Piltdown Man

The Piltdown Men: (Left to right) Front row: W. P Pycraft, Arthur Keith, A. S. Underwood, Ray Lankester. Back Row: F. O. Barlow, Grafton Elliot Smith, Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward. John Cooke, R.A., rather tactlessly shows Keith measuring the skull of 'Piltdown man' under the direction of Smith. Teilhard de Chardin is absent on war service.

Piltdown man is one of the most famous frauds in the history of science. In 1912 Charles Dawson discovered the first of two skulls found in the Piltdown quarry in Sussex, England; skulls of an apparently primitive hominid. Piltdown man, or Eoanthropus dawsoni,  was a sensation. He was the expected "missing link" a mixture of human and ape with the noble brow of Homo sapiens and a primitive jaw. 

As the years went by and new finds of ancient hominids were made, Piltdown man became an anomaly that didn't fit in. Finally, in 1953, the truth came out. Piltdown man was a hoax, the most ancient of people who never were. 

Rutot's reconstruction of Piltdown Man

OS map of the Piltdown region

The skull bones (some of the pieces assembled)

The inside and outside views of the jaw-bone

Originally it had been believed that one skull had been used; later, more precise dating established in 1989 that two different skulls had been used, one for each of the two skull "finds". The skulls were unusually thick; a condition that is quite rare in the general population but is common among the Ona Indian tribe in Patagonia. The jawbone was not definitely established as being that of an orangutan until 1982. 

Woodward's reconstruction of Piltdown man's skull

A Reconstruction of 'Piltdown man's' skull

Not only were the bones gathered from a variety of sources, they were given a thorough treatment to make them appear to be genuinely ancient. A solution containing iron was used to stain the bones; fossil bones deposited in gravel pick up iron and manganese. Before staining, the bones (except for the jawbone) were treated with Chromic acid. The skull may have also been boiled in an iron sulphate solution. The canine tooth was painted after staining, probably with Van Dyke brown. The jaw bone molars were filed to fit. The connection where the jawbone would meet the rest of the skull was carefully broken so that there would be no evidence of lack of fit. The canine tooth was filed to show wear (and was patched with chewing gum). It was filled with sand as it might have been if it had been in the Ouse river bed.

With few exceptions nobody suggested that the finds were a hoax until the very end. In 1949, after a new dating technique , the fluorine absorption test, became available the Piltdown fossils were dated.  The tests established that the fossils were relatively modern. Even so, they were still accepted as genuine.

No one on the team was truly competent in dealing with hominid fossils; their expertise lay elsewhere. The British museum people, Woodward and Pycraft, made numerous errors of reconstruction and interpretation. The only expert in the expanded team, Grafton Eliot Smith, was strangely silent about some of the errors.

It is hard for us today to fully grasp how primitive the analytical tools available to the palaeontologists of that time were. Chemical tests and dating techniques taken for granted today were not available. The analysis of the details of tooth wear was less worked out. The simple knowledge of geology was much less detailed.  In short, the palaeontologists of 1915 were an easier lot to fool.

At the time there were virtually no hominid fossils finds except for some of the early Neanderthal finds. The forger knew what anatomical and paleontological tests the specimens would be given.

Features that might have exposed the hoax didn't get caught because of small errors in procedure. For example, the hoax would have been exposed immediately had a test of the jaw for organic matter been made.

The X-rays taken were of poor quality, even for the time. The dentist, Lyne, pointed out the incongruity between the heavy wear on the canine and its large pulp cavity, a sign of youth. This was interpreted as secondary dentine formation, an explanation that "worked" because of the poor quality of the X-rays.

The wear pattern on the molars, which was obvious when Weiner looked at the casts, was never noticed. Nor were they carefully examined under a microscope: the abrasion marks would have been seen.

When the hoax was exposed nobody knew who the perpetrator was. No one confessed to the deed. For forty odd years people have speculated about the identity of the culprit; over time an impressive list of suspects has accumulated. The case against each suspect has been circumstantial, a constellation of suspicious behaviour, of possible motives, and of opportunity.