[URL unfurl="true"]https://textbookhistory.org/henry-fairfield-osborn-and-piltdown-man/[/URL]
AFTER THE FALL
Though it wouldn’t introduce Australopithecus until 1965, Modern Biology (Moon et al.) dropped any mention of Piltdown (or Cro-Magnon) with its 1947 revision. Exploring Biology (Smith), the second-most popular high school text dropped Piltdown (and introduced the modern synthesis) in 1949. And General Biology for College (Moment) de-indexed Piltdown (and introduced Australopithecus tranvallensis) in 1950.
In striking contrast, in the first edition of the college-level Biology (1950), a textbook that would go on to dominate that market, author Claude Villee, like Pauli the year before, provided a long description of Piltdown. And like Pauli, relied for reference on the influential, and extremely racist, Up from the Ape by Harvard anthropologist Earnest A. Hooton (1931). Hooton, according to Villee, believed Piltdown “to be closer to the direct evolutionary line leading to man than any fossil so far discovered” (Villee, 1950, p. 532).
The revelation that Piltdown was a hoax in November, 1953, proved to be an extinction event for two venerable textbook series, Elements of Biology (Dodge, Smallwood), first published as Biology in 1916, and Man and His Biological World (Jean et al., first published as Man and the Nature of His Biological World in 1934). Both were “old school,” to put it pleasantly, on the topics of race and eugenics. And both, unsurprisingly, were all-in on Piltdown.
