AFTERWORD

You have just read (unless there are lacunae in my knowledge even I don’t know about) the only story you will ever read about Piltdown Man (and Woman).

Essentially, Piltdown Man was a hoax perpetrated on or by an amateur archaeologist @ 1910 on the Sussex Downs in England. There are four or five good books about the hoax; read one. Everybody had to rewrite the (pre)history books to account for Piltdown Man (which was essentially the filed-down jaw of a modern orangutan and a human skull, probably from a Roman burial, stained to look like they’d been in the gravel a million years or so.)

Nobody questioned that there weren’t even fossil apes in Britain; or how to account for the modern-looking skull and primitive jaw (it did fit right in with the theories of the time; Man evolved because he grew a big brain first, rather than, as we now think, the brain developed after we got upright, began to use our hands and developed swell binocular vision high up due to our posture.) Eoanthropus Dawsonii (Dawson’s Dawn Man) was called “The First Englishman” to give Britain pride of place in everything, not just colonial slaughter, genocide and piracy.

I started thinking. What would it have been like to have been a Piltdowner? What if they had been real? What would the British Isles had to have been like to keep Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons from coming over and having a cannibal party early on—what possibly could have kept the Picts and Romans away? And so on and so forth.

Another thing: people were always telling me the only way to get rich writing is to do a multi-volume series following a family down through the generations. Hence the title, with a tip of the Waldrop iceberg to Thomas Hardy.

This was written (in the big Eileen Gunn ledger) Nov. 9-10 1998 and read at Orycon in Portland. It was published in the 50th Anniversary October 1999 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which was about 2” thick. I’m real glad Gordon van Gelder squeezed it in there: I’m the only person in the issue without his name on the cover . . . As I said before, you gotta watch me every minute . . .

Yum yum eatem up.