Piltdown Man remains exposed as fake – archive, 1953
The skull which was found at Piltdown in Sussex 40 years ago has lost some of its importance as a relic of primitive man, but it can still cause a considerable flutter among scientists and laymen who take a natural interest in their own ancestors. Three scientists, after careful investigation, now pronounce its jaw and eyetooth to be “deliberate fakes”; but this, though the strongest, is only the latest blow to Piltdown Man’s pre-eminence. New discoveries and new methods had already brought him down a peg. A few years ago it was found possible by means untried till then to get a rough estimate of the age of fossil skulls: this showed that the Piltdown skull was by no means as old as some others, notably the one found at Swanscombe. The discoverer of the Swanscombe skull, Mr AT Marston, has, by the way, steadfastly maintained that the Piltdown skull and jaw could not possibly belong to the same individual. He was much criticised but is now vindicated; and his Swanscombe skull now takes the place which (as it turns out) Piltdown Man had usurped. But the general view of human evolution may not be much affected, since palaeontologists have all along been troubled by the contradictions in the Piltdown find and have mostly considered it an aberrant form.
The report of the investigations that led Dr Weiner, Dr Oakley, and Professor Le Gros Clark to part Piltdown Man from his jaw and tooth reads like a story of shrewd detection. What it cannot say – and what, after 40 years, is probably best left uninvestigated – is who the “extraordinarily skilful” and “entirely unscrupulous” hoaxer was. Piltdown Hoaxer is certainly a most successful specimen of Forging Man. Famous hoaxers in other fields, like Thomas Wise with his first editions of poets, or Van Meegeren with his Vermeers, have often been found out in their lifetimes; but this one, we are probably justified in assuming, died in the knowledge that whoever had the last laugh he would not be there to hear it.
Features of Piltdown skull “deliberate fakes”: lower jaw that of chimpanzee?
Recent improvements in the technique of fluorine analysis made possible some of the tests which led three scientists to conclude that the mandible and canine tooth of the “Pilt