Piltdown Man

File:Piltdownpainting.jpg

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" is a famous hoax consisting 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 fossilised remains of a hitherto unknown form of early human. 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 combined with the skull of a fully developed, modern man.

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

File:Piltdownexcavation.jpg

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 on December 18, 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

From the outset, there were scientists who expressed skepticism about the Piltdown find. 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." 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]

In November, 1953, The Times published evidence gathered by a professor of anthropology from Oxford University 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 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 racism also played a role in the less-than-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 unknown, but suspects have included Dawson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Arthur Conan Doyle as well as numerous others.

• de Chardin had traveled 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.
• 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.

The recent focus on Charles Dawson as the sole forger is supported by the gradual accumulation of evidence about other archaeological 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 may have appropriated the finds usually made by workmen by reporting them to scientific journals as if they were his own discoveries. Some of his written works were uncredited collations of the discoveries of others. His motivation may have been little more than local fame and notoriety, and the desire to enhance his own collections.

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

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 the 1920s in South Africa were ignored due 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 hoax is now a popular target for creationists, who criticize science for falling for the hoax, and suggest that other finds backing up evolution may also be hoaxes.

Trivia

• During the Scopes Monkey Trial Clarence Darrow introduced the fossil as evidence in defense of Scopes. Darrow died in 1938, more than ten years before Piltdown Man was exposed as a fraud.

• 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."

• H. P. 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.

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

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

References

• The Times, November 21, 1953; November 23, 1953
• The hoax exposed: The Piltdown Forgery by Joseph Weiner 1954
• The case against Smith: The Piltdown Man by Ronald Millar 1972
• The Dawson evidence: Unraveling Piltdown by John Evangelist Walsh 1996
• Lewin, Roger. "Chain of Fraud", Bones of Contention, "The Piltdown Plot", 1987. Accessed August 25 2007

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.
• An annotated bibliography of the Piltdown Man forgery, 1953-2005.