Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Infamous Piltdown Man hoax solved at last?
Fake fossil find caused fallout for decades
When Piltdown Man was unveiled before a meeting of London geologists in 1912, he was heralded as paleoanthropology’s “missing link,” the long-sought transitional form between modern humans and our great ape ancestor. He had a smallish skull, a chimplike jaw and a mixture of primitive and modern teeth to boot. Plus, he was a local; to this gathering of Brits, it would have seemed completely right and proper that humankind got its start just down the road in Sussex.
There was just one problem: He was a fake.
In 1953, scientists at the British Natural History Museum and University of Oxford reported that the Piltdown fossil was a hodgepodge of human and orangutan bones, none of them more than 720 years old. The remains had been meticulously worn down with a file and stained with iron and acid to give the appearance of age. Dental putty was used to hold the teeth in place.
The scientists called the fake “extraordinarily skillful” and the hoax “so entirely unscrupulous and inexplicable as to find no parallel in the history of paleontological discovery.”
But their investigation couldn’t resolve one question: Who would have done such a thing, and why?
Writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, a new team of investigators say they have an answer. The Piltdown forgery was the work of one man: solicitor and amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson, who first “uncovered” the remains.
“Whether Dawson acted alone is uncertain, but his hunger for acclaim may have driven him to risk his reputation and misdirect the course of anthropology for decades,” the researchers write.
THE TOWN OF PILTDOWN
The first mention of the skull came in February 1912, when Dawson sent a letter to his friend Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, head of geology at the British Museum, about an exciting new skull he had uncovered on his land near the town of Piltdown. Just five years earlier, German scientists had uncovered the mandible of a 600,000-year-old Homo heidelbergensis: the ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans. This specimen “will rival H. heidelbergensis in solidity,” Dawson promised.
Later “excavations” at two Piltdown sites revealed a jaw bone, teeth, stone tools and a piece of carved fossil bone deemed a “cricket bat.” They also cast a cloud of suspicion over everyone who took part. A volunteer in Woodward’s department, Martin Hinton, seemed a likely suspect, especially after researchers at the Natural History Museum discovered a trunk of stained bones he had left in storage there.
Some skeptics eyed Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and prominent paleontologist, who discovered a canine that figured prominently in the skull’s identification. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the famed creator of Sherlock Holmes, was implicated; he was a member of the same archaeological society as Dawson.
Whoever committed the forgery, the consequences were long-lasting. The belief that modern humans evolved in Britain persisted for another 40 years — it was so ingrained that many scientists dismissed a real archaic human fossil, the Taung Child, when it was uncovered in South Africa in 1924. And the hoax weakened the public’s trust in science.
Even today, creationists point to Piltdown Man to justify their suspicion of evolution. SOLVING THE MYSTERY
To figure out who was responsible, paleoanthropologist Isabelle De Groote and more than a dozen other researchers re-examined the Piltdown skull and attempted to retrace how it was made. Their techniques — DNA sequencing, spectroscopic analysis — weren’t available to the scientists who exposed the hoax in 1953.
“Understanding what was used to fake the fossil that misled scientists for four decades and how they were manufactured may bring us closer to identifying whether there were one or more hoaxers, and why they would have risked their reputation to fool the scientific community,” De Groote and her team write.
They started their search with the orangutan mandible. DNA sequencing indicated the jaw and all the teeth came from the skull of one orangutan, even a tooth Dawson claimed to have found at a second Piltdown site several miles away.
Also, tiny cavities in the teeth were stuffed with pebbles and covered with putty to make them heavy, indicating that the forger knew fossil bones weigh more than recent ones.
Studies of the human remains were less successful; De Groote’s team was unable to extract material from the bone for identification and dating. They believe that at least two, and possibly three, skulls were used to make the cranial “fossil.”
But the overall modus operandi of the forger was skillful and incredibly consistent, and only one of the 20 or so people who have been implicated in the hoax could have achieved the whole thing: Charles Dawson.
“The story originated with him,” the authors write. “Nothing was ever found at the site when Dawson was not there, he is the only known person directly associated with the supposed finds at the second Piltdown site, the exact whereabouts of which he never revealed, and no further significant fossils, mammal or human, were discovered in the localities after his death in 1916.”