Frank Spencer

Background

Frank Spencer was born on May 1, 1941, in Chatham, Kent, England.

Education

Spencer trained as a medical microbiologist, working first at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, and then in Windsor, Ontario. He took degrees in anthropology at Windsor and Michigan universities.

Career

Spencer originally worked as a medical microbiologist. In 1979, Spencer became a professor at Queen's College, New York, and, from 1985 to 1994, chairman of the department of anthropology. The seeds of his concern with the authorship of the Piltdown hoax were sown in his doctoral thesis on the Czech-American physical anthropologist, Ales Hrdlicka. In Hrdlicka's correspondence, Spencer found evasive letters from Keith about Piltdown; in Keith's diaries, he found entries suggesting that Keith had known more about Piltdown than he had admitted. Spencer pondered whether Keith could have had a hand in the hoax.

In 1912, parts of a cranium and a lower jaw had been uncovered on Piltdown Common, near Uckfield, Sussex. Dawson had "found" them, embedded in reddish gravel, along with fossilized animal bones and stone tools. All were of the same reddish color, and the archaic animal bones and tools created the impression that the skull and jaw were older than the Heidelberg jaw of Germany, up to then considered the oldest hominid find in Europe. Dawson, a lawyer, and amateur archaeologist handed the remains to the Natural History museum's Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, who reconstructed the skull and presented the world with a supposedly new kind of ancestral human, with a large brain-case and an ape-like lower jaw. Of the scholars who accepted the new find as the skull of the earliest located hominid on earth - save for Java Man - none was more agog than Keith.

Some doubted whether the human cranium and the apish jaw could have belonged to the same species, and by the 1950s discoveries in South Africa had cast doubts on the authenticity of the Piltdown remains. Keith, who firmly believed that Piltdown showed the pattern of early human evolution, remained the most outspoken opponent of the South African fossils and the alternative pathway of human ascent based on them.

Careful studies at the Natural History Museum, and in Oxford, revealed in 1953 that all the Piltdown remains had been doctored, stained and seeded into the gravel beds. Dr. J.S. Weiner published a case against Dawson, who had brought most of the "specimens" to light. Then he heard about the work of Dr. Ian Langham, of Sydney University, who had been working on a biography of Keith - and had come face to face with the events surrounding the forgery.

It was in 1990 that Dr. Spencer weighed in with his hypothesis about who was responsible for planting a skull and bones in a gravel pit near the English village of Piltdown and setting a false trail, which for some 40 years diverted scientists seeking the timetable of man's origins.

Though some had long doubted the evidence found at Piltdown, the fraud was not fully exposed until 1953, when the skull and a lower jaw, originally represented as coming from the same ancient individual, were found to be from two contemporary creatures of different species. The skull was that of a modern man and the jaw that of a modern orangutan with its teeth filed down.

Achievements

• Spencer was an academician in his own right but perhaps is best remembered for his uncovering of a paléontologie fraud. The fame of the scholarly, bookish Frank Spencer rests on the case he made that Sir Arthur Keith was the likely co-conspirator, with Charles Dawson, in one of the most notorious frauds in the history of science, the infamous Piltdown hoax.
  
  Spencer stood almost alone in promoting the history and philosophy of anthropology.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Ecce Homo: An Annotated Bibliographic History of Physical Anthropology

    (This annotated bibliography, the first book-length survey...)

    1986
  • A History of American Physical Anthropology: 1930-1980

    (Presents 20 chapters by noted authorities on all aspects ...)

    1982
  • The Piltdown Papers 1908-1955

    (In one of the most spectacular cases of scientific fraud ...)

    1990
  • Aspects of human biology: theory relevant to medical laboratory sciences 1972

Connections

Spencer was married to Elena Spencer.

Mother:

Doris Spencer

Wife:

Elena Spencer