A relatively recent Sussex legend concerns Eoanthropus Dawsoni, the so-called Piltdown Man.

 

The Lewes solicitor, Charles Dawson, was walking on Piltdown Common in the vicinity of a gravel digging gang when he happened upon a fragment of human skull.   In the following spring (1912) he unearthed the rest of the upper part of the skull and half the lower jaw whereupon archaeologists and learned scholars fell about with excitement at this 'discovery' of the Missing Link.

 

The experts were fooled for years until, in the fifties, modern methods proved the Piltdown Man to be a hoax. Shortly after the alleged discovery, E.V. Lucas wrote: 'I was amused by the thought of the power that the dead hand -or, in this case, the dead head - can exert; this poor prehistoric peasant, for instance, who could neither read nor write and had only a small series of sounds with which to communicate his needs, being able, some thousands of years after his death, to start scores of scholarly pens in England, Italy, Germany, France and America theorising and even quarrelling over his identity; human or simian.

 

Yes, and Swedish too, the anatomist Ramstrom of Upsala having the hardihood to suggest that at the same time that the Piltdown Man expired a chimpanzee also gave up the ghost, and whereas the skull that the Lewes archaeologist, Charles Dawson, excavated in 1912 belonged to a prehistoric man - Homo sapiens - the jaw belonged to the ape, and therefore no valuable inferences could be drawn.'

 

All very well for Mr. Lucas to be patronising about the Swede's hardihood but, as it turned out, Ramstrom had hit on the truth years before modern science came to the same conclusion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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