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Who was Piltdown Man?

On 18 December 1912 newspapers throughout the world ran some sensational headlines - mostly along the lines of: 'Missing Link Found - Darwin's Theory Proved'.

That same day, at a meeting of the Geological Society in London, fragments of a fossil skull and jawbone were unveiled to the world. These fragments were quickly attributed to 'the earliest Englishman - Piltdown Man', although the find was officially named Eoanthropus dawsoni after its discoverer, Charles Dawson. Dawson was an amateur archaeologist, said to have stumbled across the skull in a gravel pit at Barkham Manor, Piltdown, in Sussex.

Some 40 years later, however, on 21 November 1953, a team of English scientists dramatically exposed Piltdown Man as a deliberate fraud. Instead of being almost a million years old, the skull fragments were found to be 500 years old, and the jaw in fact belonged to an orang-utan. So what had really happened?

Search for missing link

Sir Arthur Smith of the British Museum (left) with English antiquarian Charles Dawson (centre), standing on Barkham Avenue, Piltdown, Sussex in 1908.  © The story of Piltdown Man came out at just the time when scientists were in a desperate race to find the missing link in the theory of evolution. Since Charles Darwin had published his theory on the origin of species in 1859, the hunt had been on for clues to the ancient ancestor that linked apes to humans.

Sensational finds of fossil ancestors, named Neanderthals, had already occurred in Germany and France. British Scientists, however, were desperate to prove that Britain had also played its part in the story of human evolution, and Piltdown Man was the answer to their prayers - because of him, Britain could claim to be the birthplace of mankind.

Discoveries

Charles Dawson had made a name for himself by finding fossils in Sussex, and passing them on to Sir Arthur Smith Woodward at what is now the Natural History Museum, London. Dawson now claimed that at some point before 1910, a workman had handed him a dark-stained and thick piece of human skull. He said that recognising that this might be part of an ancient human, he had continued to dig at the site and collected more pieces of skull.

On 14 February 1912, he wrote to Woodward with news of exciting discoveries, and that summer Woodward joined him to excavate at Piltdown. They found more fragments of skull, and the bones and teeth of extinct British animals such as elephants, rhinos and beavers. They also found primitive stone tools, and a remarkable ape-like jaw.

On the basis of these finds, Woodward constructed a skull that seemed to supply the missing link in the evolutionary path between humans and the apes. With a brain the same size as that of modern humans, and a very ape-like jaw, Piltdown Man was born.

Doubts and further finds

Some overseas experts were sceptical of the match between the skull and jaw. They argued that they represented separate human and ape fossils, and had become mixed in the same fossil deposit. In 1913, however, Dawson and Woodward made further finds at Piltdown, including one of a canine tooth.

This was of an intermediate size, between that of an ape's and a human's tooth, exactly as Woodward had predicted on his model of Piltdown Man. This seemed to confirm that the jaw was from an intermediate ape-man creature, not an ape.

Then in 1915 Dawson claimed to have found another molar tooth, and some skull pieces, just two miles from the original Piltdown dig site. These looked similar to those of Piltdown Man, and the find was dubbed Piltdown Man II. With two family members and the backing of the Natural History Museum, Piltdown Man thus became generally accepted.

Suspicions

For the next 40 years, Piltdown Man remained a key member of the human family tree, although in the early 1920s and 30s, other fossils being discovered around the world didn't seem to fit with his physiology.

In South Africa, in 1924, Raymond Dart discovered the fossil skull of an ape-man that had human-like teeth, but since its brain was much smaller than that of Piltdown, most British scientists dismissed Dart's find as an ancient ape.

Dart's fossil, however, now known as 'Taung's child', eventually became recognised as a genuine member of the human family tree, officially named Australopithecines. Despite this, British scientists, including Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, continued to believe in Piltdown - as can be seen from Woodward's book 'The Earliest Englishman' (published 1948).

Exposure

It was not until new technology for the dating of fossils was developed, in the late 1940s, that Piltdown Man came to be seriously questioned once again. In 1949, Dr Kenneth Oakley, a member of the staff at the Natural History Museum, tested the Piltdown fossils and found that the skull and jaw were not that ancient.

He joined forces with Professor Joe Weiner and Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark from Oxford, to apply stringent tests to all the Piltdown remains. They realised that the human-like wear pattern on the teeth had been created by artificially filing down the teeth from an orang-utan jaw. The skull pieces were found to have come from an unusually thick-boned - but quite recent - human skull. It had simply been boiled and stained to match the colour and antiquity of the Piltdown gravels.

Although many of the mammal fossils were genuine, they had also been stained to match the skull and came from all over the world. It turned out that every single one of the 40 odd finds at Piltdown had been planted.

On 21 November 1953 the news broke, and headline writers revelled in the Natural History Museum's embarrassment: 'Fossil Hoax Makes Monkeys Out Of Scientists!' Weiner and Oakley quickly began an investigation to uncover the identity of the hoaxer. Who had had the access, the expertise and the motive to carry out such an outrageous forgery?

Suspects - the amateur accused

Weiner set off in pursuit of Charles Dawson. He was the one person who was always present when the discoveries were made, and after his premature death from septicaemia in 1916 no more finds were ever made at Piltdown.

Weiner's went to Lewes in Sussex, where Dawson had lived. Here he discovered Dawson's unsavoury local reputation - he had obtained his home, Castle Lodge, by falsely claiming to be buying it for the Sussex Archaeological Society. He also discovered that Dawson was an ambitious man, who had made many supposed discoveries that later turned out also to be forgeries.

Although Weiner hinted at Dawson being the perpetrator of the Piltdown hoax in his book The Piltdown Forgery, he never out-right accused him. There was serious doubt about whether he had sufficient knowledge to fake the bones that had deceived so many scientists. Was he himself the victim of someone else's elaborate vendetta?

The writer accused

The most famous name linked to the Piltdown forgery is that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the fictitious sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle lived near to Piltdown, and was a member of the same archaeological society as Charles Dawson.

As a doctor and fossil collector he had the relevant knowledge to pull off the hoax. He may also have left some intriguing clues to the Piltdown hoax in one of his most famous novels, The Lost World, published the same years as Piltdown was found. The book treated in colourful detail the supposed survival into modern times of dinosaurs and ape-men - and included a tantalising line about bones being as easy to fake as a photograph.

Most revealing of all is a possible motive. Conan Doyle spent the last decade of his life advancing the cause of spiritualism - he believed that it was possible to communicate with the dead. His beliefs were mocked by fellow scientists, so what better way to shake the arrogance of the scientific establishment than to fake Piltdown and expose their fallibility?

An insider job?

There have also always been rumours that the forgery was perpetrated by somebody inside the Natural History Museum with a grudge against Sir Arthur Smith Woodward. One man, Martin Hinton, was a volunteer at the museum when Piltdown was discovered - who was known to have fallen out with Woodward over payment for his work.

Rumours about Hinton's involvement took off in 1978, when a trunk belonging to Hinton was discovered in the museum - containing fossil animal bones, stained and deliberately cut to see how far the stain had penetrated. The stains looked like those used on the Piltdown remains, but no-one can say whether Hinton was staining material to plant at Piltdown, or just conducting his own tests on how Piltdown was forged.

One of the most extraordinary aspects of the Piltdown discoveries was a curious artefact found by Woodward and Dawson in 1915. It was in the shape of a prehistoric cricket bat - perhaps a bit too apt a tool for the 'earliest Englishman'? Many people believe this indicated the practical joker, Hinton, and believe it was an attempt to bring an end to Piltdown Man. Unfortunately it appears the joke backfired when Woodward and Dawson wrote up the find as a genuine early tool of Piltdown Man.

No single suspect, however, satisfactorily explains all the complexities of the hoax. And it seems that we may never know the identity of the Piltdown hoaxer - it remains one of the most fascinating and intriguing scientific hoaxes of all time.

Find out more

Books

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle (John Murray, 1912)

'Piltdown Man: The Missing Links' by L Matthews, New Scientist (vols 90 & 91, 1981)

The Piltdown Papers edited by F Spencer (Oxford University Press, 1990)

Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery by F Spencer (Oxford University Press, 1990)

Unravelling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and its Solution by J Walsh (Random House, 1996)

The Piltdown Forgery by JS Weiner (Dover, 1955)

'The Perpetrator at Piltdown' by J Winslow and A Meyer, Science (September, 1983)

The Earliest Englishman by AS Woodward (Watts, London, 1948)

Piltdown Man: The Secret Life of Charles Dawson by Miles Russell (Tempus, Stroud, 2003)

Links

by Richard Harter

About the author

Kate Bartlett is a freelance science and history TV producer. She has worked on the award-winning 'Human Body' series with Lord Robert Winston, the science documentary series 'Horizon', and the animated series 'Walking with Beasts'.