'Forget Piltdown

'Forget Piltdown - we've still got the oldest.' (discovery of the 'Boxgrove Man') 'Boxgrove Man' was one of the sillier fictions of the year.In the unusual (but probably temporary) absence of royal and ministerialscandals, and with the proximity of a generally tedious Euro-election inmind, journalists not only broke open the champagne over the discoveryof 'Boxgrove Man', but seem to have drunk most of it on sightbefore writing their copy. The TV crews had a field day, and accordedBoxgrove Man the same degree of importance that Indiana Jones ascribedto the Lost Ark. Once again, the public was left in no doubt thatarchaeology is about Great Discoveries, and that human palaeontology isabout finding the oldest scrap of human bone. Newspapers did littlebetter. The Times weighed in with the front page headline'Europe's first man was a 6' prehistoricheavyweight' (as though anyone apart from Creationists expected thefirst European to be 'historic'). Even Norman Hammond,customarily one of the better archaeo-hacks, wrote of how Boxgroveilluminates the 'life of the first Britons'. 'Thediscovery is a triumph for British archaeology' proclaimed TheIndependent before settling into it's-great-to-be-British-mode: theAustrians and Italians may share the Ice Man, the French and Germans mayhave their (dead-end) Neanderthals, but we, the English, now have theoldest. 'A moment like this', wrote the correspondent,'is not one for chauvinism. But every Englishman may walk a littletaller in the recognition that he is descended from such a strikingcreature'. (By the same token, the Welsh may perhaps walk a littleshorter in the knowledge that the 'first Welshman' fromPontnewydd (Green 1981) was probably a dead-end Neanderthal.) Forget thefootball results or the trade figures, goes the message; we can stillwalk tall on our package holidays because our bit of bone is older thantheirs.Why are we and the public served such codswallop cods��wal��lop?n. Chiefly British SlangNonsense; rubbish.[Origin unknown.]codswallopNounBrit, Austral & NZ slang ? A little sobrietywould not go amiss. Boxgrove is a wonderful, world-class site; however,the hominid hominidAny member of the zoological family Hominidae (order Primates), which consists of the great apes (orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos) as well as human beings. tibia tibia:see leg. shaft tells us little that we did not know alreadyeither about the site, about the European Palaeolithic, or even abouthuman evolution in general. The find may or may not be half a millionyears old, give or take a generous standard deviation or two; it may bemale, but the amount of hominid sexual dimorphism by the MiddlePleistocene is slight; the find is not 'a triumph of Britishscience', since it was fortuitous; if there is a triumph, it liesin the meticulous achaeological and environmental investigationsdirected there by Mark Roberts over the last decade and more (andlargely ignored by the media in their stampede for the leg-bone). Thefind itself adds little to our overall knowledge of Middle Pleistocenehominid post-cranial anatomy. It may or may not be 'the firstEuropean': Mauer is undated but almost certainly in the same timerange, and Dmanisi in Georgia (on the fringe On The Fringe is a popular Pakistani television show on Indus Music. It is hosted and scripted by the eccentric television host and music critic, Fasi Zaka and directed by Zeeshan Pervez. of Europe as now definedand also a member state of the CSCE CSCESee Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange (CSCE). ) is almost certainly older. Worst ofall is this nonsense of 'Boxgrove Man' being the first Britonor Englishman. Who could seriously claim that the 'English'are direct descendants of an individual who died some half-a-millionyears ago in what is now Sussex? That would be as ludicrous as arguingthat Mauer was 'the first German'. The 'English'emerge as a recognizably geographically and politically distinct groupafter the 14th century, and 'Britons' only after the Act ofUnion with Scotland in 1707 (Colley 1992). To write that 'BoxgroveMan' is the first Briton, Englishman (or Sussexonian) is asludicrous as calling the type fossil of Australopithecus afarensis the'first Tanzanian'.In terms of media treatment, Boxgrove Man is a direct descendant ofPiltdown Man, that other famous hominid discovery from Sussex found over80 years ago. Then, as now, the focus was entirely on having the oldest.The Manchester Guardian (21 November 1912), to which the discovery wasleaked before its unveiling, headlined the story 'The Earliest Man?A skull "millions of years" old. One of the most important ofour time' (Millar 1974: 126), and stated that there was 'morethan a possibility of its being the oldest remnant of a human frame yetdiscovered on this planet'. In an otherwise fairly anodyne anodyne/an��o��dyne/ (an��ah-din)1. relieving pain.2. a medicine that eases pain.an��o��dynen.An agent that relieves pain. piece,The Times (23 November 1912) also stressed 'the earliest undoubtedevidence of man in this country'. Likewise, the Illustrated LondonNews Illustrated London NewsHistoric magazine of news and the arts, published in London. Founded in 1842 as a weekly, it became a monthly in 1971. A pioneer in the use of various graphic arts, it was London's first illustrated periodical, the first periodical to make extensive (November 1912) carried an artist's reconstruction of Piltdownas a right-handed, spear-carrying, Man-the-Hunter type (how long-livedthese stereotypes are!) and named it 'the most ancient knowninhabitant INHABITANT. One who has his domicil in a place is an inhabitant of that place; one who has an actual fixed residence in a place. 2. A mere intention to remove to a place will not make a man an inhabitant of such place, although as a sign of such intention he of England' (Spencer 1990: 52-3), which is subtly butcrucially different from calling it 'the earliest Englishman',as did Smith Woodward (1948) when titling his book on Piltdown towardsthe end of his life.Piltdown was, of course, a fraud; but so is the notion of'Boxgrove Man' as the earliest Englishman, Briton or evenEuropean. Hominid palaeontology should not be incorporated intoassertions of national identity and status as it was before the FirstWorld War, with disastrous consequences on assessments of Neanderthals,Piltdown and, later, Taung (see e.g. Hammond 1982; Lewin 1989). This mayhave been understandable in the context of intense great power rivalrybefore the outbreak of war; in the context of the current EuropeanCommunity, it is absurd. Both the public and those who study the pastdeserve better from the media. In particular, the public might have beenspared the impression that human evolution is about finding the firstrepresentative of a modern nation-state. It is a sad reflection onjournalism that sensationalism sensationalism,in philosophy, the theory that there are no innate ideas and that knowledge is derived solely from the sense data of experience. The idea was discussed by Greek philosophers and is shown variously in the works of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George remains the main means of communication.Consequently, we have again been dished up a fake, however genuine thistime the fossil might be.ROBIN DENNELL Department of Archaeology University of Sheffield The University of Sheffield is a research university, located in Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England. ReputationSheffield was the Sunday Times University of the Year in 2001 and has consistently appeared as their top 20 institutions. ReferencesCOLLEY, L. 1992. Britons: forging the nation 1707-1837.GREEN, S. 1981. The first Welshman: excavations at Pontnewydd,Antiquity 55: 184-95.HAMMOND, F. 1982. The expulsion of the Neanderthals from humanancestry: Marcellin Boule and the social context of scientific research,Social Studies of Science 12: 1-36.LEWIN, R. 1989. Bones of contention. London: Penguin.MILLAR, R. 1974. The Piltdown men: a case of archaeological fraud.London: Paladin.SMITH WOODWARD, A. 1948. The earliest Englishman. London: Watts &Co.SPENCER, F. 1990. Piltdown: a scientific forgery. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.