The Piltdown Man was a hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. These fragments consisted of parts of a skull and jawbone, said to have been collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex, England. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawn-man", after the collector Charles Dawson) was given to the specimen. The significance of the specimen remained the subject of controversy until it was exposed in 1953 as a forgery, consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan that had been deliberately combined with the skull of a fully developed modern human.
The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous paleontological hoax ever. It has been prominent for two reasons: the attention paid to the issue of human evolution, and the length of time (more than 40 years) that elapsed from its discovery to its full exposure as a forgery.
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At a meeting of the Geological Society of London held on 18 December 1912, Charles Dawson claimed to have been given a fragment of the skull four years earlier by a workman at the Piltdown gravel pit. According to Dawson, workmen at the site had discovered the skull shortly before his visit and had broken it up in the belief that it was a fossilised "coconut". Revisiting the site on several occasions, Dawson found further fragments of the skull and took them to Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of the geological department at the British Museum. Greatly interested by the finds, Woodward accompanied Dawson to the site where, although working together between June and September 1912, Dawson alone recovered more fragments of the skull and half of the lower jaw bone.[1]
The skull unearthed in 1908 was the only find discovered "In situ" with most of the other pieces found in the gravel pits' spoil heaps.
At the same meeting, Woodward announced that a reconstruction of the fragments had been prepared that indicated that the skull was in many ways similar to that of a modern human's, except for the occiput (the part of the skull that sits on the spinal column) and for brain size, which was about two-thirds that of a modern human's. He then went on to indicate that save for the presence of two human-like molar teeth the jaw bone found would be indistinguishable from that of a modern, young chimpanzee. From the British Museum's reconstruction of the skull, Woodward proposed that Piltdown man represented an evolutionary missing link between apes and humans, since the combination of a human-like cranium with an ape-like jaw tended to support the notion then prevailing in England that human evolution began with the brain.
Almost from the outset, Woodward's reconstruction of the Piltdown fragments was strongly challenged. At the Royal College of Surgeons copies of the same fragments used by the British Museum in their reconstruction were used to produce an entirely different model, one that in brain size and other features resembled a modern human. This reconstruction, by Prof. Arthur Keith (later Sir), was called Homo piltdownensis in reflection of its more human appearance.[2]
Woodward's reconstruction had included apelike canine teeth which was itself controversial. In August 1913, Woodward, Dawson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and friend of Dawson who had trained as a paleontologist and geologist, began a systematic search of the spoil heaps specifically to find the missing canines. Teilhard soon found a canine that Woodward found fitted the jaw perfectly. A few days later Teilhard moved to France and took no further part in the discoveries. Noting that the tooth "corresponds exactly with that of an ape", Woodward expected the find to end any dispute over his reconstruction of the skull. However, Keith attacked the find. Keith pointed out that human molars are the result of side to side movement when chewing. The canine in the Piltdown jaw was impossible as it prevented side to side movement. To explain the wear on the molar teeth, the canine could not have been any higher than the molars. Smith sided with Woodward and at the next Royal Society meeting accused Keith of opposing Woodward due to "rabid ambition". Keith later recalled "such was the end of our long friendship".
As early as 1913, David Waterston of King's College London published in Nature his conclusion that the sample consisted of an ape mandible and human skull.[3] Likewise, French paleontologist Marcellin Boule concluded the same thing in 1915. A third opinion from American zoologist Gerrit Smith Miller concluded Piltdown's jaw came from a fossil ape. In 1923, Franz Weidenreich examined the remains and correctly reported that they consisted of a modern human cranium and an orangutan jaw with filed-down teeth. Weidenreich, being an anatomist, had easily exposed the hoax for what it was. However, it took thirty years for the scientific community to concede that Weidenreich was correct.
In 1915, Dawson claimed to have found three fragments of a second skull (Piltdown II) at a new site about two miles away from the original finds.[1] Woodward attempted several times to elicit the location from Dawson but was unsuccessful. So far as is known the site has never been identified and the finds appear to be largely undocumented. Woodward did not present the new finds to the Society until five months after Dawsons death and deliberately implied that he knew where they had been found. In 1921, Henry Fairfield Osborn, President of the American Museum of Natural History, examined the Piltdown and Sheffield Park finds and declared that the jaw and skull belonged together "without question" and that the Sheffield Park fragments "were exactly those which we should have selected to confirm the comparison with the original type".
The Sheffield Park find established the authenticity of the discoveries. It may have been chance that brought an apes jaw and a human skull together but the odds of it happening twice verged on mathematical impossibility and opponents gradually gave up and admitted that they were wrong.
On 23 July 1938, at Barkham Manor, Piltdown, Sir Arthur Keith unveiled a memorial to mark the site where Piltdown Man was discovered by Charles Dawson. Sir Arthur finished his speech saying:
So long as man is interested in his long past history, in the vicissitudes which our early forerunners passed through, and the varying fare which overtook them, the name of Charles Dawson is certain of remembrance. We do well to link his name to this picturesque corner of Sussex–the scene of his discovery. I have now the honour of unveiling this monolith dedicated to his memory.[4]
The inscription on the memorial stone reads:
Here in the old river gravel Mr Charles Dawson, FSA found the fossil skull of Piltdown Man, 1912–1913, The discovery was described by Mr Charles Dawson and Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 1913–15.
The nearby pub was renamed The Piltdown Man in honour of it. It is still in business under that name.[5]
From the outset, some scientists expressed skepticism about the Piltdown find (see above). G.S. Miller, for example, observed in 1915 that "deliberate malice could hardly have been more successful than the hazards of deposition in so breaking the fossils as to give free scope to individual judgment in fitting the parts together."[6] In the decades prior to its exposure as a forgery in 1953, scientists increasingly regarded Piltdown as an enigmatic aberration inconsistent with the path of hominid evolution as demonstrated by fossils found elsewhere.[1] Skeptical scientists only increased in number as more fossils were found.
In November 1953, Time published evidence gathered variously by Kenneth Page Oakley, Sir Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark and Joseph Weiner proving that the Piltdown Man was a forgery[7] and demonstrating that the fossil was a composite of three distinct species. It consisted of a human skull of medieval age, the 500-year-old lower jaw of a Sarawak orangutan and chimpanzee fossil teeth. The appearance of age had been created by staining the bones with an iron solution and chromic acid. Microscopic examination revealed file-marks on the teeth, and it was deduced from this that someone had modified the teeth to give them a shape more suited to a human diet.
The Piltdown man hoax had succeeded so well because, at the time of its discovery, the scientific establishment had believed that the large modern brain had preceded the modern omnivorous diet, and the forgery had provided exactly that evidence. It has also been thought that nationalism and cultural prejudice played a role in the less-than-critical acceptance of the fossil as genuine by some British scientists.[3] It satisfied European expectations that the earliest humans would be found in Eurasia, and the British, it has been claimed,[3] also wanted a first Briton to set against fossil hominids found elsewhere in Europe, including France and Germany.
The identity of the Piltdown forger remains unknown, but suspects have included Dawson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Arthur Keith, Martin A. C. Hinton, Horace de Vere Cole and Arthur Conan Doyle.[8]
Teilhard had travelled to regions of Africa where one of the anomalous finds originated, and was residing in the Wealden area from the date of the earliest finds. Hinton left a trunk in storage at the Natural History Museum in London that in 1970 was found to contain animal bones and teeth carved and stained in a manner similar to the carving and staining on the Piltdown finds. Phillip Tobias implicated Arthur Keith by detailing the history of the investigation of the hoax, dismissing other theories, and listing inconsistencies in Keith's statements and actions.[9] Other investigations suggest the hoax involved accomplices rather than a single forger.[10]
The focus on Charles Dawson as the main forger is supported by the accumulation of evidence regarding other archaeological hoaxes he perpetrated in the decade or two prior to the Piltdown discovery. Archaeologist Miles Russell of Bournemouth University analyzed Dawson's antiquarian collection and determined at least 38 were fakes. Among these were the teeth of a reptile/mammal hybrid, Plagiaulax dawsoni, "found" in 1891 (and whose teeth had been filed down in the same way that the teeth of Piltdown man would be some 20 years later), the so-called "shadow figures" on the walls of Hastings Castle, a unique hafted stone axe, the Bexhill boat (a hybrid sea faring vessel), the Pevensey bricks (allegedly the latest datable "finds" from Roman Britain), the contents of the Lavant Caves (a fraudulent "flint mine"), the Beauport Park "Roman" statuette (a hybrid iron object), the Bulverhythe Hammer (shaped with an iron knife in the same way as Piltdown elephant bone implement would later be), a fraudulent "Chinese" bronze vase, the Brighton "Toad in the Hole" (a toad entombed within a flint nodule), the English Channel sea serpent, the Uckfield Horseshoe (another hybrid iron object) and the Lewes Prick Spur. Of his antiquarian publications, most demonstrate evidence of plagiarism or at least naive referencing. Russell wrote: "Piltdown was not a 'one-off' hoax, more the culmination of a life's work."[11]
Dawson's work prior to Piltdown had also been suspect. On one occasion, a collection of flints he exchanged with another collector, Harry Morris, turned out to have been aged with chemicals, a point Morris noted down at the time and which was later unearthed. There were also numerous individuals in the Sussex area well-acquainted with Dawson who long held doubts about Piltdown and of Dawson's role in the matter, but given the sheer weight of scholarly affirmation regarding the find few if any were willing to publicly speak out for fear of being ridiculed for their trouble.
In 1912, the Piltdown man was believed to be the “missing link” between apes and humans by the majority of the scientific community. However, over time the Piltdown man lost its validity, as other discoveries such as Taung Child and Peking Man were found. R.W. Ehrich and G.M. Henderson note, “To those who are not completely disillusioned by the work of their predecessors, the disqualification of the Piltdown skull changes little in the broad evolutionary pattern. The validity of the specimen has always been questioned.”[12] Eventually, in the 1940s and 1950s, more advanced dating technologies, such as the fluorine absorption test, scientifically proved that this skull was actually a fraud.
The Piltdown man fraud had a significant impact on early research on human evolution. Notably, it led scientists down a blind alley in the belief that the human brain expanded in size before the jaw adapted to new types of food. Discoveries of Australopithecine fossils found in the 1920s in South Africa were ignored owing to Piltdown man, and the reconstruction of human evolution was thrown off track for decades. The examination and debate over Piltdown man led to a vast expenditure of time and effort on the fossil, with an estimated 250+ papers written on the topic.
The fossil was sufficiently influential for Clarence Darrow to introduce it as evidence in defense of Scopes during the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. Darrow died in 1938, more than ten years before Piltdown Man was exposed as a fraud.
The hoax is often cited (along with Nebraska Man) by creationists as an example of the dishonestly or credulity of biologists that study human evolution, despite the fact that evolutionary biologists had exposed the hoax themselves.[13][14]
The notoriety of the hoax remains strong and in November 2003, the Natural History Museum in London held an exhibition to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its exposure.[15]
The Piltdown case is a strong example of how racial, nationalist, and gendered discourses shaped some science at this time, just as they shaped society more generally. Piltdown's semi-human features were made sense of by reference to non-White ethnicities who were at that time considered by many Europeans to be less evolved than themselves.[16] The influence of nationalism was clear in the differing interpretations of the find: whilst the majority of British scientists accepted the discovery as "the Earliest Englishman",[17] European and American scientists were considerably more sceptical, and several suggested at the time that the skull and jaw were from two different creatures and had been accidentally mixed up.[16] Regarding gender, the find was discussed as a male, despite Woodward suggesting that the specimen discovered was a female. The only exception to this was in coverage by the Daily Mail newspaper, which referred to the discovery as a woman, but only to use it to mock the Suffragette movement of the time, which the Mail was highly critical of.[18]
Such discourses were not uncommon in the biological sciences, and persisted up until the middle of the century. The atrocities committed by Nazi scientists before and during World War II brought the dangers of scientific racism to the foreground, and along with changing attitudes in society more generally, had the effect of largely purging these practices from science.[19]