Piltdown Man Hoax

The Find

A laborer working in the Piltdown gravel pit in the early 1900s claimed to have found a piece of a skull. He passed it on to Charles Dawson, a local solicitor and well-known amateur archaeologist. Dawson found additional fragments at the site in 1911, and presented them to Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of geology at the British Museum. Interested in the finds, Woodward returned to the site with Dawson, where they recovered additional skull fragments and half of a lower jawbone. The same pit also produced a few fossil animal bones and a tooth. In December 1912, they presented their reconstructed skull to the Geological Society of London as a new type of early human, Eoantbropus dawsoni, or “Dawson's Dawn Man.” The bone of the skull was unusually thick and stained with age, implying primitive-ness, while having the shape and larger size of a modern braincase. However, the mandible associated with it was far more simian than human. This apparent ape-man found with the bones of extinct mammals in a Pleistocene gravel bed was exciting news for English paleontologists. Until that point, all fossil human remains had been found in various locations on the Continent, especially Germany and France. England could now claim a place on the evolutionary tree even earlier than these other hominids.

Additional finds were made at Piltdown through 1915, including additional animal bones, stone tools, and a second skull (also found by Dawson) 2 miles away from the original site. Interestingly, no more finds were made after Dawson's death in 1916.

The reconstruction of Piltdown man was challenged from its introduction. The hinge joining the jaw to the skull was conveniently missing, causing some experts to doubt that the skull and jaw were from the same individual. Others developed a completely different model from the pieces. In the 1920s, Franz Weidenreich, an anatomist, examined the specimen and reported that it was a modern human cranium and an orangutan jaw with filed teeth. He was correct, but it took 30 years for paleontologists to admit it. As more and more hominid finds were made around the world in the following years, including Homo erectus and Australopithecus, Eoantbropus was pushed aside. Piltdown Man [Page 995]Not only did it not fit into the increasingly clear evolutionary tree, but also no other specimen was ever found resembling it.

Exposure of the Hoax

Joseph Weiner, an anthropology professor at Oxford University, has been given credit for exposing the hoax. In the early 1950s, he attended a paleontology congress in London. Piltdown man was hardly mentioned once again, for not “fitting in.” The possibility of fraud dawned on him. After meticulously gathering evidence, conducting interviews, and using recently developed tests on the bones themselves, he exposed the forgery in 1953. A new dating technique, the fluorine absorption test, was developed to determine age and had been applied to the Piltdown fossils in 1949. The results established that the remains were, in fact, relatively modern, but they were still assumed to be genuine. In 1953, with the fluorine test more advanced, the Piltdown remains were retested. It was determined that the cranium was from the Upper Pleistocene and approximately 50,000 years old, while the mandible and tooth were modern. Another new test devised by American scientists analyzed nitrogen content to determine age and corroborated these results. In 1959, however, the recently discovered carbon-14 dating technique was applied to the bones. The skull was shown to be between 520 and 720 years old, and the jawbone a bit younger.

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