Frank Spencer; Studied Piltdown Hoax

Frank Spencer, the anthropologist whose years of sleuthing led to his contention that he had unearthed the identity of the mastermind behind the Piltdown Man hoax, died May 30 in New York.

He was 58 and died after a short battle with cancer, according to a spokesman at Queens College, where Spencer taught.

The Piltdown Man was a proposed species of prehistoric man based on a skull and jawbone discovered in Piltdown, England, in 1912. The bones were accepted as authentic by the scientific establishment and influenced the view of human evolution for 40 years, until technological advances in the 1950s exposed the discovery as a fraud.

The hoax was long pinned on an amateur paleontologist named Charles Dawson, but many experts, doubtful that Dawson had the knowledge to execute it so skillfully, had long suspected that he had help.

Spencer was born in Chatham, England, not far from Piltdown. Only 11 when the hoax was exposed in 1953, he said it “didn’t make a lasting impression on me.”

It wasn’t until the 1970s, when he was working on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, that he ran across a document that would send him down the Piltdown trail for almost 20 years.

Prompted by discoveries in the years since 1912, scientists in 1953 began to analyze fragments of the bones, drilling into them to assess their chemical makeup and examining them under powerful microscopes to detect traces of tampering. What they found rocked the scientific community.

The bones were the skillfully disguised remains of an orangutan and a modern man. They had been stained a dark brown to look old, and the teeth had been filed smooth to hide their ape origins.

Dawson, a Sussex solicitor, had gone to a gravel pit in Piltdown to look for fossils after a laborer found what looked like a skull fragment at the site. He gathered several skull pieces and reported his finds to the Natural History Museum in London, which sent a team to examine the pit and the surrounding area. There Dawson, along with museum official Arthur Smith Woodward and Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, found what was soon trumpeted as evidence of early man.

The fossils of extinct animals found at the site placed Piltdown Man in the early Pleistocene era. The large size of the Piltdown cranium excited anthropologists who had been subscribing to the theory that the development of the modern human brain stretched back millions of years further than had previously been believed.

When the hoax was uncovered, some experts suspected that Dawson must have had a co-conspirator to fool the leading scientists of the era. Fingers were pointed at several possible suspects, including Teilhard de Chardin and Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle, but conclusive evidence to incriminate someone else was never found.

In 1976, Spencer was researching a physical anthropologist named Ales Hrdlicka, a contemporary of the Piltdown hoaxers. Based on his own theories of human evolution, Hrdlicka was skeptical that the Piltdown jaw and skull could have come from the same creature. In 1912, he wrote to one of the scientists who believed that they did, an esteemed British anatomist named Arthur Keith.

But Keith evaded Hrdlicka’s queries. Spencer, after reading their correspondence and diary entries made by Keith, suspected that Keith was covering up something. He spent several years trying to prove it.

In 1983, he found that another researcher, Australian anthropologist Ian Langham, had been studying Keith’s papers and was close to publishing findings that would implicate him in the Piltdown scandal. So Spencer, not wishing to “enter a horse race,” abandoned his pursuit.

Langham died unexpectedly a year later. His widow invited Spencer to take her husband’s notes and urged him to solve the mystery. Combining Langham’s research with his own enabled him to “see something I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to see,” he told Newsday in 1991. Piecing together correspondence and articles by dozens of scientists allowed him to re-create events of 70 years earlier.

Written like a whodunit, his 1990 book, “Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery,” waits until the last chapter to make the case against Keith. Spencer showed that Keith, through his position at the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, had access to fossils with which to “seed” the Piltdown site.

Moreover, Spencer wrote, Keith was in contact with Dawson. The author also showed that Keith not only had a vested interest in Piltdown Man but possibly had the most to lose by its unmasking: On the cover of Keith’s “The Antiquity of Man,” the 1925 work that secured his academic reputation, is a gold-embossed reconstruction of the bones of Piltdown Man.

Keith’s many admirers, particularly in England, lambasted Spencer. One critic, a respected British anthropologist named Lord Zuckerman, wrote in the New York Review of Books that Spencer’s arguments were “ludicrous.”

Other experts, such as Roger Lewin, author of “Bones of Contention,” a chronicle of controversies involving fossil discoveries and evolution theory, called Spencer’s case against Keith persuasive because of the extensive documentation he presented.

Spencer said he agonized over his manuscript, never taking lightly the prospect of ruining the reputation of Keith, who was knighted for his work on Piltdown.

The history of anthropology, said James Moore, the acting chairman of Queens College’s anthropology department and longtime colleague of Spencer, was a persistent theme in Spencer’s work.

“That was probably the hook,” Moore said, the reason Spencer persevered in his hunt for solutions to the Piltdown mystery.

“His interest in Piltdown was how the hoax distorted the whole view of human evolution and threw things off track for years,” Moore said. “The second thing was how people ever fell for it in the first place.”

Spencer is survived by his wife, Elena, of Queens, and his mother, Doris, of Rochester, England.