Hello friends, and welcome back to Scholar Minor. I'm so glad that you are listening, and I'm grateful for your patience regarding my absence last week - but some sleep and self-care was desperately needed. While I have a fun dive into fairy lore planned for next week, tonight's topic couldn't wait.
Happy Father’s day to my amazing, inspiring, supportive, and hilarious dad. I hope you enjoy tonight’s discussion of the Piltdown man. Surprise!
Our story begins with infamous British archeologist Charles Dawson. Do a Google image search of this dapper gentleman, and you will not be disappointed. What a fantastic mustache!
Charles Dawson was born in 1864 and initially studied to become a lawyer like his father. But Dawson didn’t want to be a lawyer - he wanted to be an archeologist, and he loved to find and collect fossils. And he apparently had a knack for it. The public and many in the scientific community marveled at his luck - Dawson seemed to just stumble upon history-making discoveries with alarming frequency.
As it turns out, Dawson wasn’t the greatest archeologist - but he was arguably history’s most talented hoaxer.
Around 1910, Charles Dawson was out walking near a farm at Piltdown Common in Sussex, England. Some of the roadway had been dug up for construction purposes, and in the exposed gravel, Dawson discovered what he believed to be a human parietal bone - a part of the skull. He later found more pieces of skull and what appeared to be an ape-like jawbone.
Dawson had donated fossils he'd found to the British Museum of Natural History for years, and had a working relationship with the Keeper of the Geology Department there - Arthur Smith Woodward. In 1912 Dawson wrote to Woodward, describing his strange discoveries at Piltdown. Woodward was intrigued.
Dawson then sent Woodward one of the specimens he had uncovered in the Piltdown gravel - a mysterious molar - which a very confused and excited Woodward identified as the molar of a hippopotamus. Soon after, Woodward joined Dawson at the Piltdown site - with a team of other experts in tow - and an archeological dig began in earnest.
More pieces of skull, another strange molar, and some ancient tools were discovered. Analysis of the jawbone that Dawson had found showed that while it certainly belonged to an ape, the teeth were worn down in a distinctly human fashion. Woodward was thrilled, believing that the Piltdown skull fragments and jawbone could be evidence of the missing evolutionary link between apes and humans, possibly over 500,000 years old.
Dawson and Woodward's discovery was announced officially in 1912 before the Geological Society of London, and casts of the artifacts were made available for other paleontologists to examine. Surgeons, geologists, anthropologists, and many others in the scientific community began attempts at reconstructing the skull - and it was chaotic.
While some critics questioned whether or not the skull fragments and jaw belonged together, many academics readily believed in the validity of the discovery and Woodward and Dawson’s theory. Though they didn’t fit together exactly, the jawbone and the skull fragments did appear to be the same age, and were found in close proximity.
“The 'dawn man',” wrote Gerrit Smith Miller of the Smithsonian Institution in 1915, “is the most ancient human type in which the form of the head and size of the brain are known. Its anatomy, as well as its geologic antiquity, is therefore of profound interest and worthy of very full consideration . . .
These precious geologic and archaeologic records furnish the only means we have of determining the age of Eoanthropus, the 'dawn man,' one of the most important and significant discoveries in the whole history of anthropology. We are indebted to geologist Charles Dawson and the palaeontologist Arthur Smith Woodward for preserving these ancient records and describing them with great fullness and accuracy . . ."
American anatomist William King Gregory studied the casts and endorsed the find as legitimate - despite stating, "It has been suspected by some they are not old at all; that they may represent a deliberate hoax . . . artificially fossilized and planted in the gravel-bed to fool the scientists." Very strange indeed.
But despite the suspicions of some, for decades, the Piltdown man - or Eoanthropus dawsoni - was considered part of the human evolutionary tree.
Widely recognized in the academic world, Charles Dawson died only a few years after his history-changing discoveries at Piltdown - succumbing to septicemia in 1916 at only 52 years old. In his lifetime, Dawson’s Piltdown man had given him the scientific recognition and acclaim he had always wanted. After Dawson’s death, however, his reputation would change . . . to put it mildly.
Turns out, Charles Dawson was no stranger to deception. He had published a historical account of Hastings Castle, which later turned out to be completely plagiarized from an old unpublished manuscript. He had purchased his beautiful estate by claiming to be doing so as a representative of the Sussex Archaeological Society . . . which was untrue.
But at the time of the Piltdown man’s unearthing, the public - and the scientific community, for that matter - were not aware of these falsifications. Eoanthropus dawsoni was included into textbooks and viewed as a factual member of human ancestry. Following Dawson’s death, Woodward became the champion of the monumental discovery, even publishing a book titled The Earliest Englishman. One of the reasons that the Piltdown man had been so widely accepted - despite some nagging inconsistencies - was that it cemented England as an important place in the human evolutionary tree.
In the 1920s, remains of an early bipedal primate called Australopithecus were found in South Africa. Taking its place alongside other relevant specimens, like Pithecanthropus and Neanderthals, Australopithecus made sense from an evolutionary standpoint. But scientists were scratching their heads - now that Australopithecus had arrived, where did Piltdown man fit into this family tree? Something wasn't quite right, but Eoanthropus dawsoni remained widely accepted - though it fell out of popularity.
Speculation began to grow that something was wrong with Piltdown man - some academics even suggesting that it was a complete hoax.
Religious groups that rejected evolution also began to take advantage of Dawson's suspicious find. As published in a 1923 issue of the Walther League Messenger, ". . . A few years ago Professor George Grant MacCurdy of the Yale Archeological Department stated that the skull bones were human but the rest ape, so that instead of one Eoanthropos Dawsoni . . . we really have the remains of a human being and the remains of a chimpanzee! The knock-out blow! World-renowned men of learning have openly declared that the Piltdown Man never existed as such and that the theories as to his place in man's ancestry or as to his being a developed 'Missing Link' are without fact and foundation."
By the late 1940s, significant advancements had been made in accurately testing and dating fossils. In 1953, bothered by the anomalous nature of Dawson’s decades-old discovery, British Museum geologist Kenneth Oakley and Oxford anthropologist Joseph Weiner decided to test the remains of the Piltdown Man. They hoped to determine once and for all when this strange distant relative of man had been roaming around England.
Using fluoride to test the age of the bones, Oakley and Weiner discovered that the portions of skull were around 500 years old, and that the jawbone dated back only a few decades. Not only were they not nearly old enough to have any relevance on the evolutionary timeline, they weren't from the same specimen.
To make matters worse, further testing revealed that the bones had been artificially aged using potassium dichromate and iron. To the naked eye, they appeared discolored and worn - but Oakley and Weiner were able to uncover the chemical evidence of tampering with more modern analysis. One of the biggest giveaways, however, was the Piltdown Man's teeth.
Humans and apes have remarkable similarities, and our skeletons are no exception. Our jawbones are nearly identical, we both have (ideally) 32 teeth. We both have incisors, and molars, and canines - though those in an ape are slightly larger. Ape jaws are a little bigger, a little more square, but not dramatically different than a human's. While the differences may be subtle, they are there and visible to the trained eye.
Apes are vegetarian, so their teeth are designed for breaking down fibrous plants. They are larger, with more surface area for grinding. This is also why the jaw is wider - tough plants require more jaw strength to chew. Humans, as omnivores, don't need such heavy duty teeth and jaws. Our teeth are smaller and flatter. The Piltdown Man’s jaw was an orangutan’s jaw, but the teeth had been meticulously filed down to appear more human prior to the artificial aging process.
All of the artifacts from Piltdown were determined to be faked - though some clearly involved less effort than the Piltdown skull. A shaped bone tool was a whittled elephant femur - probably an unlikely inhabitant of the British Isles - and a loose canine tooth from the dig was filed and painted with brown oil paint. The hoaxer hadn’t even bothered to use the chemical aging for that one.
Many historians agree that Charles Dawson himself was the hoaxer, and from the looks of his mustache, I see their point. But there has been a lot of speculation as to whether he acted alone or with others. Though Arthur Smith Woodward has been suggested as a possible participant in the hoax, most evidence seems to support that Woodward believed in the Piltdown Man and supported Dawson in good faith.
Some believe that the perpetrators may have been those in archeology circles who disliked Woodward and/or Dawson, and hoped that a discovery of fraud would publicly and permanently embarrass them. Even our old friend, Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was suggested as a possible suspect - he also dabbled in amateur archeology and had some connections to Dawson.
It is suspicious, however, that no other relevant remains were found at the Piltdown site after Dawson’s death. Additionally, further examination has shown that not only were the bones forged - they were forged badly. As mentioned, one of the teeth had been painted with artists’ oil paints, some others in the jawbone had begun to crack from the filing.
A dental putty had been used to cement some skull fragments together, and it had not been allowed to set properly, resulting in more broken fragments. Additionally, there were two dig sites at Piltdown - and bones found at both separate sites were determined to belong to the same unfortunate orangutan.
Two other amateur archeologists, Captain Guy St. Barbe and Major Reginald Marriot, reported to a junior zoologist at the British Museum that they had accidentally interrupted Dawson experimenting with bones and chemicals in his office in 1913. Dawson had also been casually asking around how one would make bones appear older, and how one might distinguish an ape skull from a human one - all hypothetically, of course. He also had recently purchased a human skull. Worried that making this suspicious behavior public might destroy the lives of Dawson's wife and family, these reports were kept private until Oakley and Weiner’s 1953 examinations.
A collaborative research project in 2016 utilized modern chemical analysis and 3D imaging to further deconstruct the falsified remains. Lead author of the project, Dr. Isabelle De Groote, concluded that "Although multiple individuals have been accused of producing the fake fossils, our analyses to understand the modus operandi show consistency between all the different specimens and on both sites. It is clear from our analysis that this work was likely all carried out by one forger: Charles Dawson."
The 19th and early 20th centuries were certainly strange times - I love learning about all the crazy goings-on, and I hope that you do, too.
Thanks again for listening, and please join me next Friday to learn about some Fairy Folklore. My references are in the show notes, as is a link to my website www.ursaminorcreations.com, and my email if you’d like to say hello.
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Happy Father’s day once again to Mr. Hebert, I hope you liked our episode this week, and much love to all of you listeners for tuning in.
Take care, and I’ll speak to you again next week.