession. Conan Doyle, after all, had an interest in palaeontology, experience as a doctor working with teeth, access to all the Piltdown parts and a penchant for jokes. What’s more, he had known, met and flattered Dawson, who told a friend that the great man “seemed excited about the skull. He has kindly offered to drive me in his motor anywhere . . .”
Such as up the garden path, perhaps? Conan Doyle was a known prankster: he faked a photograph for his book The Lost World, with himself made up as the lead character, Professor Challenger.
Chris Stringer is the head of human origins at the Natural History Museum, whose office in South Kensington is next door to where the Piltdown remains languish in two drawers. He has little doubt that Dawson, an amateur palaeontologist seeking fame and the only man present when all the Piltdown pieces were found, was guilty. He concedes that Dawson might well have had an accomplice, and that there are “interesting coincidences” in The Lost World, but that’s all.
My last hope for an academic ally is in New York: Richard Milner, an associate in the anthropology department at the American Museum of Natural History and an internationally known Darwinian scholar. He first indicted Conan Doyle at the Linnean Society of London in 1997 but admits that his prime suspect has so far eluded conviction beyond a reasonable doubt. Despite his penchant for setting evolution to music — his startling show Charles Darwin, Live and In Concert, was hailed by Time Out as the “smartest show in NY” — Milner is a serious academic and not, sadly, keen to torpedo a lifetime’s reputation by allowing me to hijack his name.
Sometimes, though, enthusing about the clues that the great mystery writer appears to have strewn in his wake, Milner veers dangerously close to the conclusion I am willing him to reach. In his original copy of the Strand, he points out the photograph of “Challenger” — Conan Doyle, made up with false beard and eyebrows — and the author’s signature: “Yours truly (to use the conventional lie), George Challenger”.
“Conan Doyle does seem to be saying, ‘Catch me if you can.’. I mean, what’s the name of the professor? Challenger!” The challenge, Milner theorises, was to a scientific establishment that had mocked his belief in spiritualism. “I can imagine him getting totally p***ed off. ‘I’m the creator of Sherlock Holmes, don’t tell me I don’t know what’s rational and provable. I bet you scientists would go for the flimsiest evidence if it supported your most cherished beliefs’.”
So why didn’t he spring the trap? “A little something called the First World War,” Milner suggests. Intensely patriotic, Conan Doyle was advising the Government on a number of issues in the run-up to 1914. “If a man wants to influence war policy, he doesn’t go round saying, ‘Oh, by the way, that skull in Piltdown? I planted it. Ha ha ha’.”
And then Milner spills one clue from The Lost World that I had missed. At the time, cryptograms, codes using secret symbols, were all the rage in children’s magazines. In chapter 15 of The Lost World is a cave map. Milner believes it could be a tough cryptogram — and the smoking gun. There are only 18 characters, too few for an easy frequency analysis. But if so, he imagines that the message will say something like “Ape jaw, human skull”. He’d like to hear from an intrigued cryptographer. Armed with this suspicion, I reread the passage in the book where the explorers are handed the map, which Challenger believes at first is “clearly some sort of script”. “Unless,” says Summerlee, “we have come upon a primitive practical joker, which I should think would be one of the most elementary developments of man.”
Elementary? Well, quite, my dear Watson.
THE LOST CLUES
THE serialisation of The Lost World, in which Professor Challenger and his team find “missing link” apemen living in South America, began in the April 1912 edition of Strand Magazine — eight months before Charles Dawson told the Geological Society that he had found the remains of an early human fossil in a shallow gravel pit near the village of Piltdown in Sussex. Conan Doyle lived in Crowborough, a few miles from Piltdown, and Dawson later claimed that the dig produced its first finds within a year of the author’s arrival in the area in 1908. Work began on The Lost World in 1911. The narrator, journalist Edward D. Malone (a “most insignificant unit” on the Daily Gazette), is sent to grill Professor Challenger.
Clue one: Malone’s news editor denounces Challenger as “Sir John Mandeville redivivus”, a reference to an exposed literary fraudster. What about the bones he says he has found? “First one out of an Irish stew. Second one vamped up for the occasion. If you are clever enough and know your business, you can fake a bone as easily as you can fake a photograph.”
Clue two: Conan Doyle packs the book with references to the geological and palaeontological profile of Sussex and the Wealden clay in which Piltdown was found. Challenger spots a dinosaur’s footprint and exclaims “Wealden! I’ve seen them in the Wealden clay!”
Clue three: Challenger refers to Sir Edwin Lankester, director of natural history at the British Museum, as “my gifted friend”. Lankester, writing in 1906, had predicted the type of finds that might attend discovery of a “missing link”. The fraudulent Piltdown haul echoed his predictions. In 1876 Lankester had exposed the spirit-medium Henry Slade as a fraud and prosecuted him. Conan Doyle later came out as a spiritualist.
Clue four: Fear of an evolutionary bogeyman is evoked in The Lost World with a reference to the curupuri — a spirit feared by the Amazon tribes and described as a “kind of orang-utan”. Piltdown’s jawbone turned out to be that of an orang-utan.
If you think you can crack the cryptogram, e-mail [email protected]
