Piltdown Man

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The portrait painted by John Cooke in 1915. Back row (from left): F O Barlow, G Elliot Smith, Charles Dawson, Arthur Smith Woodward. Front row: A S Underwood, Arthur Keith, W P Pycraft, and Sir Ray Lankester.

The "Piltdown Man" consists of fragments of a skull and jawbone collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, a village near Uckfield, East Sussex. The fragments were thought by many experts of the day to be the fossilized remains of a hitherto unknown form of early human. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawn-man") 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 combined with the skull of a fully developed, modern man. It has been suggested that the forgery was the work of the person said to be its finder, Charles Dawson, after whom it was named. This view is strongly disputed and many other candidates have been proposed as the true creators of the forgery.

The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous archaeological hoax in history. 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 exposure as a forgery.

The find

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Excavating the Piltdown gravels in 1911, with Dawson (right) and Smith Woodward (centre).

The finding of the Piltdown skull was poorly documented, but at a meeting of the Geological Society of London held in December 1912, 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. 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 between June and September 1912 they together recovered more fragments of the skull and half of the lower jaw bone.

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 modern man, 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 modern man. 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 ape and man, 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 was brain-led.

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 modern man. Despite these differences however, it does not appear that the possibility of outright forgery arose in connection with the skull.

In the 1920s, 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, 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 fragments of a second skull (Piltdown II) at a site about two miles away from the original finds. So far as is known the site has never been identified and the finds appear to be entirely undocumented. Woodward does not appear ever to have visited the site.

Memorial to the discovery

The Piltdown Man memorial stone.

On July 23, 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.'"

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 in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 1913-15.

The nearby pub was renamed The Piltdown Man in honour of it.

The forgery exposed

Scientific investigation

Joseph Weiner, a young professor of anthropology at Oxford University, is owed the most credit for exposure of the hoax. He meticulously gathered evidence by interviewing those who were alive, visiting the sites, talked to locals, and prepared a well-documented case. Like many anthropologists in the early 1950s, he had come to realise that Piltdown Man's peculiar characteristics - those, supposedly, which established it as the "missing link" - just didn't fit into the evolutionary pathways established by the science.

Piltdown man had for some time become regarded as an aberration that was entirely inconsistent with the mainstream thrust of human evolution as demonstrated by fossil hominids found elsewhere. So in 1953, the exposure of the Piltdown forgery was greeted in many academic quarters with relief. Scientific method and the evolutionary theory of progressive and relatively continuous change, had triumphed eventually over a clever deception by a person (or people) with undoubted expertise in the subject. It was the inconsistencies between Piltdown and the known evolutionary facts that gave the game away.

Piltdown Man was shown to be a composite forgery, part-ape and part-man. 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.

Weiner's main problem in accepting the fabricated evidence, was that the animal jaw with its canine (sharp tearing) teeth had been fitted to a human skull where the teeth had been modified by a million years of a different diet, to flat grinding teeth. Human jaws are also capable of considerable side-to-side movement (as seen in cud-chewing herbivors) which requires a different sort of jaw-hinge joint.

For the forger, the area where the jaw joined the skull had posed problems that were overcome by the simple expedient of breaking off the terminals of the jaw. The canine teeth in the jaw had then been filed to make them fit and it was this filing that led to doubts about the authenticity of the whole specimen. By chance, it was noticed that the top of one of the molars sloped at a very different angle from the other teeth. Microscopic examination then revealed file-marks on the teeth, and it was deduced from this that filing had taken place to change the shape of the teeth. Ape teeth are different in shape from human teeth.

The degree of technical competence exhibited by the Piltdown forgery continues to be the subject of debate; however, the genius of the forgery is generally regarded as being that it offered some of the experts exactly what they wanted: convincing evidence that human evolution was brain-led. A hotly contested dispute among anthropologists at this time was whether the human brain evolved first and other characteristics followed, or whether brain development was a consequence of other physical transformations.

It is argued that Piltdown Man hoax succeeded so well because it gave a large body of experts the evidence that they needed to win in a scientific dispute. The experts taken in by the Piltdown forgery were prepared to ignore many of the rules that are normally applied to evidence because the find supported their case. It is also possible that nationalism and racism also played a role in the less-that-critical acceptance of the fossil as genuine by some British scientists. It satisfied European expectations that the earliest humans would be found in Eurasia, and the British, it has been claimed, also wanted a first Briton to set against fossil hominids found elsewhere in Europe, including France and Germany.

Identity of the forger

The identity of the Piltdown forger remains unproven, but the finger of suspicion has been most strongly pointed at Dawson. In all, there have been eleven major candidates, and some suggestions of rather unlikely collaborations. Woodward and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin remained as prime suspect for many years, as did Arthur Conan Doyle the writer and creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Teilhard de Chardin went on to become a famous philosopher-anthropologist, and he was linked to the hoax because of some inconsistencies in his memory, especially surrounding his rather incredibly discovery of a conveniently-confirmatory tooth (He was in the pit with Dawson at the time). He had also travelled in the Ishkeul region of North Africa from which one of the anomalous finds (a rhinoceros tooth) originated, and was resident in the Wealden area from the date of the earliest finds. He is reliably documented as working at the site in 1913 with Dawson, and he possibly visited a few unrecorded times.

The name of Arthur Conan Doyle has been mentioned but is scarcely credible, except for the fact that he was a known practical joker, and was writing the novel "The Lost World" dealing with monkey-men living in a Jurassic-type residual setting at that time. He also had a fascination with mysteries and the occult.

Sir Arthur Keith, and a few other collector-antiquinarian friends of Dawson have also been fingered over the years either as the hoaxer or an accomplice, and a number of learned papers and books have been written defaming these individuals since their death. Thought by some to be a very promising candidate for the role of the Piltdown forger, Martin A.C. 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.

However the collection of antiquities was a popular pastime among some sections of the wealthy British gentry at that time, and forgeries and artificial-ageing were not unknown. A labourer working in a gravel pit and finding some object of age and importance, could easily double his monthly income by selling it to a local collector, so there was plenty of incentive to mock up or exaggerate the age of finds.

So the actual motive of the forger remains unknown, and the most likely suggestion for many years was that the hoax was a practical joke that rapidly ran out of hand.

The recent focus on Dawson as the sole forger is supported by the gradual accumulation of evidence about other archeological hoaxes he perpetrated over a few decades before the Piltdown discovery. Beginning in 1895 as a young man, he appears to have made dozens of minor 'discoveries' including the first evidence of cast-iron figure-casting in Roman Britain, a medieval clockface, a flint-arrowhead and shaft, and a few other remarkable finds that all later (well after his death) turned out to be forgeries. On one occasion, while he was alive, some flints he exchanged with another collector turned out to have been aged with chemicals.

Sometimes he appears to have appropriated the finds made by others (usually workmen) by reporting them to learned journals as if the discoveries were his own, and when his written works were examined more carefully, it was evident that most of them had been plagerised and were simply collations of the discoveries of others, usually uncredited. His motivation appears to have been little more than local fame and notoriety, and the desire to enhance his own collections.

In 1903 he had been ostricised by members of the local Sussex Archaeological Society for gazumping them in a deal involving the purchase of their long-term rented headquarters, Castle Lodge in Uckfield, while supposedly acting as solicitor on the Society's behalf. Instead, he bought it for himself, and the Society had to move.

In 2003, the Natural History Museum held an exhibition to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the exposure of the hoax.

Relevance

Piltdown and early humans

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.” Eventually, in the 40s and 50s, more advanced dating technologies, such as the fluorine absorption test, scientifically proved that this skull was actually a fraud.

Relative importance

According to Robert Parson, “Piltdown confirmed hypotheses about our early ancestors that were in fact wrong, specifically, that the brain case developed before the jaw. The early Australopithecine fossils found by Raymond Dart in South Africa in the 1920s failed to receive the attention due to them for this reason. The entire reconstruction of the history of the evolution of humanity was thrown off track until the 1930s.”

The discovery of Piltdown Man led to a vast expenditure of time and effort on the fossil. It has been estimated that over 250 papers were written on the topic. In fact, more than seventy were cited in G.S. Miller’s 1915 work on the topic (less than ten years after the discovery). Arthur Smith Woodward spent much of his career studying Piltdown Man. When it finally was proven as a hoax, much of his work came to naught, and became a permanent stain on his reputation.

The hoax is also now a popular target for creationists, who point out many reconstructions based on the hoax and the duration of time in which it was a major factor in archaeological (and evolutionary) decisions. Malcolm Muggeridge, a nonscientist who did not accept that human evolution had occurred, asserted that no fewer than 500 doctoral theses were written on the subject. However, others have disputed Muggeridge's statement, arguing that the annual output of doctoral theses in paleontology was, and is, too low to reach this number. Moreover, no such doctoral theses have ever been referred to in any scientific publication.

Historical errors

Many early scientists actually pointed out this hoax before they were confirmed in 1953. These scientists include G.S. Miller, who wrote in 1915, “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.” It is believed that if Miller had been working with the actual Piltdown skull instead of a cast, he could have revealed the hoax before it was given overwhelming prominence. This skepticism was commonplace, as most researchers believed that the jaw and cranium were, in fact, from two animals. However, the scientific establishment held to the conviction that humans developed a larger braincase before other distinct characteristics like bipedalism. Since technologies did not exist at that time to date the skull accurately, the hoax was eventually accepted, and people simply ignored works like that of Miller.

In popular culture

• Mike Oldfield, in his 1973 album Tubular Bells, lists "Piltdown man" as one of the instruments he plays in the album. This refers to one part of the album (found in the second track) that is undoubtedly inspired by early hominids and sung in a raw voice. In the 2003 reworking of the album, this part is titled "Caveman".

• In March 1994, Apple Computer introduced the Power Macintosh 6100, the first of the Power Macintosh line of computers, which carried the codename "Piltdown Man". Later that year, the Macintosh computer game Marathon 2 was released, which has a computer terminal with the word "piltdown" in a transmission's header. It is argued that this usage implies that the message from the terminal was not entirely true, and that the supposed sender did not exist.

• In his book Scientology: A History of Man, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard lists Piltdown Man as one of the ancestors of humanity, describing him as having "enormous" teeth and being "quite careless as to whom and what he bit". Piltdown Man was exposed as a hoax just months after the publication of Hubbard's book.

• There is a brief reference to the Piltdown Man in the X-Files episode 'Gethsemane'.

• Lovecraft's short stories Dagon and The Rats in the Walls refer to the Piltdown man.

• In The Psychiatrist, an episode of Fawlty Towers, Basil Fawlty refers to a lower class guest as a "Piltdown ponce".

• The Piltdown man is mentioned as a thought from Ellie Sattler in the novel Jurassic Park when she is considering that an x-ray may be a hoax (found in the 'Second Iteration' within the section 'Skeleton').

• The hoax formed part of the inspiration for Angus Wilson's 1956 novel Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.

• In the 1958 movie "Monster On The Campus", Professor Donald Blake (Arthur Franz) has a collection of facial reconstructions depicting the ascent of man from the early hominids to modern man (or woman in this case, actress Joanna Moore). One of them is that of Piltdown Man.

Timeline

• 1908: Dawson discovers first Piltdown fragments
• 1912 February: Dawson contacts Woodward about first skull fragments
• 1912 June: Dawson, Woodward, and Teilhard form digging team
• 1912 June: Team finds elephant molar, skull fragment
• 1912 June: Right parietal skull bones and the jaw bone discovered
• 1912 November: News breaks in the popular press
• 1912 December: Official presentation of Piltdown man
• 1914: Talgai (Australia) man found, considered confirming of Piltdown
• 1925: Edmonds reports Piltdown geology error. Report ignored.
• 1943: Fluorine content test is first proposed.
• 1948: Woodward publishes The Earliest Englishman
• 1949: Fluorine content test establishes Piltdown man as relatively recent.
• 1953: Weiner, Le Gros Clark, and Oakley expose the hoax.

See also

• Archaeoraptor

Reference

• The hoax exposed: The Piltdown Forgery by Joseph Weiner 1954
• The case against Smith: The Piltdown Man by Ronald Millar 1972
• The Dawson evidence: Unravelling Piltdown by John Evangelist Walsh 1996

External links

• Piltdown Man at the Natural History Museum, London
• The Piltdown Plot
• Archæological Forgeries
• The Unmasking of Piltdown Man: BBC
• Fossil fools: Return to Piltdown by BBC
• PBS NOVA: The Boldest Hoax (about Piltdown Man case)
• Talk.origins page on Piltdown Man
• Sarah Lyell, "Piltdown Man Hoaxer: Missing Link is Found", The New York Times, 25 May 1996 The case for Martin A. C. Hinton as the hoaxer.