Alvan T. Marston: a historical character study

Alvan T. Marston:
a historical character study

by Tom Turrittin, April 2004

fig. 1

Paleontology was just one of the many hobbies of a British dental surgeon named Alvan Theophilus Marston (1889-1971). In the early 1930s, he began to search the gravel beds of Kent looking for human fossils and stone tools, which paid off in June of 1935. In a quarry pit in the region of Swanscombe, he found a piece of a fossilized human skull "in situ" - still in place in the ground, undisturbed.

Marston knew he had an immediate problem. If he simply took the fossil out of the ground, with no witnesses to corroborate his discovery, his claims for finding it at that location could be challenged. If he left the fossil while he went to find a witness, the spot might get re-buried. These were valid concerns. Only a few months earlier, the geologist Percy Boswell had criticized Louis Leakey for failing to properly document where he had discovered human remains in Africa, and Leakey's reputation had suffered badly.

Compromising, Marston took the fossil, marked the spot with a stone wrapped in a handkerchief, and found a workman in the pit to be his witness. He then made a sketch of the gravel seams, measured the distance from the spot to several nearby points, and left notes to the other quarrymen. The next day, he came back to take photographs.¹ Although this shows that he knew how to properly record data, looking at it in the context of his later behavior, it might also suggest a latent paranoia of being mistrusted and rejected by the scientific establishment.

In any case, Marston's luck continued. Nine months later, in March of 1936, he found a second piece of the skull. Swanscombe Man was born.

The occipital and left parietal pieces of the
Swanscombe Man skull.

To understand what happened next, it's necessary to know what people thought about human evolution during the mid-1930s. Back then, the picture of our ancestry was quite blurry because not enough fossils had been found yet, and when a new one turned up, all it took was a minor difference in anatomy for someone to propose a new species. (Genetics and variation within populations weren't taken into account back then.) Mankind's family tree was constantly being re-arranged and new names for species being suggested. This became so problematic that in the 1950s, the biologist Ernst Mayr estimated that, over the years, there had been about 29 generic names and over 100 specific names proposed for ancient human species.²

This is a list of the fossils that were commonly thought to be potential ancestors for mankind during the 1930s. (Australopithecus and Neanderthal Man had been rejected as ancestors, but were making a gradual comeback.)

What later become known as	Was known as
Homo erectus	Pithecanthropus erectus, a.k.a. Java Man. Sinanthropus pekinensis, a.k.a. Peking Man.
Homo sapiens (archaic and modern forms)	Heidelberg Man, a.k.a. the Mauer jaw. Rhodesian Man. Cro-Magnons. Swanscombe Man.
Fossils that confused everything	Piltdown Man. Galley Hill Man. Kanjera Man and the Kanam jaw.

Many of these fossils were open to a lot of interpretation, and things weren't made any easier by some that shouldn't have been there in the first place. Galley Hill Man was a younger fossil that had been buried in older deposits, and Piltdown Man was a forgery.

This is a vastly simplified version of mankind's family tree as conceived in 1931 by Sir Arthur Keith, a high-profile British anatomist:

Keith typically drew a branch to represent our evolutionary progression towards our modern selves, with European Caucasians at the top, and lots of dead branches along the way. Fossils were placed on the dead branches, because it was thought that even though they had tried to evolve towards modern man, they had ultimately failed. Note that there are no fossils on the main stem - no direct ancestor was thought to have been found yet! Keith wasn't the only one who thought this way, and by 1939 the situation had become so muddled that the anatomist Frederic Wood Jones wrote to Keith,

"...It seems to me that this business of human phylogeny is becoming highly complex. We seem to be getting so many dead ends hanging about - phyla that lead to nowhere - and all over the world at that. The South African series must be a blind side-line, and now you put Piltdown and Swanscombe off the main line - where are we to look for the real ancestral line? I am getting all mixed up."³

Piltdown Man was one of the most contentious fossils of all. It had been "discovered" around 1911 by a lawyer and amateur geologist named Charles Dawson, who brought it to the attention of the British Museum. It was followed by a series of further discoveries of animal bones and stone tools, and became the national pride of England.

Piltdown Man itself consisted of:
  -  pieces of a human-like skull that were unusually thick,
  -  an ape-like canine tooth, and
  -  part of an ape-like lower jaw (the mandible), that had two molars worn flat; a feature that had been seen in other human fossils.

But Piltdown Man was a fake. Someone, probably Dawson, had planted everything at the site. The fossils had been chemically stained, the molars had been artificially filed down until they were flat, and various other alterations had taken place. Unfortunately, the fossil fit the theoretical expectations of the time, and quickly won acclaim as being very important, far outshining Heidelberg Man, a jawbone that had been discovered in Germany only a few years earlier.

Although the general public believed Piltdown Man to be a well-established fact, there was actually a lot of academic disagreement. The essential question was: did the jaw belong with the skull? Had the remains of one creature been found, or two? The leading British scientists said it was one, but many contrary opinions were raised. By the 1920s, the international academic community was divided about fifty-fifty on the issue. By the late 1930s and 1940s, more human fossils had been found in China and Africa, and Piltdown Man made increasingly less sense. Some scientists decided to ignore it, hoping that new discoveries would eventually solve the problem. Still, a small but influential group of scientists at the top of the academic ladder continued to support Piltdown Man's jaw and skull as a single creature.

This was the context that Marston found himself up against when he brought the Swanscombe skull to the British Museum's attention. He was eager to discuss his find, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science invited him to give a lecture about it. Comparing the heights of the gravel beds at both Swanscombe and Piltdown, Marston suggested that the two fossils were approximately the same age, although he was inclined to think that Swanscombe was slightly older.

In the audience was Kenneth Oakley, a geologist who had recently joined the British Museum, who corrected Marston on one particular point: a geological survey some years before had shown that the height of the Piltdown site was not what it had originally been estimated to be. In other words, the Swanscombe and Piltdown sites were not the same age. For Marston, this changed everything. And little did Oakley know that he would be dealing with Marston for the next twenty years!

Marston dove into the literature of British geology and paleontology. Oakley's information suggested that Swanscombe was older than Piltdown, but if Piltdown Man had evolved later, why did it look like an evolutionary throwback? The only way Marston could explain it was to reject the idea of a single creature. It had to be two; a human skull and an ape jaw that had ended up buried together. All he had to do was demonstrate that the jaw and teeth belonged to a fossil ape - he was, after all, a dentist. And so, with a certain sense of humor at first, he began his attacks against Piltdown Man (also known as Eoanthropus dawsoni - Dawson's dawn man).

NOTICE OF OPERATION⁴

Eoanthropus dawsoni is about to undergo a major dental operation on Monday, November 23, at the next meeting of the Odontological Society of the Royal Society of Medicine at 8.0 p.m.

The operation will involve extraction of the right lower canine tooth and the excision of the mandible. The condition of the mandible which has long been a serious problem, has at length been accurately diagnosed.

After excision, it is proposed to offer the removed parts to the British Museum (Natural History) to be placed in the section of fossil anthropoids.

Eoanthropus has been so heavily doped, that no anaesthetic will be considered necessary. Assistance may be needed, however, in holding the victim down.

Eoanthropus is expected to make a speedy recovery to convalescence. The prognosis is good. His mental outlook will be more human. He will be less anti-social without a mandible which has prevented him from eating and speaking like a human being.

Dental Surgeon. -- A. T. Marston, L.D.S.
Assistants. -- You.

Marston's attacks were nothing new to the British supporters of Piltdown Man. They had been fighting off the "Piltdown Man is two creatures" theory from American, German, and fellow British scientists for twenty-three years, long before Marston came along. Marston wasn't even on the same scholarly level as their opponents - he was an amateur, and was easy to dismiss. Originally, I think Marston had hoped that as long as his observations were accurate, his amateur status would be irrelevant to the recognition of scientific truth. "Science is inexorable. It knows no personalities," he wrote,⁵ but he quickly learned otherwise.

One of Piltdown Man's major supporters was Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, who had been Charles Dawson's contact in the British Museum. Woodward had participated in the original excavations at Piltdown, had a long career behind him, had once been the head of the Museum's geology department, and was a world expert on fossil fish. Piltdown Man meant so much to him that when he retired, he moved into the area of the discovery so he could continue digging at the site during the summer. Despite the fact that nothing was ever found there after Dawson's death in 1916, Woodward published a book about it in 1948 called The Earliest Englishman.

With people like Woodward around, Marston knew he was in for an uphill battle. In 1936 he wrote to Woodward:

"There can be little doubt that the status of Piltdown Man will have to be revised; including the question of the canine tooth.
... Do not think I am speaking boastfully, because I know that any fresh discovery may necessitate the re-orientation of previously accepted views, and moreover, because I know the re-orientation although it may be suggested by me will not be effected except by the judgement of science in general."⁶

When Marston showed his fossil to the top British experts in human paleontology, he received contradictory opinions.⁷ Given the state of the discipline in the 1930s, and the fact that Swanscombe Man wasn't an easy fossil to interpret, this is not really surprising, but Marston seemed irritated by the lack of consistency. ("The geologists must decide."⁸) His respect for the professionals probably deteriorated further when he experimented to see if they could tell the difference between Piltdown Man's canine and that of an ape:

"At the Cambridge Meeting of the British Association in 1938, I passed [an orangutan] ape-skull bearing the cast of the Piltdown canine up to the platform, where Sir Arthur Keith was lecturing on his revised reconstruction of the Piltdown skull, and asked him to say whether he thought anything was amiss. He answered 'No.' The chairman, Professor Haddon, also answered 'No.' Then I drew Sir Arthur Keith's attention to the left upper canine tooth, and pointed out that it was the cast of the Piltdown canine."⁹

Most of what Marston had to say about Piltdown Man was ignored. There were several things working against him. To begin with, his writing style was confrontational, righteously indignant, and repetitive. It was not an endearing tactic to use on the people he was trying to convince. It was a bad combination of him thinking too highly of his own ideas, and of the experts not giving him enough benefit of the doubt.

Secondly, he was twenty years out of luck - I don't think the British Museum had much time for amateur scientists in the 1930s. If he had made his discoveries before World War I, it might have been a different story; the discipline was younger then. Charles Dawson, the discoverer of Piltdown Man, had been an amateur too, but unlike Marston, he had an easier time of remaining involved with the discussions surrounding his own fossil.

Thirdly and most importantly, even though Marston was a professionally educated dentist, he had little or no formal training in either physical anthropology or comparative anatomy. He didn't know enough about the discipline of studying human evolution to be able to provide the experts with arguments that were considered scientifically valid. His typical methodology involved comparing the jaw and teeth of Piltdown Man with those from fossil humans and apes. After making all sorts of measurements, he would point out ape features that were similar to Piltdown Man's features. But were the features he found coincidental, merely convenient for his own arguments, or were they truly universal? No one in the field of paleoanthropology seemed interested in replicating his research to find out.¹⁰

To give some examples of Marston's work, he stuck a replica of Piltdown Man's canine into an orangutan skull (as mentioned in the previous quote). It was the general opinion of the experts that the canine belonged to the lower jaw, but Marston was convinced it was an upper tooth:

"There it fits, and it harmonises closely with the canine of the opposite side, and with the remaining teeth. This shows it to be the upper left canine." Marston was not the first person to note similarities to an orangutan, but I think he was the first person who tried putting Piltdown Man's teeth into sockets to see how well they fit.¹¹

In another experiment, Marston took various jawbones and sawed through them, so he could compare the shape of their cross-sections:

fig. 5
1 - Homo erectus, child
2 - Homo erectus, adult
3 - Heidelberg Man (archaic Homo sapiens)
4 - A modern human

5 - Piltdown Man

6 - A chimpanzee
7,8 - A female orangutan
9 - A male orangutan

Humans on the left, and apes on the right. "In man the mandible widens inferiorly; in apes it narrows inferiorly. What answer does the Piltdown mandible supply?"¹²

Marston's most ironic experiment was to demonstrate the ape-like nature of Piltdown Man's molars. How did he do this? "My approach has been to make plaster casts from actual ape molars (orang-outang) ... and file down the occlusal surfaces to the same flat condition as the Piltdown molars."¹² In this photo, Marston's altered molars are shown alongside a cast of the Piltdown jaw.

Little did he realize he had duplicated the forgery!

Sadly, Marston's more significant observations were obscured by his many bad ones, and in the long run he was mostly wrong when it came to theorizing about tooth wear, coloration, and many other things. Still, he was very persistent. In 1937 he wrote a massive 68-page article about Swanscombe and Piltdown. Then, "largely at his suggestion," the Royal Anthropological Institute appointed a ten-person committee to evaluate the Swanscombe site. Although the site's geology was well-defined, the RAI committee was unable to come to any firm conclusions about Swanscombe Man's place in human evolution. All they had were two pieces of skull - none of its jaw or its face, which would have been much more helpful. "On the evidence of the fragments which are available it is suggested that this fossil man was indistinguishable from Homo sapiens." Overall, the committee's 81-page report barely discussed Marston's personal theories. They did, however, mention his good observations of the site's stratigraphy, and thanked him for making his entire personal collection of artifacts available for them to examine.¹³

As the years went by, Marston continued to argue as best he could that Piltdown Man's jaw and canine belonged to a fossil ape. He donated items to the British Museum, became a member of both the RAI and the Geological Society, and sent most of his publications in the form of letters to the British Dental Journal. He kept an eye out for news of other fossils, and occasionally wrote about discoveries that had been turning up in Africa.

When World War II happened, British research on fossil man virtually came to a standstill. But there were a number of important developments that would affect things to come. Most of the people who had originally supported Piltdown Man had died by the end of the war. The theories that had made Piltdown Man easy to accept in the 1910s had fallen out of favor by the end of the 1940s.

Additionally, Kenneth Oakley, the geologist at the British Museum, re-discovered something during the war that had been largely forgotten since the 1890s: that fossil bones gradually absorb fluorine from groundwater. Oakley realized that if you had two fossils from the same site, and measured their fluorine content, it would be possible to determine if they had been buried at the same time or not.

With the help of a government laboratory, Oakley began to analyze fossils to see how well the method worked. The results were encouraging. During one of Marston's anti-Piltdown presentations in 1947, "Dr. Kenneth Oakley ... suggested that the application of the fluorine estimation test to the Piltdown remains might throw light on their relative antiquity." Marston was all for it, but Oakley was still refining the test. In 1949 he measured the fluorine content of Swanscombe Man and Galley Hill Man, which had been found in the same area. It was good news for Marston. Swanscombe Man's great age was confirmed, while Galley Hill Man was shown to be a later burial that had been dug down into older deposits.

With Galley Hill Man removed from the picture, Oakley moved on to using the fluorine test on Piltdown Man.¹⁴ It wasn't good news for Marston: the results suggested that the skull and the jaw were about the same age, and so they probably belonged together. But it wasn't good news for Oakley either, because even though the fossils had similar amounts of fluorine, there wasn't much of it - meaning, perplexingly, that the bones were relatively young!

One of the other people perplexed by the results was a physical anthropologist named Joseph Weiner. If Piltdown Man was one creature (and a recent one at that), Weiner thought, why did it make so little sense compared to all the other human fossils? On the other hand, if Piltdown Man was two creatures, what was an ape doing in England at the end of the last ice age? Weiner realized there was a third possibility: that Piltdown Man was a fake. Experimenting, he took a chimpanzee jaw, chemically stained it, and filed down the teeth. The results were good enough to convince his professor, W.E. Le Gros Clark (a respected British anatomist), that a forgery had taken place. Together they contacted Oakley, and had the fluorine test done a second time, with a higher degree of accuracy. The results, in combination with other tests, showed that Piltdown Man was indeed a forgery.

Weiner, Oakley and Clark broke the bad news to the world in November of 1953. Oakley then brought in over a dozen experts to use as many techniques as possible to confirm their results, and seven months later, concluded that every single object at Piltdown had been fraudulently planted there. The jaw was that of an orangutan, and was only semi-fossilized.

Marston was furious - and refused to believe it was a forgery! But why? With Piltdown Man gone, wouldn't he have been happy because he had discovered a much older skull? As it turned out, no. When Oakley wrote that Swanscombe Man was now the oldest fossil skull in Europe, Marston was quick to point out that Heidelberg Man was even older.¹⁵ As early as 1937, Marston had expressed no interest in flattering his ego with the age of his discovery.

"I have neither the wish nor the intention to claim that the Swanscombe skull is either the oldest in the world, or that it is contemporary with the oldest in the world, for the reason that I have been associated with it; neither have I the wish, were my powers sufficiently gifted and persuasive, to make a clean sweep of all rival skulls."¹⁶

One might also think that Marston would have been happy at being proved right; the jaw was from an orangutan, and definitely didn't belong with the skull. But Marston wasn't happy - he insisted that the bones hadn't been fraudulently altered. Why was he so keen to disagree with the British Museum? I believe he wanted to accomplish two fundamental things.

Firstly, Marston wanted to correct scientific error. Specifically, he wanted the experts to admit that for years, they had been wrong in saying that Piltdown Man represented a single creature, which had made scientific discourse on human evolution more problematic than it should have been. If the error was corrected, then everyone (including himself) would be able to talk about human evolution on a level playing field. But rather than the Museum admitting the error (from Marston's point of view), instead they came up with a different error: forgery. Marston interpreted this as a dishonorable way of avoiding taking the blame for their original mistake. The Piltdown forger was their scapegoat.

The second thing I think Marston wanted to accomplish was to contribute something to science. Swanscombe Man, perhaps? No. He wanted recognition for coming up with methods of analysis, specifically, ways to tell if fossil teeth were more closely related to apes or to humans. Reading through all his articles, this theme appears again and again - even before he found Swanscombe Man.¹⁷ If Piltdown Man's teeth had been artificially altered, then all of his research was worth nothing. He had spent more than fifteen years using Piltdown Man as the one of the main fossils upon which he had based his techniques. Marston refused to believe a forgery had taken place because his theories required trustworthy fossils.

I can't help but wonder what Marston thought the British Museum was up to when the forgery was announced. If he thought the Museum scientists were wrong, why did he think they were subjecting themselves, on purpose, to the most humiliating scientific embarrassment possible? Did he think they were all idiots, or cowards, or did he think there was a massive conspiracy at work?

During their investigations, Weiner, Oakley and Clark were careful to avoid openly accusing anyone of being the Piltdown forger. But intentionally or not, it was easy to infer from their articles that it could have been Charles Dawson, and the media caught on to this immediately. A few days after the Piltdown forgery was first announced, Oakley and Weiner made a formal presentation of their evidence to a packed audience at the Geological Society of London. Marston had been invited to give a talk about his jawbone theories, but instead he used the occasion to launch an angry attack against the British Museum. As The Times reported...

"I am here," said Dr. Marston, "to protest against the attack which has been made against Mr. Dawson in The Times and in the B.B.C. broadcasts on Saturday. It has been very strongly hinted, if not definitely stated, that Mr. Dawson took the canine tooth and lower jaw of a modern ape..."

At this point Professor W.B.R. King, F.R.S., the president, intervened to say that it was not a case of trying to justify or to condemn anything that had appeared in the newspapers or on the B.B.C. They were hoping to get Dr. Marston's views on the jaw itself.

Dr. Marston replied that he had received a letter from Barkham Manor confirming the integrity of Mr. Dawson; and after a further intervention from the chair he said "they should not attack this man - it is so simple to prove that the canine tooth was not modern."

After showing a series of lantern slides, with a narrative setting out his reasons for believing that the Piltdown teeth and jaw were not modern nor artificially stained or abraded, Dr. Marston asked how they could accuse a dead man's memory and besmirch his name. ...

The charges had been made to hide their own ineptitude. The sycophantic humility of the museum tradition had for the past 40 years been playing a hoax on public opinion. Now they had made a scapegoat out of Mr. Dawson, who died in 1916 and could not answer back. "Let them try to tackle me," added Dr. Marston.¹⁸

There are varying reports of what happened at the meeting, the most exaggerated and inaccurate of which appeared in the U.S. Science News Letter:

"Rumors now reaching this country reveal that when the Piltdown hoax was exposed at the meeting ... it precipitated a violent discussion, with an old gentleman named Marston ... The meeting soon broke up into a series of fist fights, so strong was the feeling on both sides of the question. The fracas resulted in the expulsion of several members of the dignified scientific body."¹⁹

Whatever happened, many newspapers were eager to quote Marston. He was the lone voice of dissent, and provided a controversial and entertaining edge to the affair - to the annoyance of the British Museum.

"This may hurt, but I'm afraid I'll have to remove the whole jaw."
Cartoon in Punch.

The news of the forgery must have upset Marston for several reasons. He had taken pride in his work since 1935 (he was now 64 years old), and this was probably coupled with a massive case of denial. My impression is that he had lost all respect for his opponents since the late 1930s, and this was the last straw. It had become a him-versus-them situation; he was right, they were wrong. He defended Dawson's name because Dawson had been an amateur like he was, and because the Museum wouldn't own up to what he thought was the real truth.

To make things worse, Oakley and Clark, two of the three people who had exposed the forgery, had also been part of the ten-person committee that had evaluated the Swanscombe site! Marston must have come to loathe and distrust academic scientists. His most vitriolic writing appeared in the January 1954 issue of The Dental Record, in an article that contained passages like:

"It is because I know of the inherent difficulties which had to be overcome, the things which I had to discover for myself without relying upon others..."

"These figures show...the little worth of the...fluorine estimation test...to prove the iniquitous charges that [the Piltdown teeth] have been deliberately faked by filing them down, [charges] which none but an evil mind could make, and none but a fool believe."

The editorial column went even further, greatly exaggerating Marston's fame, knowledge and accomplishments. I suspect Marston had a large part in writing it, because the me-versus-them pattern appears in the form of dentists-versus-scientists.

Alvan T. Marston

A member of Parliament when speaking in the radio programme, "Any Questions" on 27th November, referred to Alvan T. Marston as "a practically unknown scientist of whom I had never heard." Members of Parliament are notoriously ignorant of scientific matters, but such ignorance should be enlightened. To describe the discoverer of the Swanscombe Skull, perhaps the finest and most accurate piece of anthropological excavation that the world has known, as a "practically unknown scientist" is unpardonable ignorance. Marston has contributed much more important palaeontological work than the mere unmasking of Eoanthropus dawsonii, great though we dentists have known that contribution to be since his paper, "Chimpanzee or Man, etc.", was published in the British Dental Journal in 1936. Marston's publication on Proconsul also marked him as far from "a practically unknown scientist."

There is a very interesting side light upon the attitude of the newspapers towards dentistry which this Piltdown exposure has emphasised. Marston has been described as a geologist, a scientist, a palaeontologist and as an anthropologist in the newspapers. He certainly is all of these to a very high degree. Very few newspapers had the honesty to describe Alvan Marston as a dentist. To describe a great scientist as a dentist would not comply with current newspaper policy.

Most scientific discovery is done quietly, by those who neither seek nor like the limelight of publicity, but it is proper to acclaim publicly the work of such men for it is the result of patient thought based upon close observation and detailed knowledge, and these are attributes which are of the essence of human progress. Unfortunately so many of those who are prominent in the public eye and have access to the public ear are sadly deficient in such qualities, and the world suffers for it.

It is our duty to honour this great scientist as a dentist. The Dental Record hopes that it will not be long before the Royal College of Edinburgh, from which he qualified, will vie with the Universities in honouring a member of the dental profession who has brought greater fame to his profession in the past than the present belated recognition of his condemnation of the Piltdown mandible and canine tooth, great though this work undoubtedly was.

In the months following this article, Marston continued his attacks, and sent Oakley the occasional letter. Meanwhile, the Swanscombe site was declared to be a National Nature Reserve, and archaeological excavations were started there a year later. This was not very comforting to Marston. While the Swanscombe site had lain unprotected since 1935, the Piltdown site had gotten a memorial stone in 1938 and had become a Reserve in 1952.

The case against Piltdown Man was finally closed at a meeting of the Geological Society in June of 1954. As with the previous meeting, Marston was invited to participate.

The June 1954 meeting at the Geological Society.
Marston in foreground, on the left side of the table.

Speaking first, Marston presented the results of his experiments in artificially staining bones and stone tools. He also tried to explain that the flat wear on Piltdown Man's molars was natural, having used a device that supposedly imitated jaw-chewing movements to grind down teeth.

But after Marston's talk came expert after expert, weighing in with the scientific evidence for forgery that had been accumulated over the past eleven months. The presentations must have left Marston feeling utterly crushed. He still didn't believe any of it - but he must have realized that the tide was now permanently against him. It was unlikely that anyone would ever believe his arguments about Piltdown Man after this. His research would go unrecognized.

A year later, Marston remained resentful. In a letter to a colleague he wrote,

"...Get it into your noodle that there was no Piltdown forgery ... with de Beer [and Oakley] as the mouth-piece... Le Gros Clark the wind-bag and Weiner as the garbage collector ... I have got them 'holed' and am biding my time..."²⁰

The last published word of Marston's on Piltdown Man that I found ended with, "Time will prove the correctness or otherwise of my views."²¹

Alvan Marston's name essentially vanishes from the popular and academic press after 1955. Although he was sometimes mentioned offhand as the discoverer of Swanscombe Man, it was a fairly recent fossil by geological standards, and not especially interesting. What little fame it had was quickly eclipsed by discoveries being made in Africa.

In the end, I doubt that anything would have made Marston happy except being told, "Yes, you've been right all along." But the tragedy of Marston's situation can't entirely be explained by his amateurism. It was also partially the result of the social structure of science in Britain.

While researching this essay, I read through Oakley's articles and looked for evidence of deliberate maliciousness towards Marston. At worst, Oakley wrote with cold formality - a not unexpected attitude. One thing is for certain: the established scientists almost never debated with Marston in print. They simply published their data on Swanscombe and Piltdown, and let it speak for itself. When Oakley occasionally mentioned Marston's theories, he never discussed the details, nor how he had come up with them, nor what support he had for his arguments - a minimalist treatment. This is a typical example from a report of Oakley's in 1939:

"[Marston] stated his own views on the cultural succession and stratigraphy of the [Swanscombe site]. These differed from the views of the Swanscombe Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute, as put forward during the afternoon by [me]. ... He considered that the Swanscombe [skull] was more primitive than that of Piltdown Man."²²

On a slightly more positive note, Oakley was definitely aware of Marston's work. When Oakley wrote about Swanscombe or Piltdown, he frequently included a bibliographical reference to at least one of Marston's articles. Later, when the Piltdown forgery was exposed, W.E. Le Gros Clark looked through some of Marston's work for potentially useful observations. When the final, conclusive paper on the forgery was published, the text mentioned Marston a few times, and pointed out both good and bad observations of his. Although because Marston hated the forgery, it was probably the last place he would have wanted to have seen his name.²³

In January of 1954, Oakley received a letter from a colleague who was friends with Marston:

"I do agree about my friend Marston. He had taken this all very badly. And refuses to be comforted. But as you may know some feel that he has had a raw publications deal throughout, and so was driven into a kind of underworld; his papers appearing first in one and then in another journal of obscurity. He could have been accepted into a more cordial circle?"²⁴

Marston's last moment in the limelight came on July 30, 1955, when John Wymer, digging at Swanscombe, found a third piece of Swancombe Man's skull. It had been 20 years since Marston's original discovery. Wymer telephoned Marston, who immediately came down to see it, still in situ, before he personally removed it from the soil.

Alvan T. Marston passed away in 1971, at the age of eighty-one. In this essay, I've painted a rather negative image of the man, but there were much more positive sides to him than this. You can read more about him in his obituary.

Swanscombe Skull Site National Nature Reserve

On this spot on 29 June 1935, A.T. Marston discovered the
oldest known human remains in Britain,
a fossilized fragment of a skull 250,000 years old. The
smaller blocks mark the sites where two further pieces of
the same skull were found in 1936 and 1955.
This site was declared a National Nature Reserve in 1954.
Magnus Magnusson, writer and broadcaster,
unveiled this memorial on 29 June 1985,
the fiftieth anniversary of the first discovery.

Footnotes

1. Marston described the circumstances of his discoveries in Marston 1937a: 339-342.

2. Lewin 1997: 26-27.

3. Spencer 1990b: 180.

4. An announcement circulated by Marston in November 1936 to notice boards at the British Museum, the Royal College of Surgeons, and at London dental schools. From Marston 1954d: 102. Also in Spencer 1990b: 176-177.

5. Marston 1937a: 404.

6. Spencer 1990b: 176.

7. The best that could be said about Swanscombe Man at the time was that the associated stone tools and animal fossils suggested a Pleistocene date. Modern estimates place it at 250,000 years old. Marston found at least one expert who supported the possibility that Swanscombe Man was older than Piltdown: Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, a well-respected neuroanatomist. Unfortunately for Marston, he also believed that Piltdown Man was a single creature. Elliot Smith became ill in 1936 and passed away on January 1, 1937, making him unavailable for Marston to consult.
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8. Marston, 1937a: 394.

9. Marston 1953.

10. In 1959, an anatomist named Thomas Murphy compared some of Marston's methods of dental analysis with those of W.E. Le Gros Clark's, and found Clark's to be more reliable.

11. Marston had also tried fitting human and orangutan teeth into the empty socket of the Piltdown jaw (Marston 1937a: 399 and 1952a: 1).
Another dentist had independently come to the conclusion in 1937 that the canine was an upper one, but this had gone unnoticed (Taylor 1978).
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12. Marston 1952a: 3. The cross-sections were later donated to the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons.

13. Researcher Frank Spencer discovered that when the RAI committee's report was being prepared, a draft version of its introduction claimed that Marston had not found the first piece of the Swanscombe skull himself, although this was corrected in the official publication. It is unknown whether the original mistake was made on purpose or by accident. (Spencer 1990b: 178-179.)
   Shortly after Marston wrote his massive 1937 paper, he wrote a second one in which he discussed the geology of the Swanscombe site, but it was somehow mislaid and never got published. A copy of it turned up years later and has subsequently appeared in Conway 1996: 247-254.
   "Largely at his suggestion", Hinton 1938: 18.
   "On the evidence", Marston 1938a: 469. Italics in the original.
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14. Years later, Oakley insisted that Marston had not been the catalyst that made him test the Piltdown bones (Spencer 1990a: 227, footnote 96). While it's true that Oakley had realized the general potential use of the fluorine test as early as 1943, there is no evidence of exactly when it occurred to him that he could use it on Piltdown Man.
It may seem unusual that Oakley didn't test the Piltdown bones until two years after his conversation with Marston. Oakley had, in fact, been busy running tests on a number of fossils the whole time - he simply wasn't writing about them much. See Oakley 1949b for a good selection of what he was working on. Oakley's final report on the fossils he analyzed didn't appear until 1980! It included decades of test results done by himself and by teams that had continued his research.
"Dr. Kenneth Oakley...", from Marston 1950a: 298.
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15. Marston 1950a: 299.

16. Marston 1937a: 387.

17. In 1934, Marston began to research curved roots in the canine teeth of humans and apes, and most of his early articles discuss this to some degree. For another example of his attempts to establish an official technique, in 1952 he proposed a diagnostic measurement called "The human mandibular constant of Marston".
Even if Marston's methods had been accepted, it's impossible to know whether they would have survived the paradigm shifts that took place in paleoanthropology in the 1950s and 1960s. The discipline's previous emphasis on anatomy was reduced somewhat, and the over-abundance of names for species was honed, perhaps overly so, down to a much smaller number of them.
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18. From Anonymous 1953a. In 1955, Weiner concluded his investigations and openly accused Dawson of being the Piltdown forger, and published a book about it.

19. From Anonymous 1954b.

20. Spencer 1990a: 229, footnote 20.

21. Marston 1955.

22. Oakley 1939.

23. The motivations for mentioning Marston's name in the paper were somewhat mixed. To find out more, I've put together a list of examples of how Oakley and others cited him, which makes for a bit of separate reading outside the scope of this essay.
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24. Spencer 1990b: 251.

Image sources

Fig. 1: Taken from Hugh Miles, "Monkey Puzzle", in History Today, 53.10 (October 2003): 4.
Fig. 2: Taken from Spencer 1990a: 124.
Fig. 3: Adapted from Arthur Keith's 1931 book, New discoveries relating to the antiquity of man.
Fig. 4: Marston 1953.
Fig. 5: Marston 1952a: 3.
Fig. 6: Marston 1952a: 4.
Fig. 7: Leslie Illingworth, Punch, December 2, 1953: 653.
Fig. 8: Taken from Spencer 1990a: 146.
Fig. 9: Photograph taken on August 3, 2003 by "ocifant" (Alan S.?), and downloaded in March 2004 from a Web site at http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/4229.

Bibliography

Articles by A.T. Marston

1934. "The anthropoid ape dentition", British Dental Journal 57: 493.
1935. "The Piltdown and Heidelburg mandibles", British Dental Journal 59: 447-448.
1936a. "Preliminary note on a new fossil human skull from Swanscombe, Kent", Nature 138: 200-201.
1936b. "Chimpanzee or man? The Piltdown canine tooth and mandible versus the human specific characteristics of the straight canine and the fused alveolar-maxillo-premaxillary suture", British Dental Journal 61: 216-221.
1936c. "Observations on the Piltdown canine tooth", British Dental Journal 61: 595-596. Letter of response on pp. 728-729.
1936d. "The teeth of prehistoric man", British Dental Journal 61: 619-620.
1937a. "The Swanscombe skull", Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 67: 339-406. (This was Marston's major article before the RAI committee published their own conclusions.)
1937b. "The case for the Piltdown jaw", Discovery (London) 18 (January): 13-15.
1937c. "The labial bend of the apex of the root of the human deciduous upper canine", British Dental Journal 63: 467-468.
1938a (with others). "Symposium on the Swanscombe find", Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science no. 108: 466-469, 478, 541.
1938b. "The relation of the deciduous and permanent molars in the ox", Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 31 (1937-38): 495-496.
1938c. "Paranthropus robustus", British Dental Journal 65: 366-367.
1942a. Commentary following a paper by A.J. Bull, "Pleistocene chronology", Proceedings of the Geologists' Association 53: 29-31. (The paper is on pp. 1-20 and the commentaries are on pp. 20-45. Comments by Oakley follow those of Marston.)
1942b. "Flint industries of the high terrace at Swanscombe", Proceedings of the Geologists' Association 53: 106.
1946a. "Piltdown Man: with special reference to the ape mandible and canine tooth", Geologists' Association of London Circular no. 483: 1.
1946b. "Dr. L.S.B. Leakey's discovery of fossil anthropoid mandibles from the Lower Miocene of Kenya", British Dental Journal 81: 316-320.
1950a. "The relative ages of the Swanscombe and Piltdown skulls, with special reference to the results of the fluorine estimation test", British Dental Journal 88: 292-299. (This was the first of two articles that Marston published to re-state this theories more thoroughly.) A series of letters to the editor followed; see 88: 334; and 89 (1950): 21-22, 48, 80, 110.
1950b (alongside K.P. Oakley). "Proceedings", Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 106: iii-v.
1952a. "Reasons why the Piltdown canine tooth and mandible could not belong to Piltdown man", British Dental Journal 93: 1-13. (This was the second of two articles that Marston published to re-state this theories more thoroughly. Oakley was definitely aware of both articles before the Piltdown forgery was discovered.)
1952b. "The human mandibular lacteon constant of Marston", British Dental Journal 93: 114.
1952c. "The human mandibular lacteon constant (of Marston)", Man 52 (November, no. 252): 170-171.
1953. "Goodbye to the 'Missing link'", Picture Post, December 19.
1954a. "The Piltdown 'hoax'", Dental Record 74: 1-4, 9, 15.
1954b. "The Piltdown controversy", British Dental Journal 96: 70. Letters of response include one by Oakley, see 96: 122, 146, 165.
1954c (alongside K.P. Oakley). [Notes on the meeting of 24 February, 1954]. Proceedings of the Geological Society of London no. 1508: xlv-xlvii. A summary of this meeting appeared in Nature 173 (1954): 525.
1954d. "Comments on 'The solution of the Piltdown problem'", Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 47: 100-102 ; and 48 (1955): 992.
1955. "More of the Swanscombe skull found", British Dental Journal 99: 208-209.

Articles by K.P. Oakley

Oakley wrote a lot of articles about dating techniques, many of which mentioned Marston briefly, but they haven't all been included here.

1939. "Field meeting at Swanscombe, Kent", Proceedings of the Geologists' Association 50: 357-361.
1949a. "Relative dating of the Piltdown skull", Advancement of Science 6 (1949-50): 343-344.
1949b. "The fluorine-dating method", Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 5: 44-52. (An article discussing some of the fossils he'd been testing over the past few years.)
1952. "Swanscombe Man", Proceedings of the Geologists' Association 63: 271-300. (Oakley mentions Marston more frequently in this article.)
1953 (alongside J.S. Weiner and A.T. Marston). [Notes on the meeting of 25 November, 1953]. Proceedings of the Geological Society of London no. 1504: xv-xviii. Parts of this were later used in American Journal of Physical Anthropology 12 (1954): 1-7.
1954 (alongside others). [Notes on the meeting of June 30, 1954]. Proceedings of the Geological Society of London no. 1514: cxiv-cxxii. A summary of this meeting appeared in Nature 174 (1954): 61-62, and later became Weiner, J.S. et al., 1955.
1979. "Suspicions about Piltdown Man", New Scientist 82: 1014. (Very briefly discusses Marston's access to the Piltdown fossils.)

Other authors

Carreck, J.N., 1973. [Marston's obituary], Proceedings of the Geologists' Association 84: 118-120. Reprinted in British Dental Journal 135 (1973): 240-241.
Conway, Bernard et al. (eds.), 1996. Excavations at Barnfield Pit, Swanscombe, 1968-72. London: Dept. of Prehistoric and Romano-British Antiquities. (British Museum Occasional Paper no. 94.) (This book has a lot of information on the paradigms that were used to interpret the Swanscombe site during the 1930s.)
Hinton, M.A.C. et al., 1938. "Report on the Swanscombe skull", Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 68: 17-98. (This was the RAI committee's report. Another report would be published in 1964, edited by C.D. Ovey.)
Murphy, T., 1959. "Gradients of dentine exposure in human molar tooth attrition", American Journal of Physical Anthropology 17: 179-186.
Spencer, Frank, 1990a. Piltdown: a scientific forgery. London: Oxford University Press.
Spencer, Frank, 1990b. The Piltdown papers, 1908-1955. London: Oxford University Press.
Weiner, J.S. & K.P. Oakley, 1954. "The Piltdown fraud: available evidence reviewed", American Journal of Physical Anthropology 12: 1-7.
Weiner, J.S. et al., 1955. "Further contributions to the solution of the Piltdown problem", Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) Geology 2.6: 225-287.
Widdowson, T.W., 1939. Special or dental anatomy and physiology and dental histology, human and comparative, vol. 2 (6th ed.). London: John Bale, Sons & Curnow. (The author essentially quotes Marston's opinions about the Piltdown and Swanscombe skulls on pp. 273-278.)
Wymer, J., 1955. "A further fragment of the Swanscombe skull", Nature 176: 426-427.

Anonymous articles and miscellaneous announcements

1935. "Fossil human occipital bone from Thames gravels", Nature 136: 637-638.
1937a. "The Swanscombe skull", Man February (no. 35): 33-34.
1937b. "Human and other remains in the 100-ft. terrace at Swanscombe", Man June (no. 118): 99.
1938. "The Swanscombe skull", British Dental Journal 65: 106-107.
1950. "New evidence on the antiquity of Piltdown Man", British Dental Journal 89: 81-82.
1953a. "Piltdown Man hoax, protest against 'attacks'", Times (London) November 26: 5.
1953b. "The Piltdown skull", British Dental Journal 95: 279.
1954a. "The Piltdown flints", Nature 173: 525.
1954b. "The Piltdown bones and 'implements'", Nature 174: 61-62.
1954c. "Piltdown hoax clumsy, fresh evidence shows", Science News Letter 66 (July 17): 40.
1955a. "New discovery at Swanscombe, Kent", Nature 176: 287.
1955b. List of exhibits in 1954. Proceedings of the Geologists' Association 66: 150. (Only mentions the titles of presentations that Marston and Oakley had made, without any dates or details.)

Sources for the general historical context

Bowler, Peter J., 1986. Theories of human evolution: a century of debate, 1844-1944. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Dennell, Robin W., 2001. "From Sangiran to Olduvai, 1937-1960: the quest for 'centres' of hominid origins in Asia and Africa", pp. 45-66 in Studying human origins: disciplinary history and epistemology, ed. by Raymond Corbey. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press.
Lewin, Roger, 1997. Bones of contention: controversies in the search for human origins (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tattersall, Ian, 1995. The fossil trail: how we know what we think we know about human evolution. London: Oxford University Press.
Weiner, J.S., 1955. The Piltdown forgery. London: Oxford University Press.

Tangential subjects

Clark, W.E. Le Gros, 1938. "Significance of the Swanscombe skull", Nature 142: 509-510.
Lyne, W.C., 1916. "The significance of the radiographs of the Piltdown teeth", Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 9 (1915-16): 33-62. (Lyne noted similarities between the Piltdown jaw and apes, and that Piltdown Man's canine was from a young animal. Another dentist named Underwood disagreed with him.)
Ovey, Cameron D. (ed.), 1964. The Swanscombe skull: a survey of research on a Pleistocene site. London: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. (Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Paper no. 20.)
Taylor, R.M.S., 1978. "The Piltdown Paper", pp. 362-370 in his book, Variation in Morphology of Teeth: Anthropologic and Forensic Aspects. Springfield, IL: C.C. Thomas. (This article was originally written in 1937.)
Underwood, A.S., 1913. "The Piltdown skull", British Journal of Dental Science 56: 648-652. (See Lyne, above.)