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the chronology of tooth formation. While the tables given in most anthropology textbooks still present standards defined long before even 1963, many further radiographic stud- ies of dental development in children have been carried out, and several standard den- tal age assessment schemes are available for jaw radiographs. Difficulties with dental at- trition as an age-estimation method con- tinue much as before, and a further short contribution deals with assessment and analysis and presents a multiple regression technique. Considering the central impor- tance of dental remains in age-at-death as- sessment, only a small part of Advances is concerned with this aspect. The dental histo- logical methods introduced by Miles in 1963 are missed altogether. These have been somewhat slow to evolve, but they have been widely employed in forensic studies, and re- cent developments have been applied to ar- chaeological and paleoanthropological mate- rial.

DENTAL PALAEOPATHOLOGY

Four chapters in Advances are concerned with studies of dental disease in particular groups of material or regions of North and South America. They include largely dental caries, ante-mortem tooth loss, and abscess- ing. The recording and analysis methods for dental caries, in particular, remain in these studies much what they were in 1963, but there is considerably more integration of the pattern of pathology with archaeological and ecological data and more attempt at dietary interpretations. In a strange quirk of fate, the editors’ own chapters on these subjects were poorly printed in the review copy, to the extent that they could not be read in full; check your copy before buying.

Two further chapters wrestle with the twin problems of recording alveolar bone loss

reliably and in distinguishing between bone loss due to periodontal disease and the ef- fects of continuous dental eruption. As these contributions make clear, the problems con- tinue and, if anything, are more acute with the recent increase in research on the etiol- ogy of periodontal disease which has added enormously to the variables requiring con- sideration.

Also in this section of Advances is a useful short discussion by Goodman and Rose of the possibilities for studying dental enamel hy- poplasia, with a discussion of possible future research directions. This is followed by an overview of studies on malocclusion.

TOOTH WEAR AND MODIFICATIONS

The last part of the book has chapters on methods for measuring the rate of attrition, methods for examining microwear, and an overview of the evidence for deliberate mod- ification of teeth. Microwear studies, in par- ticular, have been established only since 1963, and Teaford’s paper is a very useful summary of techniques and possibilities for this work.

This book probably achieves most of what it set out to do in summarizing the current position of dental anthropology. In some cases, techniques and interpretations can- not really be said to have “advanced,” and, in others, recently developed and novel tech- niques have been left out, but this is hard to avoid in a volume of edited, but still sepa- rate, contributions. Overall, it is a useful book that most physical anthropologists will want to own.

SIMON W. HILLSON University College London, Institute of Archaeology London, England

PILTDOWN: A SCIENTIFIC FORGERY. By Frank Spencer. New York: Oxford University (cloth). Press. 1990. xxvi + 272 pp. ISBN 0-19- 858522-5. $24.95 (cloth).

xii + 282 pp. ISBN 0-19-858523-3. $65

Frank Spencer has produced two new works on the .Piltdown fraud: one perhaps the most authoritative chronicle to date, the other a n edited series of letters from the

THE PILTDOWN PAPERS. By Frank Spencer. New York: Oxford University Press. 1990.

BOOK REVIEWS 377

archives of the British Museum by some of the principals. There are three areas of inter- est for these works: as documentation of the history of physical anthropology, as docu- mentation of the process of science, and as another contribution to the “whodunnit” genre of Piltdown literature.

The aspect of Spencer’s contribution that has received the most notoriety is his sugges- tion (following Ian Langham) that the perpe- trator was none other than Arthur Keith, the leading anatomist/physical anthropologist in England. A brief recap may be in order. Most people interested in pinning this tale on someone have followed J.S. Weiner in seeing Charles Dawson as their donkey. Cir- cumstantially, Dawson found almost all the fossils, and after his death no more were found; and he was something of a shady character. On the other hand, Dawson was virtually the only participant who was not a scientist, and therefore is certainly an easy target as an outsider. Through the years, others have cast aspersions on Grafton Elliot Smith, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, William J. Sollas, Arthur Conan Doyle, and more recently upon some lesser-known suspects: Martin A.C. Hinton, Frank Barlow, and Lewis Abbott.

I confess that I do not find this avenue of inquiry particularly productive, or even par- ticularly interesting. The Piltdown affair should be of considerable interest to us as a community of scientists and as a community of physical anthropologists, but to focus upon it simply as a docudrama is to lose sight of the real significance of the episode. What Piltdown raises, as the archetypal scientific fraud, are questions about the scientific pro- cess: How does fraud work? What structures exist in science to prevent its detection? Is the critical eye that gives science its vaunted “self-correcting” feature efficient enough? Do the media work in the best interests of the scientific community when they publicize conclusions that may be poorly supported, and then inflame anti-intellectual senti- ment by publicizing its debunking, as it they weren’t the main part of the reason it needed to be debunked?

I do not find the case against Keith to be a very convincing one, but neither do I think the case against anyone else is much stron- ger. In Keith‘s defense we have the fact that he reconstructed the skull poorly and then engaged in a protracted and bitter dispute over the proper manner of reconstructing it. If he in fact perpetrated the fraud himself, it

is difficult to imagine him being so absent- minded as to have forgotten what it origi- nally looked like! And, certainly, were this simply a ploy (fake it and reconstruct it badly, so that when the fraud is revealed you’re in the clear) it would also have the effect of making him look the fool for having reconstructed it so ineptly. Furthermore, it is hard to imagine Keith’s motive-not hav- ing a vested interest in its authenticity, in that he was not its discoverer or original describer-in publishing several books over his career emphasizing Piltdown’s impor- tance, if he knew it to be a fraud. Another recent theory, apparently inspired by Spen- cer’s book, is the inadvertent conspiracy the- ory of Keith Stewart Thomson (1991), that the original fraudulent fossils were by Daw- son; that the later ones were by others who wished to show Dawson they knew what was going on, but without sensationalizing; that it had some elements of a joke (the cricket- bat tool); and that it got out of hand with Dawson’s death, with no one left to blame except the second batch of tricksters, who would be in no position to let the cat out of the bag.

But this is idle pedantry. What do we learn from Piltdown? Is the “greatest lesson of Piltdown,” as per Washburn (19531, “that there never was enough of the fossil to justi fy the theories built around it” (emphasis in original)? By that criterion, we have to admit that it stacks up pretty well against Taung, WT-17000, and even OH-62, around whom some good yarns, many of them probably valid, have been spun. Do we learn, as per Hooton (1954), first, “that it is unwise to accept current scientific decisions and ‘proofs’ as final, irrevocable, and conclusive, no matter how authoritative they may sound or look? (Certainly we knew that indepen- dently of Piitdown!) Or, second, “although there may be a few crooks among scientists and their assistants and adherents, the prac- titioners of science are in the vast majority of cases men who are perfectly honest and so scrupulous in their search for closer and closer approximations to the truth that they will not try to cover up any sin that may have been committed by one of the very few black sheep in their flock, no matter how damag- ing to the reputation of science that revela- tion may be”? (Somehow I suspect you’d have a hard time selling that lesson to anyone who has followed the David Baltimore contro- versy at all carefully.)

For me the most fascinating aspect of the

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Piltdown case is that William King Gregory returned from a 1913 visit to the BM(NH) noting that “[ilt has been suspected by some that geologically they are not old at all; that they may represent a deliberate hoax. . . ‘planted’ in the gravel-bed, to fool the scien- tists.” Extraordinarily, whoever suspected such perfidy never came forward, and Grego- ry’s repetition of this rumor (Spencer at- tributes the rumor either to Martin A.C. Hinton or James L. Williams) is the only such statement on record. The next closest thing to a suggestions of foul play is Colin Groves being told by Theodore McKown in 1966 that Gerrit Miller told him that some decades earlier he had concluded that Pilt- down was bogus, “but had been persuaded by his colleagues not to publish his suspicion on the grounds that without positive proof this would be too serious an allegation of scien- tific f r a u d (Oakley and Groves, 1970).

Is it possible that the “self-correcting” na- ture of science is so inefficient that even suspicions about the authenticity of a corpus of work-much less the veracity of conclu- sions derived therefrom-cannot be safely voiced? Probably. Then, as now, whistle- blowers had something to fear: Gerrit Miller managed to avoid the fate that more recently befell whistle-blower Margot O’Toole. The reason is probably that science is a social, bureaucratic enterprise, and such systems are rarely conducive to whistle-blowers; rather, the bureaucracy protects the miscre- ants within it, as we saw with painful clarity in the Imanishi-KariBaltimore case. Gerrit Miller was right to be scared: People with power and connections use them to protect themselves. It was as true for Cyril Burt as for Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. What we learn from Piltdown is an aspect of how science works; and hopefully we as a commu- nity can grow from that new level of self- awareness, and perhaps generate an im- proved set of norms from it.

Another lesson involves the possibility, raised any number of times, that the associ- ation between the skull and the jaw was accidental. Now, of course, given the mosaic nature of evolution, there seems no reason a priori why a derived cranium and primitive mandible could not be associated in the same organism. The argument that they could not have come from the same individual is as applicable to Australopithecus afarensis as to Eoanthropus dawsoni. Indeed, I would suspect that such a false argument is related to the orthogenetic views of human evolution

popular a t the time-in which progress “to- w a r d humanization involved the entire body evolving together. In such a light, of course, the “associationist” view of Piltdown might be the more enlightened, and thereby deserved to win the day.

However, even granting that a reasonable argument against the association of the cra- nium and teeth could be made, the apparent association would have had to be accidental, not calculated. Miller wondered in print that “[dleliberate malice could hardly have been more successful than the hazards of deposi- tion in so breaking the fossils as to give free scope to individual judgement in fitting the parts together.” But the breakage pattern of the fragments never an issue: it was that an ape’s jaw was there together apparently with a human’s cranium, and, if you didn’t believe it was real, it had to be an accident, for there was no other alternative. David Hull (1988) points out that even though fraud and error lead to the same conclusion (wrongness; blind intellectual alleys for the rest of the community), Scientists are more willing to tolerate error than fraud. In other words, it is just better in science to be stupid than dis- honest. That is why the initial defense in all scientific fraud accusations is that it was accidental, not deceitful, for we all make errors and are consequently likely to be sym- pathetic. Again, Piltdown represents science practiced-as-normal, for whatever problems arose had to be honest problems, until the smoking gun of 1953, when almost everyone involved was dead anyway.

One reason that Piltdown held as much sway as it did was that its supporters in- voked the principle of replication. Was the ape’s teeth and human’s cranium a fluke or a real association? If those again were the only two options, then the discovery of Piltdown 2 settled it (Washburn, 1979). But obviously, there is a broad spectrum of reasons why scientists might get the same results twice, only one of which is that the results are “right.” Obviously, if fraud was committed once, it could be committed twice. Alterna- tively, scientists often see what they are looking for, as in the case of the 47th and 48th human chromosomes (Kottler, 1974). Or the same experimental artifact can occur independently, as in polymerized water (Franks, 1980). Or scientists, who often have interests other than simply discovering the truth, may bias their results to support ide- ologies, pet theories, friends, colleagues, or superiors. Again, in the context of how sci-

BOOK REVIEWS 379

ence works, Piltdown provides an illustra- tion of normalcy, not deviance. The deviance is that it happened to have been chicanery, but the activity of the scientists involved was normal, if not paradigmatic. A notable irony is that the fluorine test, which finally was taken as proof of fraud, once fraud was sus- pected, was actually a second try and gave the expected results: The first time it also gave the expected results, that the jaw and skull actually belonged together chronologi- cally (Oakley and Hoskins, 1950).

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect is what Piltdown reveals about the judgments of ex- perts. I do not mean this in the sense that Hooton raised the question, as referring to the interpretations of the experts, which are generally sound but always subject to revi- sion. Rather, I mean it in a more primary and fundamental sense. The dentition of Pilt- down is now recognized as that of an orang- utan, and orangs are dentally in some ways more similar to humans than to chimps and gorillas. And the diagnostic occlusal surface of the molars had been filed away. Yet some- how the ape invoked as the source of the jaw by nearly all the “non-associationists” was a chimpanzee! Miller actually named this new chimp, known only from its jaw, as Pan uetus. And, for all the dental expertise on the part of the early critics of “association” (Waterston, Boule, Matthew, MacCurdy, Hrdlicka), only Gregory (1914) saw dental similarities to an orang (in the canine). Curi- ously, Gregory also maintained that the mo- lars were chimp-like (1916) but shortly be- fore the discovery of fraud he wrote “In particular, [the Piltdown molars] rather closely resemble the worn crowns of certain orang molars” (1951:497). Wouldn’t it be nice to know on what basis he revised his opinion? Spencer attributes the first recognition of orang-ness in the molars to a German anat- omist named Heinz Friedrichs in 1932, and more widely publicized by his professor Franz Weidenreich (1936).

In addition to the experts who apparently could not tell orang-utan teeth and jaw frag- ments from their chimpanzee homologs, we have Hrdlicka’s certainly informed judg- ment: “It resembles more or less in a number of points the jaws of the chimpanzee, but it differs from these in a whole series of points of importance, such as the form of the notch, type of coronoid process, subdued muscula- ture, markedly reduced internal massive- ness of body especially near symphysis; and in the most important characteristics of the

teeth, namely, height of crown, height of enamel, nature of ‘cingulum’ and stoutness of cusps-in all of which features it is nearer or like human” (1922:346). Spencer notes that Hrdlicka (unlike Gerrit Miller) exam- ined the original specimens on a visit to England in 1922. How did he find human characteristics in an orang-utan’s mandible? (And that would not be the last time the difference in enamel thickness between hu- mans and orangs on the one hand, and chim- panzees on the other, would provide a rich source of confusion to paleoanthropologists!)

Finally, Piltdown raises a general ques- tion about the literature. Once a piece of work has become problematic, how do we exorcise it from the literature? On the one hand, we want to make sure that we are comprehensive in our discussion of the data and cast our net widely; thus Piltdown was still part of the story long after Weidenreich (1936) was noting that the fossil record itself belied Piltdown’s significance. On the other hand, one has to make decisions about what to include, and both Hrdlicka (1930) and Hooton (1931) chose not to include Taung in their reviews of paleoanthropology.

Where were the Literature Police? Pilt- down, being the paradigm fraud, has never directly confronted the problem Conway Zirkle articulated in 1954: that Paul Kam- merer’s work on Lamarckian inheritance in midwife toads had been rediscovered by a generation of workers who did not know (and by some who did not care) that the work was fraudulent. But how do we monitor the liter- ature to insure not only that fraudulent re- sults are kept to a minimum, but that once a piece has been debunked, it ceases as well to be cited as if it had been competent and honest?

What Spencer’s books yield is the best opportunity for us to study the Piltdown case and learn about how we, as scientists, act and think. Perhaps when we as social scien- tists study ourselves more carefully as a social community, we will come to appreciate the real significance of the affair. It does not show how unique physical anthropology is as a science-it shows quite the opposite, how much like other sciences it is. But, it gives us, as a science a little more introspective than others, an opportunity to reflect on it and to grow from it.

A final thought: If the fraud had been discovered promptly, and the perpetrator identified, what would have happened? Paul Kammerer blew his brains out, but that

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seems to be an exceedingly rare fate for data falsifiers. Instead, they tend to claim 1) it was all a mistake; 2) they’re being perse- cuted; 3) it is simply a difference of interpre- tation; or 4) they got the “right” answer, so ultimately there isn’t really a problem. The success of these claims again depends on the ease with which the bureaucratic nature of science can be exploited. Frankly, I would bet that if the perpetrator of Piltdown had been nailed, s h e would have gotten off scot- free, especially if it had been someone prom- inent such as Arthus Keith (who was already a Scot). . . .

JONATHAN MARKS Departments of Anthropology and Biology Yale University New Haven, Connecticut

LITERATURE CITED Franks F (1980) Polywater. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gregory WK(1914)The dawnmanofPiltdown,England.

Gregory WK (1916) Note on the molar teeth of the Am. Mus. J. 24:188-200.

Piltdown mandible. Am. Anthropol. 28:384-387.

Gregory WK (1951) Evolution Emerging. New York Macmillan.

Hooten EA (1931) Up From the Ape. New York: Mac- millan.

Hooten EA (1954) Comments of the Piltdown affair. Am. Anthropol. 56:287-289.

Hrdlicka A (1922) The Piltdown jaw. Am. J. Phys. An- thropol. 5:337-347.

Hdrlicka A (1930) The Skeletal Remains of Early Man. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collec- tions, 83.

Hull DL (1988) A mechanism and its metaphysics: An evolutionary account of the social and conceptual de- velopment of science. Biol. Philos. 3:123-240.

Kottler MJ (1974) From 48 to 46: Cytological technique, preconception, and the counting of human chromo- somes. Bull. Hist. Med. 48:465-502.

Oakley KF’, and Groves CG (1970) Piltdown Man: The realization of fraudulence. Science 269:789.

Oakley Kp, and Hoskins CR (1950) New evidence on the antiquity of Piltdown man. Nature 165:379-382.

Thomson KS (1991) Piltdown man: The great English mystery story. Am. Sci. 79:194-201.

Washburn SL (1953) The Piltdown hoax. Am. Anthropol. 55:759-762.

Washburn SL (1979) The Piltdown hoax: Piltdown 2. Sicence 203:955-958.

Weidenreich F (1936) The mandibles of Sinanthropus pekinensis: A comparative study. Palaeontol. Sin. Se- ries D7.

Zirkle C (1954) Citation of fraudulent data. Science 120:189-190.

ALSO OF INTEREST Guilaine J, ed. (1991) Prehistory: The World

ofEarly Man. New York: Facts on File. 192 pp. $39.95 (cloth).

A very handsome coffee-table book, trans- lated from a 1986 French version. From paleoanthropology to ethnoarchaeology, it

covers world prehistory. It hits the high- lights-domestication, urbanism, art-but takes a refreshingly broad view, with sepa- rate chapters on Africa, Oceania, Mesoamer- ica, and North America, in addition to Eu- rope with excellent color illustrations.

BOOKS RECEIVED Bailey RC (1991) The Behavioral Ecology of

Efe Pygmy Men in the Ituri forest, Zaire. Anthropological Papers, Museum of An- thropology, University of Michigan, #86. 143 pp. npg (paper).

Durham WH (1991) Coevolution: Genes, Cul- ture, and Human Diversity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. xxii + 629 pp. $65 (cloth).

Futuyma D and Antonovics J (1990) Oxford Surveys in Evolutionary Biology, Vol. 7.

New York: Oxford University Press. 314 PP .

Kibbee J Z (1991) Cultural Anthropology: A Guide to Reference and Information Sources. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlim- ited. 205 pp. $47.50 (cloth)

Proctor RN (1991) Value-Free Science? Pu- rity and Power in Modern Knowledge. Cambridge, hL4: Harvard University Press. 331 pp. $34.95 (cloth).

Robins AH (1991) Biological Perspectives on