Calendar: December 18

Year: Day to Day Men: December 18

Locker Room Moment

On the 18th of December in 1912, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed he had discovered fossilized remains of a previously unknown early human, the missing link between apes and man. This human ancestor was named Eoanthropus dawsoni, but became known as Piltdown Man from the gravel pit in which the remains were found.

Although there were doubts about its authenticity from early 1912, the Piltdown Man remains were widely accepted for many years. In November of 1953, Time magazine published evidence gathered by anthropologist Kenneth Oakley, primatologist Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, and biologist Joseph Weiner that proved the Piltdown Man was a forgery composed of three distinct species. This hoax was notable for the attention it generated on the subject of human evolution and the fact that it took forty-one years to its definitive exposure as a forgery.

In February of 1912, Dawson contacted the Keeper of Geology at London’s Natural History Museum, Arthur Smith Woodward, that he had found a section of a human-like skull in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown, East Sussex. Later in the summer, Dawson and Woodward purportedly discovered a jawbone, skull fragments, a set of teeth, and primitive tools at the site. From the outset, the reconstruction of the skull was strongly challenged by researchers.

Waterston, Boule and Miller’s evidence proved the remains of the Piltdown Man was a forgery. The fossils consisted of a human skull of medieval age, a five-hundred year old lower jaw of an orangutan and fossil teeth from a chimpanzee. Someone had simulated age by staining the bones with an iron solution and chromic acid. A microscopic examination of the teeth showed file-marks that had modified the teeth to a shape more suited for human diet. The identity of the forger remains unknown; however the focus on Dawson is supported by evidence regarding other archaeological hoaxes he had perpetrated in the previous two decades.

Notes: The fossil was introduced as evidence by Clarence Darrow in defense of John T. Scopes during the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. Darrow died in 1938, fifteen years before the Piltdown Man was exposed as a fraud.

Calendar: October 6

A Year: Day to Day Men: 6th of October

The Trail Hiker

October 6, 1914 was the birthdate of Norwegian anthropologist and explorer Thor Heyerdahl.

Thor Heyerdahl began to study biology and geography at the University of Oslo in 1933. At the university he came in contact with Bjarne Kroepelien, who had traveled around Polynesia during the first World War. While living on Tahiti, Kroepelien fell in love with and married Tuimata, one of the daughters of a Tahitian chief, Tereiieroo.

The world-wide 1918 influenza pandemic struck Tahiti, resulting in the deaths of half of Tahiti’s population, including Tuimata. Bjarne Kroepelien subsequently amassed a unique collection of books on Polynesia, which he would years later bequeathed to the University of Oslo. Heyerdahl’s access to these books, as well as Kroepelien’s friendship with Chief Tereiieroo, would have a major impact on Heyerdahl’s life and career.

Thor Heyerdahl married Liv Coucheron Torp in 1936 and visited Tahiti, both sharing a desire to escape from Western civilization. Heyerdahl’s theory that indigenous South American peoples were the first to populate Polynesia took shape after he and Liv made several interesting discoveries on Fatu Hiva and the neighboring island of Hivoa. They stayed on Fatu Hiva for a year, before deciding to return to their native Norway.

Back in Norway, Heyerdahl began writing his scholarly work entitled “American Indians in The South Pacific”, which was published in 1952. His living on Fatu Hiva had instilled in Heyerdahl an interest in how the remote Polynesian islands of the Pacific Ocean came to be inhabited; this question had been a defining topic in Pacific Ocean research for many years.

Heyerdahl was convinced that the first humans to reach Easter Island – and other islands in the eastern part of Polynesia – came from South America. He believed that only later did people come to Polynesia from the west, and then via the northwest coast of Canada and Hawaii

According to scholars with whom Heyerdahl discussed the subject, the peoples of South America did not have seaworthy rafts or boats that could take them as far as the Polynesian islands. In order to prove that it was possible, Heyerdahl decided to build a raft and make the journey himself. On April 28,1947, he and five other men left the seaport of Callao in Peru on a balsa wood raft called the Kon-Tiki, destined for Polynesia. The raft ran aground on the Raroia atoll in Polynesia after 101 days in open waters, proving that it was indeed possible for South American peoples to have traveled to the islands of the South Pacific.

Calendar: July 9

A Year: Day to Day Men: 9th of July

Apollo on the Bed

July 9, 1858, was the birthdate of the German-American anthropologist Franz Uri Boas.

In 1887 Franz Uri Boas emigrated to the United States, where he first worked as a museum curator at the Smithsonian. In 1899 he became a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his career. Through his students, many of whom went on to found anthropology departments and research programs inspired by their mentor, Boas profoundly influenced the development of American anthropology.

Franz Boas was one of the most prominent opponents of the then-popular ideologies of scientific racism, the idea that race is a biological concept and that human behavior is best understood through the typology of biological characteristics. In a series of groundbreaking studies of skeletal anatomy, Boas showed that cranial shape and size was highly malleable depending on environmental factors such as health and nutrition, in contrast to the claims by racial anthropologists of the day that held head shape to be a stable racial trait.

Boas also worked to demonstrate that differences in human behavior are not primarily determined by innate biological dispositions but are largely the result of cultural differences acquired through social learning. In this way, Boas introduced culture as the primary concept for describing differences in behavior between human groups, and as the central analytical concept of anthropology.

Among Boas’s main contributions to anthropological thought was his rejection of the then-popular evolutionary approaches to the study of culture, which saw all societies progressing through a set of hierarchic technological and cultural stages, with Western European culture at the summit. Boas argued that culture developed historically through the interactions of groups of people and the diffusion of ideas; and that consequently, there was no process towards continuously “higher” cultural forms. This insight led Boas to reject the “stage”-based organization of ethnological museums, instead preferring to order items on display based on the affinity and proximity of the cultural groups in question.

Boas also introduced the ideology of cultural relativism, which holds that cultures cannot be objectively ranked as higher or lower, or better or more correct; but that all humans see the world through the lens of their own culture, and judge it according to their own culturally acquired norms. For Boas, the object of anthropology was to understand the way in which culture conditioned people to understand and interact with the world in different ways. To do this, it was necessary to gain an understanding of the language and cultural practices of the people studied.