The Piltdown Man Hoax

The story as it is told

In 1912 an amateur fossil hunter was digging in a gravel pit in Sussex when he turned up the thing scientists had been dreaming of: the missing link. It was a human-like skull with an ape-like jaw, half a million years old or more. The experts hailed it as the earliest Englishman.

Britain, with no early human of its own to set beside Germany's Heidelberg jaw, had found one at last. It sat for 41 years in the museum. Then scientists took a closer look and proved the whole thing a fake, and who made it has been argued over ever since.

What we can confirm

Charles Dawson was a solicitor and keen amateur geologist in Sussex. On February 14, 1912, he wrote to Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum, about part of a human skull from a gravel pit at Barkham Manor, near Piltdown. In May he handed the finds over with the words "How's that for Heidelberg?", a jab at the famous German jaw found in 1907 (British Geological Survey timeline).

News leaked before the scientists spoke. On November 21, 1912, the Manchester Guardian ran "The earliest man? Remarkable discovery in Sussex." The formal unveiling came on December 18, 1912, at a packed meeting of the Geological Society of London at Burlington House. Dawson and Woodward's paper, printed in the Society's Quarterly Journal in March 1913, is headed "Read December 18th, 1912." It named a new genus and species, Eoanthropus dawsoni, "Dawson's dawn man." The plates show the skull pieces and a lower jaw with two worn molars.

More finds kept arriving. They included an ape-like canine tooth, found by Teilhard de Chardin in 1913, a bone tool shaped "rather like the end of a cricket-bat" in 1914, and a second site, "Piltdown II," which Dawson reported in a letter of January 9, 1915. He never revealed exactly where it was. Dawson died on August 10, 1916, aged 52. In 1938 a stone memorial was unveiled at the pit.

Doubts surfaced slowly. In 1949 Kenneth Oakley of the Natural History Museum ran a fluorine test. The jaw and skull gave similar values, so they still looked like a matched pair, but the values were much lower than expected, implying Piltdown Man was far younger than claimed. In 1953 Joseph Weiner of Oxford examined the remains and became convinced the molars had been filed down. He filed and stained chimpanzee teeth to show how it could be done. With Wilfrid Le Gros Clark and Oakley, he found the canine had been stained with a mix that included Vandyke brown paint. The Times announced the "elaborate hoax" on November 21, 1953, 41 years to the day after the Guardian scoop. A 1954 presentation concluded the jaw was from a modern ape, probably a young female orangutan.

The question was who did it. The BGS lists more than a dozen people who have been accused, from Teilhard de Chardin to Arthur Conan Doyle, plus "Chipper the goose (in jest!)". In 2016 a team led by Isabelle De Groote re-examined the finds with DNA analysis and CT scanning. They concluded that a single orangutan specimen and at least two human specimens were "highly likely" used. The same methods, brown staining, packed gravel and filler, appear at both sites. They linked the work to "a single forger-Charles Dawson," adding: "Whether Dawson acted alone is uncertain."

The facts

• Feb 14, 1912 letter; "How's that for Heidelberg?"; Guardian story Nov 21, 1912; unveiling Dec 18, 1912 at Burlington House; Piltdown II letter Jan 9, 1915; Dawson's death Aug 10, 1916; 1938 memorial; 1949 fluorine test; Weiner's filing experiment; Vandyke brown; Times Nov 21, 1953; orangutan finding 1954; list of accused. BGS Earthwise, "Piltdown Man forgery," earthwise.bgs.ac.uk
• Paper "Read December 18th, 1912"; Eoanthropus dawsoni, gen. et sp. nov.; Plate XX fig. 2 is the "Right mandibular ramus" with first and second molars. QJGS vol. 69 (1913), p. 117 and plate explanations, archive.org
• 2016 findings and quotes. De Groote et al., Royal Society Open Science 3:160328, abstract at PubMed, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (DOI 10.1098/rsos.160328)

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