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Piltdown Man
A skull postulated
from a group of fossils of primitive man, dramatically discovered in
England in 1912, but later proved to be fraudulent.
At the time, the
British journal Nature called the find "the most important
discovery of its kind hitherto made in England." The reconstructed
skull resembled a cross between a human and a chimpanzee. Charles Dawson
— an amateur archaeologist and the skull's discoverer — and Arthur
Smith Woodward — a distinguished geologist at the British Museum to
whom the findings were submitted to by Dawson — tried to fit the skull
and the other fossils found at Piltdown together, but had difficulty.
Anthropologists also were not comfortable with the Piltdown man, and
several attempts at reconstructions to reconcile the ape-like jaw and
the human-like cranium produced no advances. Several scientists finally
agreed to consider it as an aberration, an error of nature, and the
skull was authenticated and placed in the British Museum.
Doubts, however, were
always present and in 1954 the fragments were dated by Kenneth P. Oakley
(discoverer of the 500,000 year old "Swanscombe fossil") and
his associates using the fluorine analysis method — developed by
Oakley — and it was found out that the jawbone actually belonged to a
modern orangutan, stained and abraded to look older. The cranium was
found to be genuinely human, but not very ancient. Also, artifacts and
relics supposedly discovered at the Piltdown site were found out to have
been tampered with to appear to be contemporary with the fossils.
Until this day there
is a lot of speculation at who perpetrated the hoax, but the definite
answer has never been found. The list of suspects include Charles
Dawson, Arthur Smith Woodward, Tielhard de Chardin (scientist and theologian
who was in several of the expeditions to Piltdown), Martin A. C. Hinton
(curator of zoology at the British Museum), and, believe or not, Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle.
Related books:
Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery.
The Piltdown
Men.
Further
info:
Piltdown: The Man that Never Was.
Piltdown Man: The Bogus Bones Caper.
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