To the River (17 page)

The story had got so tattered in the keeping that it resembled lace, more holes than thread. Where had it come from? The need to punish a wicked place by drowning must have been filched from Noah. As for the location, was it Capel Celyn, the Welsh village that was flooded to make a reservoir to provide the people of Liverpool with drinking water? The bells I thought had been borrowed from Dunwich, the medieval Suffolk town that was sunk beneath the encroaching sea, for it is often said that there were eight churches there and that their bells were sometimes heard by fishermen and sailors. Had she cobbled the story herself, or picked it up from somebody else? I hadn’t asked at the time, and now it was too late.

The prohibition against staying too long was also familiar. It echoed those tales of the underworld I’d been musing on a few days back, lands that opened and shut like clams, catching the unwary in their grip. What was the line from True Thomas?
For
gin ae word you should chance to speak, you will neer get back to your ain countrie.
And I had a dim memory of another mythic city: Ys, the Breton Sodom, which was sunk beneath the waves by God in punishment for the behaviour of the king’s daughter, Dahut, who drank too much wine and liked to murder her lovers after a single night between the sheets.

These cities have resurfaced in the apocalyptic fiction of our own age, like the submerged London of J. G. Ballard’s
The Drowned World
: ruined settlements with canals for streets where humans eke out a precarious existence if they survive at all. Water, in these fantasies, might stand for time, which also comes as a flood and has inundating qualities, or it might stand simply for itself. That winter I’d begun to pry around in the great sump of material that comprises the written history of the Ouse. The papers include newspaper articles, Acts of Parliament, coroners’ reports and the diaries and documentation of the Commissioners of Sewers, who were first appointed in the sixteenth century to ensure the river’s uprisings didn’t overwhelm the land. The 2000 flood, it was clear, was not an isolated occurrence, but rather part of a long and painful struggle for control, in which the town and its outlying fields were periodically encroached upon by water. Sitting there, in the dark, it began to seem to me that the folktales were a way of charting the same ancient, ongoing battle, or at least of managing the fears and fantasies that water’s wilfulness engendered. Either that or I’d strayed into the valley beneath the lake, and any minute now the river would rise gurgling up above my head.

It rained in the night, and I woke briefly at dawn to a changed landscape. The valley had filled with mist and only the tops of the Downs were visible above a fog the bleached pink of candyfloss. The cranes of Newhaven docks had vanished and the villages strung along the river were swallowed out of sight. I slipped back into sleep and when I woke again the false sea had receded and the valley returned, though Firle Beacon was still hung with dense white air, like those gusts of dragon’s breath exhaled on cold days. The rain had stopped and a gang of jackdaws were squabbling on the roof, crying
ker-ack
,
ker-ack
and jostling for space.

The town museum was just over the road, with the castle hard above it. It seemed like a good place to get my bearings, for the castle commanded the highest views and Barbican House, which I’d visited once before, was full of the archaeological specimens that the people who’d lived in these hills had discarded over the years. Within the castle precinct there were a few fine Regency houses and a bowling green that had apparently been used consistently since the leap year 1640. Opposite it was Castle Lodge, which had once belonged to Charles Dawson, the amateur geologist who discovered the Piltdown man in a bed of ancient Ouse gravels and is now credited with its forgery.

He was good at discoveries, Dawson. He also found, let’s see, the teeth of one of the earliest mammals, his own variety of iguanodon, a Saxon boat, the only known cast-iron Roman statuette, a goldfish-carp hybrid, a petrified toad preserved within a hollow flint the size of a lemon and an entire network of tunnels stuffed with miscellaneous prehistoric, Roman and medieval artefacts. The toad might possibly have been a genuine discovery, but the rest were either fakes or misattributions, as was his tale of seeing a sea serpent while travelling by ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe, its
rounded, arched loops
rising from the waves.

The story of the Piltdown man is almost the exact antithesis of that of the iguanodon, which makes it rather pleasing that Charles Dawson lived around the corner from Gideon Mantell, though nearly a century later. Like Mantell, Dawson didn’t go to university and had to fit his interests in geology and archaeology around the more prosaic business of a career as a solicitor. But despite this lack of formal education, he had less trouble being accepted by the establishment. At the time of his greatest find he had built up a considerable reputation for the range and quality of his work, being made a Fellow of the Geological Society at the age of twenty-one and of the Royal Society of Antiquarians by thirty-five. The discovery of the Piltdown man came towards the end of his life, and was exactly the big, globally significant find he’d recently complained seemed always to elude him.

Oddly enough, it isn’t clear
when
the first remains of the Piltdown man were found;though this is also true for Mantell’s iguanodon and does not in itself imply foul play. Dawson’s own accounts are vague and though they’re frequently retold they never seem to settle to a particular date. In the earliest written version – a letter from February 1912 announcing the find to his friend Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum – he simply explained that he’d come by chance across an ancient gravel bed, which he thought was Pleistocene, and found there (the grammar is odd but this seems to be what he means) a portion of what was to all appearances a prodigiously old human skull.

In the official presentation that the two men made to the Geological Society in December of that same year, this account is much elaborated:

Several years ago I was walking along a farm-road close to Piltdown Common, Fletching (Sussex), when I noticed the road had been mended with some peculiar brown flints not usual in the district. On inquiry I was astonished to learn that they were dug from a gravel-bed on the farm, and shortly afterwards I visited the place, where two labourers were at work digging the gravel for small repairs to the roads. As this excavation was situated about four miles north of the limit where the occurrence of flints overlying the Wealden strata is recorded, I was much interested, and made a close examination of the bed. I asked the workmen if they had found bones or other fossils there. As they did not appear to have noticed anything of the sort, I urged them to preserve anything that they might find. Upon one of my subsequent visits to the pit, one of the men handed me a small portion of unusually thick human parietal bone. I immediately made a search, but could find nothing more, nor had the men noticed anything else. The bed is full of tabular pieces of iron-stone closely resembling this piece of skull in colour and thickness; and, although I made many subsequent searches, I could not hear of any further find nor discover anything – in fact, the bed seemed quite unfossiliferous. It was not until some years later, in the autumn of 1911, on a visit to the spot, that I picked up, among the rain-washed spoil-heaps of the gravel-pit, another and larger piece belonging to the frontal region of the same skull.

Having alerted Woodward to his finds, the pair returned to the site when the spring floods had subsided, for it seems the gravel pit was more or less underwater for almost half the year. In the course of their excavations, they turned up more skull fragments, including a chunk of occipital bone and a broken portion of jaw complete with two molars. All were apparently from the original skull, which they decided must have been broken up by a worker’s pick. In addition to this impressive haul they found a few crudely worked flints and an array of tooth fragments from a great variety of early mammals, including a Pliocene elephant, a Pleistocene beaver and horse, a mastodon and a hippo, though whether these were found in spoil heaps discarded by the builders or in the undisturbed bed itself is not clear in either man’s account.

The bed itself, Dawson went on to explain, was about three to five feet deep and ran a few inches below the soil. It was formed from dark brown ironstone pebbles interspersed with angular brownish flints of a variety of sizes, ranging from half a foot to grains as small as sand. The bed was finely stratified, and the deepest layer, lying just above the yellow sandstone bedrock, was darker and more gummy than the rest due to the presence of so much iron oxide that a pick was often needed to prise free the stones. It was in this lower stratum that all the
in situ
elements were said to be discovered. The pit was situated in a field on the Barkham Manor estate, on a plateau estimated to be about eighty feet above the Ouse, which had worn through the earth over the course of hundreds of thousands of years until it reached its present depth, leaving trails and drifts of river gravels to mark its passage through time.

After Dawson had dealt with the circumstances of the find, Woodward took up the story, turning to the matter of its implications. He performed an elaborate anatomical analysis of the skull before drawing his triumphant conclusion: that the Piltdown man ‘was already in existence in Western Europe long before Mousterian man’ – the old term for a Neanderthal – ‘spread widely in this region’. His announcement was rapturously received. The hunt for the missing link in man’s origins had been quickened when Darwin published
The Descent of Man
in 1871, and for some time now the British had been lagging in the search. Satisfyingly, the Piltdown Man – officially named
Eoanthropus dawsoni
, Dawson’s dawn man – was pretty much exactly what the anthropologists had been predicting: namely a creature who had developed man’s substantial brain without yet losing the ape’s prominent jaw.

That this hypothesis should be so absolutely borne out was regarded by several scientists as unlikely, though in that period no one went so far as to suggest forgery, preferring the theory that
two
fossil creatures had been found, one an early hominid and the other an ancient sort of chimpanzee. In answer to this, Woodward drew attention to the molars, which were worn flat in a way only observed with human use. It was a shame, both camps agreed, that there wasn’t a canine present, since this would clarify for certain how the jawbone worked. What a stroke of luck, then, that just such a canine did turn up in the course of the following year’s dig, conforming almost exactly to Woodward’s predictions and clearly testifying to the creature’s human status.

In 1914, the last find from the Piltdown pit appeared: a massive implement carved from elephant bone and looking a little like a cricket bat. And then, the following year, Dawson found another fragmentary skull somewhere on the Sheffield Park estate, though the circumstances and exact location of this are hopelessly unclear. On this private and poorly documented dig he also turned up another
Eoanthropus
molar as well as a rhinoceros’s tooth that conveniently dated the cache as deriving from at least the early Pleistocene, which is to say the beginning of the ice ages. In some ways, this last molar was the most significant element of all, since it proved almost conclusively that the first jaw and skull must belong together: the double coincidence of their co-burial being too outlandish now to be entertained.

Dawson became ill at the end of 1915 and died on 10 August 1916 at the age of fifty-two. It is often suggested that he hoped to become a Fellow of the Royal Society or achieve a knighthood in recognition for Piltdown man, and that his early death prevented this from taking place; certainly many of the other figures associated with the find and its subsequent analysis were knighted. As for the gravel bed, though Woodward continued to supervise digs and even moved to the area after his retirement, nothing of any discernable antiquity was ever found at Piltdown again.

There was something distinctly fishy about the whole story, but though the Piltdown relics were subject to what seemed like exhaustive testing by anatomists and palaeontologists, and though the Piltdown Man became through the years increasingly anomalous, as subsequent international discoveries revealed man’s evolution had proceeded not with an initial increase in brain size but with the development of a human-looking jaw and teeth, it was not until 1953 that the Piltdown riddle began to be tugged apart. In the July of that year Joseph Weiner, an anatomist and anthropologist at Oxford, was at an academic dinner when a colleague based at the Natural History Museum mentioned to him in passing that there existed no record of the exact location of Dawson’s Sheffield Park finds. This casual statement startled Weiner and by November 1953 he had, in a model of a priori reasoning and the application of the scientific method, proved conclusively that the Piltdown man was a fake. His team performed a battery of tests, many of which had been invented in the intervening years and were unavailable to the original investigators. Fluorine, nitrogen, organic carbon and iron levels were all assessed, and the radioactivity of the samples measured. The results were startling. The skull and jaw fragments were from wholly different specimens, and the jaw and teeth had been deliberately stained with a paint containing iron oxide and bitumen, in all probability Vandyke brown. This was true of both the Sheffield Park and the original Piltdown finds. Furthermore, the molars had been deliberately shaped by a file or similar instrument to give them their distinctively human shape. The Piltdown jaw in fact belonged to a modern ape, probably an orang-utan. As for the mammalian teeth that had served to date the finds, these were indeed of formidable antiquity but not indigenous. It seems they derived from a variety of global sources, perhaps including Tunisia and Malta, and had also been subject to artificial staining to match the ferruginous nature of the gravel.