Volume 44, Number 2 · February 6, 1997
Crooked Bones
By Steve Jones
Unraveling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and Its Solution
by John Evangelist Walsh
Random House, 279 pp., $25.95
Thus the meeting of Dr. Mortimer with Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles; and thus a crucial clue for those who claim that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle faked Piltdown Man, the scientific fraud of the twentieth century. The fake, discovered in Sussex a decade after Dr. Mortimer's 1902 adventure, was not in fact a half-million-year-old human ancestor, Eoanthropus, 'dawn man,' but a crude amalgam of a medieval human brain case with an orangutan jaw of the same age. A few of the bones were painted with household brown paint and others roughly stained to resemble a fossil. They had, some said, been planted by the founder of detective fiction.
Review, 2633 words
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