The Piltdown Experts.....

So Called Experts……….. 

An ‘expert’ is defined as ‘a person who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area’.

I have found throughout my life, that once a ‘top expert’ makes a decision, others quickly agree and like ‘the emperor’s new clothes’, the ‘pack’ are loath to offer a contrary opinion.

Although there are many examples my all-time favourite is the ‘Coelacanth’.   Its fossils were well known to ‘experts’ who deemed it to be extinct for over seventy million years. Others claimed it to have been extinct for about four hundred million years.

The problem was that no-one told the Coelacanth that it did not exist.....

In 1938 it was discovered to be alive and well and swimming in South African waters.   Local fishermen knew it well but as its flesh was too oily, it was ignored by them.   Panic set in among the experts and the relevant science books had to be re-written.  It is now known as ‘the living fossil’.....

The true purpose of this post is to tell you about a similar event here in the UK with the discovery of fossils that became known as 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 previously never been found.

All the experts of the day agreed with the conclusion and numerous papers (over 250) were written on the subject over the following years. Modern 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.

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 proved to be 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 1950’s with advanced dating technologies scientifically proved the entire affair was indeed 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 a 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............................

Experts – I ask you.................

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