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.King soriginal belief that they represented a different kind of hominidfrom human beings received a great deal of attention becauseDarwin s basic ideas about evolution, as well as those of his rivalAlfred Russel Wallace, were already sufficiently known in scien-tific circles to have stirred the beginnings of a debate that contin-ues to this day.Then, as now, there were those who reacted withhorror to the idea that human beings were even related to theapes, finding that concept an affront to both God and humanity.The Neanderthals (or Neandertals, as Donald Johanson, who dis-70 c07.qxd 6/19/01 2:20 PM Page 71Is There a Missing Link? 71covered the famous Lucy skeleton in 1974, and some otheranthropologists prefer) came to be regarded by many scientists as brutish. In the nineteenth century, even professional scientistsseemed to be infected to some degree by the distaste that the reli-gious had for the idea that we Homo sapiens might be intimatelylinked to bestial creatures.As Johanson and others have pointed out, the degrading viewof the Neanderthals that persisted into the 1950s can be blamedon one man, French anthropologist Marcellin Boule.Boule de-clared that these primitive brutes could in no way be comparedto the Cro-Magnons, who settled in Europe 35,000 years ago andare generally regarded as the earliest human beings.The firstremains to be called Cro-Magnon were discovered in the Dor-dogne region of France in 1868.Boule saw the Neanderthals assubhuman, but he described Cro-Magnons as having a more ele-gant body, a finer head, an upright and spacious brow, and whohave left, in the caves which they inhabited, so much evidence oftheir manual skill, artistic and religious preoccupations, of theirabstract faculties, and were the first to merit the glorious title ofHomo sapiens! These words were written in 1908, following thediscovery of a deformed Neanderthal skeleton that we now knowto have been twisted by arthritis to which the Neanderthalswere prone.The scientific community in general went along with Boule sbelief that we could not have evolved from this brute stock.Nonetheless, it was clear that, given the slow workings of evolu-tionary change, there must be some creature, further back, thatcould stand as an intermediary between the apes and our exaltedselves.Thus was born the concept of the missing link, and thou-sands of amateur geologists went out hunting for bones thatmight turn out to be significant.In the late 1800s and early 1900s,such enthusiasts played the kind of role that amateur astronomershave in the search for new comets in recent years.In 1912, onesuch man, a British lawyer named Charles Dawson, found whatappeared to provide the answer.In a gravel bed on PiltdownCommon near Lewes, England, he uncovered a skull with a cra-nium that was clearly human, but which also had an apelike jaw. c07.qxd 6/19/01 2:20 PM Page 7272 UNSOLVED MYSTERIES OF SCIENCEA photograph of the supposed skull of Piltdown Man, discovered by CharlesDawson in England in 1912 and certified by numerous experts as authenticevidence of a missing link in human evolution.It was exposed as a fraud in1953.Courtesy the Museum of the City of London, England.Piltdown Man, as it came to be called, created a worldwidesensation.The skull was put through a variety of tests by top sci-entists, and they declared it authentic.There was some concernthat no other bones could be found in the area, but theorists havealways had a knack for cooking up excuses for anomalous finds,and plenty of them were put to use in this case.Piltdown Manwent into the biology books as the proven missing link, the cer-tain answer to those who claimed that humans could not possiblybe related to the apes.There were always a few anthropologistswho were dubious about Piltdown Man, and eventually theirworries prompted a new round of tests in 1953, using chemicalanalyses that had been recently developed.The headlines thathad once screamed MISSING LINK FOUND now read PILT- c07.qxd 6/19/01 2:20 PM Page 73Is There a Missing Link? 73DOWN HOAX. It had been shown that the skull consisted of ahuman cranium attached to an orangutan jaw.The joining hadbeen performed with enormous skill but perhaps not quiteenough to excuse 41 years of abject credulity.It then took another 43 years to determine who had perpe-trated the hoax, one of the most successful and damaging in thehistory of science.Over the next several decades, the puzzleattracted numerous researchers, who came up with all kinds ofsuspects
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