Bibliography - British Geological Survey

Sollas, W. J. 1911. Ancient hunters and their modern representatives. London: Macmillan and Co., xvi,
416 pp. (The opening paragraph of Chapter II: The Antiquity of Man, p. 29, neatly summarises the state of
knowledge in late 1911 concerning man’s origins. The book appeared just a few months before Charles
Dawson informed Smith Woodward of his discovery at Piltdown. Sollas writes: ‘The dawn of the human
race is supposed to belong to a past more remote than the beginning of the Great Ice age; yet of the existence
of man antecedent to that epoch not a vestige of evidence, forcible enough to compel universal belief, has up
to the present time been discovered. Even Pithecanthropus, that singular ape-like form, which makes the
nearest approach to the genus Homo, although referred by its discoverer to the Pliocene, has since been
asserted on good authority to belong more probably to the Quaternary epoch.’)
Sollas, W. J. 1913 (contribution to discussion in Dawson & Woodward 1913b)
Sollas, W. J. 1915. Ancient hunters and their modern representatives. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan.
(Piltdown, pp 49–56)
Sollas, W. J. 1924. Ancient hunters and their modern representatives. 3rd ed. London: Macmillan. (In this
edition Sollas included, for the first time, a note dismissing the Sherborne engraved bone as ‘a forgery
perpetrated by some schoolboys’, p. 536 n. Smith Woodward had described it as an authentic Palaeolithic
artefact in 1914. See Woodward 1914b, and Woodward 1926 for his response to Sollas’s assertion.)
Sollas, W. J. 1926. The Palaeolithic drawing of a horse from Sherborne. Nature, 117, 233. (A response to
Woodward 1926)
Somerville, E. M. 1996. Piltdown reflections: a mirror for prehistory. Sussex Archaeological Collections,
134, 7–19. (An examination of the history of the Society’s relationship with the Piltdown discoveries)
Sommer, M. 2004. Eoliths as evidence for human origins? The British context. History and Philosophy of
Life Science, 26, 209–241.
Spaulding, A. C. 1955. Further contributions to the solution of the Piltdown problem. American Journal of
Physical Anthropology, 13, 166–167. (A commentary on Weiner et al. 1955)
Spencer, F. 1979. Aleš Hrdlička MD (1869‒1943): a chronicle of the life and work of an American physical
anthropologist. London: University Microfilms International, 2 vols.
Spencer, F. 1984. The Neandertals and their evolutionary significance: a brief historical survey. In: The
origins of modern humans: a world survey of the fossil evidence / edited by F. H. Smith & F. Spencer. New
York: Alan R. Liss, pp. 1–49. (Turritin cites pp. 21–34)
Spencer, F. 1987. Ape jape: The Piltdown Inquest, by Charles Blinderman. New Scientist, 113 (5 Mar),
50–51. (An uncharitable review from one who at this time was preparing his own rival account of the Piltdown
forgery. A few months later Blinderman offered to return the compliment by reviewing Spencer’s
forthcoming book: see ‘Piltdown rivals’, New Scientist, 114, 7 May 1987, 67.)
Spencer, F. 1988. Prologue to a scientific forgery: the British eolithic movement from Abbeville to
Piltdown. In: Bones, bodies, behaviour: essays on biological anthropology / edited by G. W. Stocking.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 84–116.
Spencer, F. 1990a. Piltdown: a scientific forgery. London, Oxford & New York: Natural History Museum
Publications / Oxford University Press, xxvi, 272 pp. (A considerable amount of scholarly research is here
weakened only by the final chapter in which the writer attempts to implicate Sir Arthur Keith as the forger
following a line of enquiry developed by Ian Langham, whose papers, after his death in 1984, were passed
to Frank Spencer because he had independently come to the same conclusion. Includes an introduction by
Phillip V. Tobias. A number of lengthy reviews appeared: see Campbell 1991, Fagan 1991, G. A. Harrison
1990, J. Marks 1992, Shipman 1990, Zuckerman 1990b; for other rebuttals see Costello 1990b, Grigson
1990b, 1991, L. J. Keith 1990, Kennedy 1991, Langdon 1992a, A. Miles 1991, & Zuckerman 1990a.
Turrittin 2006, 22–24, lists many more.)
Spencer, F. (ed.) 1990b. The Piltdown papers: the correspondence and other documents relating to the
Piltdown forgery, 1908–1955. London, Oxford & New York: Natural History Museum Publications / Oxford
University Press, xii, 282 pp. (An essential reference tool for the Piltdown researcher, though now in need
of expansion and revision, since not all of the relevant correspondence held at the NHM was included.)