The Piltdown Man Hoax

Skull of the "Eoanthropus Dawsoni"

In 1912, the Piltdown Man was presented to the Geological Society of London. Near the village of Piltdown in southern England, a laborer was digging in a gravel pit when he found a piece of what appeared to be a skull. He gave it to local archaeology hobbyist Charles Dawson, who thought it looked like some ancient human remains. 

Dawson brought the skull fragment and other bones from the site, to the Natural History Museum in London. Along with Arthur Smith Woodward, the museum’s Keeper of Geology, the pair believed they had skeletal evidence of the missing evolutionary link between apes and humans.

Smith Woodward reconstructed the skull fragments and hypothesized that they belonged to a human ancestor from 500,000 years ago. The discovery was announced at a Geological Society meeting and was given the Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawn-man").

It got a lot of attention from the public, but there were scientists that said the skull was not authentic. Still, it received more attention and the idea that such a discovery had been made in England was very appealing.

  

It wasn't until 1953 that new tests on the skull revealed the Piltdown Man to be an elaborate hoax.

Who perpetrated the hoax? That is still not certain but Dawson and Woodward are the leading suspects. The skull was constructed in part from orangutan bones, and it was done well enough to fool archaeologists for more than 40 years. 

A curious other suspect was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame. Doyle lived near the site and had access. He was also a doctor and a fossil collector and had specialized knowledge of anatomy and would have had access to bones. But Doyle was also a spiritualist who claimed to be able to communicate with the dead. He also was upset with the scientific community that dismissed his séances. Other than revenge, there seems to be little motive for Doyle perpetrating the hoax.  I have also read that Doyle may have left clues about the hoax in his novel The Lost World.

The fossil was introduced as evidence by Clarence Darrow in defense of John Scopes during the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. Darrow died in 1938, fifteen years before Piltdown Man was exposed as a fraud.

The Piltdown hoax is still talked about because (in a good way) it generated a lot of attention around the subject of human evolution and because it remained accepted for such a long time before it was debunked.