Alas, Poor Piltdown! I Knew Him...

Some sly skullduggery in previously pristine Paleontology has thrown University professors of this normally placid field into a mild academic frenzy.

The excitement all began last Saturday, when news came from England that the skull of the famous "Piltdown Man," accepted for 40 years by authropologists and paleontologists as a relic of the earliest man, is actually a "most elaborate and carefully prepared hoax."

A fuller explanation of the "amazing fraud" was contained in a letter received yesterday by Hallam L. Movius, Jr. '30, associate professor of anthropology and curator of Palacolithic Archeology from Kenneth P. Oakley of the British Museum.

Oakley explained that the basis of calling the skull a fraud was the discovery that the ape-like "Piltdown" jaw is actually that of a modern ape which had been treated with a chemical to make it appear a "fossil." When found in a Piltdown, England, gravel pit in 1911, the shape of the jaw led scientists to call it at least 100,000 and possibly 600,000 years old. The cranium itself is a genuine fossil, but the scientists now say it is only 50,000 years old.

Movius last night said he knows of "nothing like this in the history of Paleontology." Researchers in this field are normally "honest, virtuous peaple," he explained.

The professor said he doesn't believe for a moment that Charles Dawson, the attorney and amateur antiquarian who discovered the skull, is the perpetrator of the hoax. "I'm only guessing." he said, "but I think the joker was one of the technicians in the British Museum who had an ambition to fool the experts."