Keith was quite frankly exultant at the discovery in England of a fossil that outdated anything that had been found in France or elsewhere in Europe, and this feeling was shared by other English scientists of the time. A similar chauvinism found expression in the efforts of the Argentinian Ameghino to claim hominid identity for fossils he uncovered in his country. The issues can become intense when the discoverer or sponsor of a fossil is involved, and it has led to much unnecessary confusion. Again and again, a new discovery is hailed as unique and given its own special name to save it from being lost in a general category and assigned to an undistinguished anonymity. But it still puzzles me that Woodward and Keith did not recognize that the bones of Piltdown man were not petrified and true fossils.
Fame carries enormous prestige.
It would have taken a courageous anthropologist even outside England to question the authority of Sir Arthur Keith. The turning of his interests became clear after the First World War, when he was free again to resume scientific work. In his publications after settling in China, one can trace an increasing commitment to anthropological research and to the problems of human evolution. . . .