The Story of the ‘Piltdown Man’….
Piltdown Village is situated in East Sussex, in the South of England. It’s claim to fame, or should I say, infamy, came in 1912 when workmen gathering gravel from a local pit near the village made a discovery. They uncovered fragments of a skull and jawbone. They were examined by all the experts of the day who concluded that they came from the fossilised remains of an unknown form of early human. They became known as ‘the Missing Link’.
Although found by the workmen, Charles Dawson claimed to be the ‘finder’ which resulted in the fossils being named ‘Eoanthropus dawsoni’ or ‘Dawson’s dawn-man’. The ‘find’ excited the experts at the British Museum as a search for a ‘missing link’ had been ongoing for many years and appeared then to be necessary to complete Darwin’s ‘The Origin of the Species’. The ‘jump’ from Ape to humanoid necessary to prove the theory had never been found.
All the experts of the day agreed with the conclusion and numerous papers (over 250) were written on the subject during the following years. Methods of dating such finds were not yet formulated at the time.
Textbooks were written and taught at schools and colleges for the following forty years and probably the most important use of the information was when used during the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ when Charles Darrow introduced it as evidence in defence of Scopes the schoolteacher. (The trial was turned into a play and several films – probably the best being ‘Inherit the Wind’ starred Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott in 1999).
Further searches at the gravel pit resulted in other ‘fragments of skull and bones’ being discovered. They and the originals were presented to the Geological Society of London and together with the British Museum, the skull was reconstructed. It was agreed that it was neither ape nor modern human but in fact ‘the Missing Link’. There was certainly some of the scientific fraternity who did not agree, arguing that parts were fossil skull fragments from elsewhere and the lower jawbone of an ape.
The Royal College of Surgeons in London was given copies of the fragments and they too made a reconstruction. It was totally different from that produced by the British Museum. However, the Museum won out with the claim that the ‘missing link was in fact British’. There were racist and national feelings at stake and it appears that there was an element of ‘The Emperors New Clothes’ about the whole affair.
In 1915 and 1923 the ‘findings’ were challenged by eminent palaeontologists who found in the first instant that it was a fossil cranium and an ‘ape-like’ jawbone. The 1923 findings were in fact correct when Franz Weidenreich reported that they consisted of a human cranium and an orang-utan jaw with filed-down teeth.
The ‘Piltdown Man Hoax’ was exposed for what it was, yet it took another thirty years for the British (and other) scientific community to agree that Weidenreich was correct in all aspects.
It was The Times newspaper in London who used the most up-to-date techniques in 1953 and in November of that year published their findings. A professor of anthropology from Oxford University showed that the fossil was a composite of three distinct species. Part was a human skull of medieval age, the 500-year-old lower jaw of a Sarawak orang-utan and chimpanzee fossil teeth. Staining with an iron solution and chromic acid had aged the bones. The teeth showed that there were file marks suggesting that someone had modified them to give a shape more suited to a human diet. Further more modern tests in the 40’s and 50’s with advanced dating technologies scientifically proved the entire affair a fraud or hoax.
Why was the hoax perpetrated? It would appear that the British Scientific community wanted a ‘first Briton’ to compete with other hominids found in Europe in particular France and Germany. Certain elements did not wish to admit that the first such people came from Africa or Asia. It was also suggested that it was done to disgrace the finder or in fact by Dawson himself to enhance his position in the field. It could also have been done as practical joke – with Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame being considered number one suspect by many.
However, the most important aspect of Piltdown Man was the fact that it put back the study of human evolution by over forty years. Other genuine discoveries in South Africa were ignored and the study of human evolution was thrown off track for decades. Time and study lead to a vast waste of man-hours and effort.
I am reminded once again of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’………….
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