Piltdown man

PILTDOWN MAN is one of the most famous frauds in the history of science. In 1912 Charles Dawson discovered the first of two skulls found in the Piltdown quarry in Sussex, England. These skulls were of an apparent primitive hominid, an ancestor of man. Piltdown man, or Eoanthropus dawsoni, caused uproar. He was the expected "missing link" which everyone was looking for; it was a mixture of human and ape with a brow of Homo sapiens and a primitive jaw.
As the years went by and new finds of ancient hominids were made, Piltdown man became inconsistent and didn't fit in, a creature without a place in the human family tree. In 1953, the truth came out. Piltdown man was a hoax.

	" In 1953, the truth came out. Piltdown man was a hoax. "
Piltdown Hoax

For forty years they were considered one of the archaeological finds of the century: A fragment of jaw and a part of a skull that proved man evolved from the apes. Since 1953 the name "Piltdown" has been associated with a great scientific fraud. It was in that year that a group of scientists, lead by Kenneth Page Oakley, attempted to use the new method of fluorine testing to get a more exact date on the bones. The jaw was modern and the skull only six hundred years old.

	" The jaw was modern and the skull only six hundred years old. "
Skull Fragments of Piltdown Man

The jaw was really that of an orangutan. It had been filed down and parts that might have suggested it's simian origin were broken off. Both pieces had been treated to suggest great age. Interestingly, Piltdown was proclaimed genuine by several of the most brilliant British scientists of the day: Arthur Smith Woodward, Arthur Keith and Grafton Elliot Smith. How did this fool the best scientific minds of the time?

	"Interestingly, Piltdown was proclaimed genuine by several of the most brilliant British scientists of the day"
Hinton and Dawnson

Even as early as 1914, though, there were those that doubted the fossils. William King Gregory wrote, "It has been suspected by some that geologically [the specimens] are not old at all; that they may even represent a deliberate hoax..." Who perpetrated the hoax? Dawson was an English solicitor who sought and collected fossils. Even before the find in Piltdown he was known as the "Wizard of Sussex" because of his many different and unusual finds. These included a reptile, a mammal and a plant. Each boar a scientific name with dawsoni in it. Piltdown was his fourth: Eoanthropus dawsoni, "Dawson's Dawn Man," in Latin.