The Piltdown Plot

What would life be if we didn't have colorful characters to liven it up a bit for us? There have been amazing hoaxes throughout history, many of which make us laugh and wince at the same time, thinking, good grief, how on earth could anyone fall for that? What was it, a more innocent time, or was everyone just plain stupid? The truth is we're all credulous to an embarrassing extent. How many times have you accepted something just on somebody's say so, because they 'looked like' or 'talked like' or 'were renowned as' experts? Sometimes we accept things as facts mainly because we just plain want to believe in them – they match the preconceived ideas we've had and so, you know, make sense.

In the early years of the Twentieth Century, Charles Darwin's formerly controversial theory about Evolution, detailed in his 1859 book 'On the Origin of Species' and 1871 book 'The Descent of Man', had begun to gain a wide acceptance. The large number of Paleontological evidences that were surfacing in various parts of the world had only conclusively validated Darwin's studies, and Evolutionary Science was no longer a matter of life-threatening consequences. In fact, far from being morally offended at being linked to apes, the public at large were now enthusiastic and proud about important fossils being discovered within their territories – after all, this signified that their ancestors had been the forerunners of Humankind, which accorded them a higher position on the Family Tree as compared to their less fortunate neighbors whose lands hadn't as yet yielded any ancestral remains.

In 1856 the Neanderthal Man had been discovered by Carl Fuhlrott in Germany, although its importance in supporting Darwin's theories was not fully understood until 1897. Remains of Primitive Man were also discovered in France, Germany, Belgium, in Dutch Indonesia, and on the African and American Continents. Nothing however surfaced in England for the longest time and this, given England's then important and leading position amongst the nations of the world, was seen as a tad bit embarrassing. No, actually, outright intolerable, and the indigenous anthropologists, archaeologists, and paleontologists doubled all efforts to find evidence of the missing English links between humans and apes. They were quite sure these existed – after all it had to be quite, quite inconceivable that the great and resourceful English Race hadn't descended from apes when everybody else seemed to have had.

Finally, on 5 December 1912, the British Science Journal proudly published an article corroborating that, YES, the English too had Simian ancestors. Evidence dating to the Pleistocene Period had evidently begun to surface in Sussex two years earlier. The finders were Charles Dawson, a Lawyer and an Amateur Anthropologist, and Arthur Smith Woodward, a Professional Paleontologist of considerable repute and keeper of Geology at the British Museum. They claimed to have found Cranial Fragments, a jawbone and a canine tooth of an 'English' ape-man, along with the fossilized remains of animals and primitive stone weapons. Later on more fossils were discovered nearby. As the fossils had been found in the Piltdown Quarry in the River Ouse basin in Sussex, the finding came to be popularly known as the Piltdown Man – the discoverers themselves named it Eoanthropus dawsoni or Dawson’s Dawn Man. The Dawn Man had a skull that was recognizably human and a jaw that was recognizably like that of an ape. Altogether, when alive, he must have been a rather ugly chap, and must have required a great deal of working to evolve finally into the typical clean-cut Englishman.

The finding of the Dawn/Piltdown Man was hailed in all the major newspapers and scientific journals as a major, ground-breaking (pun intended) discovery, and a whole mountain of work was done on it. It was shortly found that the features and characteristics of the fossils were at unexplainable tangents from those of the more human-like discoveries being made elsewhere – the Cro-magnon man, the Neanderthal man, the Java Man, the fossils found in China. These clearly showed that human development had occurred in the jaw first and in the skull next – the Dawn/Piltdown Man on the other hand had developed the other way around. After much scientific debate it was decided that these differences were simply because the Dawn/Piltdown Man had evolved a long time before the others. The English, of course, received this news with great delight and the prestige of the two original fossil finders rocketed. Of course there were distinguished skeptics like the English Scientist, Sir Ray Lankester, Professor David Waterston of the University of London and a few others, who had questioned many aspects of the findings from the start and had even said outright that the 'big-brained' discovery was really a bird-brained mistake. But such was the enthusiasm of having 'finally proven' Darwin's theory and especially in 'this England of ours' that nobody wanted to listen to them, and for the next forty years, from 1910 to 1950, the Dawn/Piltdown man was honored as a venerable and veritable ancestor.

In 1950/53 the good life came to an end. Two Professors from Oxford, Professor Joseph Weiner and Professor W. Le Gros, and Dr. Kenneth Oakley of the Natural History Museum in London, armed with modern technological equipment, proved once and for all that the whole thing had been nothing more than a grand hoax. The venerable ancestor it was now found was only partly human – in his cranium and that was only about 500 years old, not 500,000 years old as had been widely estimated. His Simian jaw was just that, and had once belonged to a modern Orangutan, with the teeth having been deliberately filed down and the whole thing artificially stained in equally modern times. Of course some of the other fossils were found to be genuine, but it turned out they had come from as far as Tunisia and Malta and not during the Dawn/Piltdown Man's lifetime. An Elephant thigh-bone 'implement', whose very curious cricket bat shape had given rise to jokes about prehistoric cricket, was also now very solemnly declared to be a fake. It was altogether a straight egg in the face of the esteemed Scientific community, especially in light of their vigorous defense of the Dawn/Piltdown Man earlier. Now, understandably, they couldn't distance themselves enough from 'that' embarrassment. There was a great deal of talk about how Scientists should hereafter be more careful and critical in evaluating evidence, and there were also the congratulatory sparks about having discovered, by courtesy of this fraud, new chemical analysis and dating techniques, which all very well and good. But the question that remained now was who had perpetrated this hoax?

There are many probable and improbable candidates, including famously Arthur Conan Doyle, but the one that seems most likely was perhaps the man with the same initials as the Theorist of Evolution, Charles Dawson. While many people argue against his role in the affair – he was such a respectable fellow after all – the evidence against him, even if circumstantial, seems quite conclusive. He had both the expertise and the opportunity for planting the hoax, and, moreover and definitely not to be overlooked, our Mr. Dawson had a prior established record of finding fantastic fakes. These included the fossilized teeth of an unknown prehistoric creature that was named Plagiaulax dawsoni (yes, Mr. Dawson was heaped with such honors), a cast iron Roman Statuette (casting iron was a skill largely unknown to the Romans), a hafted stone-axe, an ancient timber boat, petrified toads inside flints, sea-serpents in the English Channel, unicorn horns on horses, and a new human species. He also inventively attempted to cross a goldfish and a carp in order to produce a golden carp. Was Mr. Dawson castigated for these activities? No, he was awarded with Fellowships to the Geological Society and the Society of Antiquaries. Wouldn't that inspire just anybody to be more fruitful? Especially a 'respectable fellow' with, as it seems here, a wicked sense of humor.

Quite unsurprisingly, no more fossils were unearthed in Sussex after his untimely death from septicaemia in 1916. A pity, I think. Because practise makes perfect and it would have been entertaining if not enlightening to see the other imaginative takes on natural history that the man would undoubtedly have come up with in time.