Piltdown Man

[Hedgehog]

1620: The 'Pilgrim Fathers' on the 'Mayflower' make first landfall in North America, at Cape Cod, New England.
1953: Piltdown Man, an archaeological discovery hailed as the 'missing link' in 1911, is exposed as a fake.
1995: The Dayton Agreement between Serb, Croat and Bosnian leaders ends more than three years of war in Bosnia.

Who was Piltdown Man?
On 18 December 1912 newspapers throughout the world ran some sensational headlines - mostly along the lines of: 'Missing Link Found - Darwin's Theory Proved'.

That same day, at a meeting of the Geological Society in London, fragments of a fossil skull and jawbone were unveiled to the world. These fragments were quickly attributed to 'the earliest Englishman - Piltdown Man', although the find was officially named Eoanthropus dawsoni after its discoverer, Charles Dawson. Dawson was an amateur archaeologist, said to have stumbled across the skull in a gravel pit at Barkham Manor, Piltdown, in Sussex.

Some 40 years later, however, on 21 November 1953, a team of English scientists dramatically exposed Piltdown Man as a deliberate fraud. Instead of being almost a million years old, the skull fragments were found to be 500 years old, and the jaw in fact belonged to an orang-utan. So what had really happened?

Search for missing link
Sir Arthur Smith of the British Museum (left) with English antiquarian Charles Dawson (centre), standing on Barkham Avenue, Piltdown, Sussex in 1908. © The story of Piltdown Man came out at just the time when scientists were in a desperate race to find the missing link in the theory of evolution. Since Charles Darwin had published his theory on the origin of species in 1859, the hunt had been on for clues to the ancient ancestor that linked apes to humans.

Sensational finds of fossil ancestors, named Neanderthals, had already occurred in Germany and France. British Scientists, however, were desperate to prove that Britain had also played its part in the story of human evolution, and Piltdown Man was the answer to their prayers - because of him, Britain could claim to be the birthplace of mankind.

 

[Hedgehog]

Doubts and further finds
Some overseas experts were sceptical of the match between the skull and jaw. They argued that they represented separate human and ape fossils, and had become mixed in the same fossil deposit. In 1913, however, Dawson and Woodward made further finds at Piltdown, including one of a canine tooth.


Some overseas experts were sceptical of the match between the skull and jaw. They argued that they represented separate human and ape fossils, and had become mixed in the same fossil deposit.
This was of an intermediate size, between that of an ape's and a human's tooth, exactly as Woodward had predicted on his model of Piltdown Man. This seemed to confirm that the jaw was from an intermediate ape-man creature, not an ape.

Then in 1915 Dawson claimed to have found another molar tooth, and some skull pieces, just two miles from the original Piltdown dig site. These looked similar to those of Piltdown Man, and the find was dubbed Piltdown Man II. With two family members and the backing of the Natural History Museum, Piltdown Man thus became generally accepted.

Suspicions
For the next 40 years, Piltdown Man remained a key member of the human family tree, although in the early 1920s and 30s, other fossils being discovered around the world didn't seem to fit with his physiology.


Dart's fossil, however, now known as 'Taung's child', eventually became recognised as a genuine member of the human family tree, officially named Australopithecines.
In South Africa, in 1924, Raymond Dart discovered the fossil skull of an ape-man that had human-like teeth, but since its brain was much smaller than that of Piltdown, most British scientists dismissed Dart's find as an ancient ape.

Dart's fossil, however, now known as 'Taung's child', eventually became recognised as a genuine member of the human family tree, officially named Australopithecines. Despite this, British scientists, including Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, continued to believe in Piltdown - as can be seen from Woodward's book 'The Earliest Englishman' (published 1948).