Piltdown Hoax Blog

The Piltdown Hoax

The Piltdown Hoax was a hoax produced by two amateur archaeologists by the names of Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward. In December of 1912, these two men went before a crammed meeting of the U.K.’s Geological Society and presented their findings of a three year excavation they had concluded of the Piltdown gravel pit in Sussex, England. Dawson claimed to have unearthed human like skull fragments, a jaw with two teeth, a variety of animal fossils, and some prehistoric stone tools. At this meeting, Dawson and Woodward announced that the skull and jaw bones belong to the same person, a primitive hominid who’d lived between 500,000 -1 million years ago. The English scientific community welcomed these findings with open arms, as they to finally had proof that they also had prehistoric human-ape-like fossils in their land. They accepted these findings as the connection between ape and prehistoric man, and as the confirmation that Darwin’s theory of evolution was true. However, in the 1920’s and 30’s the doubts of the legitimacy of Piltdown man began to arise with the discovery of other early human remains around the world like, the Taung skull in South Africa. None of these remains showed the large brain and ape-like jaw of Piltdown Man; instead, they suggested that jaws and teeth became human-like before a large brain evolved. Upon further research in 1953, it turned out that Piltdown man was a fake, and not at all what was first believed (Dawson could not be questioned about these new findings, for he died in 1916). There was actually no connection between man and ape as was first thought. The skull and jaw were to big to belong to a human; it was a mixture of human and ape skull bones. The teeth had been filed down to look more humanlike and the skull was actually much more younger that was originally believed, it was actually no more the 600 years old. Furthermore, a microscope revealed that many of the remains from the Piltdown site appeared to have been stained to match each other as well as the gravel where they were supposedly found, this finding surfaced in 1996, when an old trunk found in storage at the British Museum was found to contain fossils that had been stained in the same manner as the Piltdown remains. It was never really known who is responsible for the hoax, but most evidence points to Dawson who was hoping to gain acceptance into various scientific circles, as well as being inducted into the Royal Society. In the end, the only thing he achieved was to infamously be known as the greatest fraud of scientific history.

In this case we see how desperation played a big role in what happened, how the findings were accepted without really being studied by real scientists, as well as more skillful, seasoned and better trained archaeologists, and aftermath of it all. England was desperate to prove that man’s origin came from Britain by claiming the findings could be those of the oldest human-ape and that they were found on their land. Dawson was so desperate to be socially accepted that he went to great lengths in doing so, not caring what would happen if the truth came to light. In the end, it was this desperation and lack of judgement that caused everyone their good name.

The positive aspects here were that the modern scientists with their more modern techniques were able to authenticate the skull fragments to prove whether or not they were in fact what was first claimed. They used techniques that at the time were the most up to date, that consisted of the use of fluorine to determine the age of the skull fragments by timing the duration of how long the object would absorb the fluorine and chemicals that were able to show the artificial stains in the skull. They also used more advanced microscopes in analyzing the teeth and jaw.

In today’s day and age it is indeed very possible to remove the “human” factor from science to prevent something like this happening again because of how advanced we now are in science as well as in technology. I think it would be very hard to let a fake ANYTHING pass for the authentic thing without it first being scientifically proven otherwise. If we have learned anything from this, it is to check, re-check and check again. Things are not always what they appear.

The life lesson here is not to take things for face value and to check things no matter how rushed we may be or how great we may came out of it. Its in these times, after a second look, that we are able to catch our errors and fix things to make them better.