The association of a human cranial vault with a pongid mandible into the taxon Eoanthropus dawsoni (1) was not accepted by all authorities. The dualist theory, that the two elements were associated by chance in the same gravels, was proposed as an alternative by David Waterston, professor of anatomy at King's College, London (2); and the distinguished zoologist Gerrit S. Miller, of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., strongly supported this point of view (3, 4).Miller went so far as to restrict Woodward's name to the cranial fragment, describing the jaw as that of a new species of chimpanzee, Pan vetus (3 ) . His paper contains this remarkable statement, which now reads like prophecy:
"Deliberate malice could hardly have been more successful than the hazards of deposition in so breaking the fossils as to give free scope to individual judgement in fitting the parts together."
The late T. D. McCown told one of us (C.P.G.) in 1966 that Miller had confided to him his suspicion that things were not quite right about Piltdown but had been persuaded by his colIeagues not to publish his suspicion on the grounds that without positive proof this would be too serious an allegation of scientific fraud.
It may be that Miller already suspected fraudulence when he wrote his 1915 paper. For a number of reasons, however, this seems unlikely; in particular, his description of the mandible as a new species of ape was too serious a committal if at that time he believed its features might not be wholly natural.
Roger Lewin quotes Sherwood Washburn as sayingPiltdown Man, by Richard Harter."I remember writing a paper on human evolution in 1944, and I simply left Piltdown out. You could make sense of human evolution if you didn't try to put Piltdown into it."