Why Do People Cheat and Lie?

We are all guilty of little white lies from time to time or even of suffering lapses in moral courage. I'm not talking about those behaviors, I'm talking about something much, much bigger.

I believe that anyone who chooses to become a scientist probably cares passionately about the outcome of their research and the process of inching closer to the scientific truth. Some are motivated by burning curiosity; some are driven by a desire to do good, to make a difference; some have heads full of abstract ideas and hypotheses about how the world works that can only be played out in experiments. Few, if any, choose science as a profession because they wish to become rich or famous, because wealth and glory rarely come to scientists.

If I am right, why would somebody fake their data?

We are coming up on the 100^th anniversary of one of the strangest scientific hoaxes of all time: the faking of fossil finds in Sussex, England, that became known as Piltdown Man. The short version of the story is that in 1908, someone took various human and ape fossils, modified them to make them appear older than they were, then planted them in a gravel pit near the town of Piltdown where they rapidly became a scientific sensation. They were taken to be the first really good fossil human remains in England and an indication of the path of human evolution. The misinterpretation fostered by these fossils led paleoanthropologists and biologists astray until 1953 and led to the (temporary) rejection of many genuine finds.

The repercussions were enormous. Prehistory and paleoanthropology had been concentrated in the hands of French scholars, not a fact that sat comfortably with many Britons. France had nearly complete Neandertal and early human skeletons, some buried with grave goods, as well as thousands of beautifully worked stone tools and cave paintings galore. The French dominated the science.

But with the appearance of Piltdown—a partial skull and jaw—British scholars came into the limelight. Since Arthur Keith (later Sir Arthur) was then organizing an exhibit on early humans in Britain at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons where he was Conservator. By studying or obtaining all the relevant fossils in Britain and placing them in context with the European discoveries, Keith was doubtless aiming to build his reputation as an expert in human evolution. And he did, with the help of Piltdown.

Piltdown was described in 1912 by an anonymous writer in the Manchester Guardian as a specimen with "more than a possibility of being the oldest remnant of a human frame yet discovered on this planet." Its formal presentation was made by its discoverer, amateur prehistorian Charles Dawson, and his friend and colleague, Arthur Smith Woodward (later Sir Arthur), a fish paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History. At a meeting of the Geological Society of London in 1912, the fossils were displayed and formally named Eoanthropus dawsonii, or Dawson's dawn-man. Though a blizzard of papers appeared over how exactly the pieces fitted together, many agreed that Piltdown was a very ancient and proved that the modern human big brain was also very ancient. Neanderthals, well-known from France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, were happily expelled from the direct ancestry of modern humans by such a fossil. The "Earliest Englishman" was, everyone thought, the earliest.

A few more bits and pieces attributed to Eoanthropus were found in the years that followed, but all discoveries ceased in 1916 after Dawson's death. Until 1953, more and more fossils from around the world appeared indicating that big brains did not come first in human evolution. Modern hip, leg and foot anatomy was much older than big brains. Only when chemical tests applied to the Piltdown specimens showed that they were of different antiquity did the reality of a massive hoax become clear.

So who did it? Let me begin by saying that nobody knows for sure. At least a dozen men have been accused, but until the scientific testing now being carried out by the Natural History Museum in London is completed, the identity of the hoaxer(s) will remain in doubt.

Dawson was almost certainly involved. He had a history of scams and fake specimens, but he lacked the access to genuine fossils and the scientific expertise modify them so cunningly as to fool all the experts. What did Dawson want? To become a Fellow of the Royal Society where he could hobnob with top-flight scholars.

Smith Woodward is identified as the hoaxer by some, since he was most intimately involved in the Piltdown material with Dawson. He became famous during the debates over the proper reconstruction of the skull. Piltdown was instrumental in his rise from being a much-ignored fish paleontologist to a well-known scientist.

Another view is that Smith Woodward was such a stiff and pompous man that showing what a fool he was might have been the point of the hoax. One of Smith Woodward's enemies was Martin Hinton, another employee of the Natural History Museum. Hinton left behind a trunk at the Museum that lay undiscovered until the 1970s, when a disused loft space was cleared. The trunk contained various correspondence and dissections carried out by Hinton, but also a small collection of artificially stained and carved pieces of stained and carved pieces of Hippopotamus and elephant teeth and other assorted bones. These altered fossils look a lot like the Piltdown remains. Are they evidence of Hinton's revenge on Smith Woodward?

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Arthur Keith, too, rose rapidly into international prominence over the Piltdown fossils. His exhibit on early man in Britain became a huge attraction and he later wrote numerous papers and books about Piltdown and other human fossils. He was also, in some other instances, less than gracious in granting full credit to others; he had a tendency to rename fossils found by others and to reinterpret them. Some would say this was due to intellectual acuity; others put it down to driving ambition.

Others point the finger at a French Jesuit priest, philosopher, and prominent paleontologist, Père Teilhard de Chardin, who participated in one of the discoveries. Teilhard de Chardin's motivation? He was known as a practical joker and, of course, for any Frenchman of the day showing up his British equivalents as ignorant and gullible might have been amusing. Teilhard de Chardin was nothing if not rather unconventional for a priest.

The entire list of all those accused or suspected is much longer. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a Sussex neighbor of Dawson, has been accused. In 1912 Conan Doyle, a physician, wrote a marvelous book called The Lost World in which a scientist (Professor George Challenger) comes upon a discovery so unexpected that he is widely scoffed at and disbelieved. Challenger remarks, "If you are clever and know your business you can fake a bone as easily as you can a photograph." So one can—and so someone did. But that does not mean that Conan Doyle was the culprit.

As we evaluate and re-evaluate the role of each suspect, who knew what when, who had the anatomical knowledge to modify the material, and who had access to the raw material (bones and fossils) that was modified, another question haunts me.

Would someone long so much for fame and recognition that he would abandon the basic premise of truthfulness that underlies science? Would someone violate all the principles that he held dear simply to further a career?

Sadly, the answer is sometimes "yes" as modern history tells us. This strikes me as nothing short of tragic. To devote your very life to truth and then to sell truth down the river is shameful, pitiful, small-minded, and small-hearted.

My husband and I have recently donated to the Royal Society a letter written by Arthur Keith to Robert Broom, when they were 78 and 77 respectively—just in time for the centennial mystery-solving. It was given to me many years ago when I interviewed John Robinson, a former student of Broom's. For almost another ten years after this letter was written, Piltdown man would block acceptance of the genuine human ancestors referred to here as Pleisanthropus and Paranthropus, which were small-brained, upright walking hominins.

"Buckston Browne Farm,

Downe, Farnborough, Kent

August 28, 1944

My dear & youthful Broom,

The letter you sent me on July 19^th has just come with the welcome outlines of Pleisianthropus and of his big cousin or brother Paranthropus... and while I'm a mollusc stuck in my parish... not because of war—but just the lack of the spirit of youth—you young & robust are everywhere on the hunt... for secrets relating to skeletons in the human cupboard. Good luck to all your chases; I shall feel relieved when I can accept all of your contentions with an easy heart. Meantime... as I write... things more rapidly & righteously against Germany. I hope she may be down & out by the time this reaches you.

With my best wishes and thanks,

Arthur Keith"

Is this a confession? Or just an old man's musings? I can't wait to find out!

In 1994, I visited the Piltdown Man discovery site and stood next to the monument that still stands to the fossil's discovery.