A GREAT SCIENTIFIC FRAUD : TRAGEDY OF PILT DOWN MAN

 PILT DOWN CRIME

The big-brained, ape-jawed Piltdown Man was hailed as a major missing link in human evolution when he was discovered in a gravel pit outside a small U.K. village in 1912.Piltdown Man turned out to be one of the most famous frauds in scientific history—a human cranium paired with an orangutan’s jaw and teeth.

The saga of Piltdown started in 1907. That year, a sand mine worker in Germany discovered the jaw bone of Homo heidelbergensis — a 200,000-to-600,000-year-old hominine now recognized as a likely common ancestor to both modern humans and Neanderthals.

5 years later, Charles Dawson, a professional lawyer and amateur fossil hunter in Sussex, U.K. (now East Sussex, U.K.), wrote to his friend, paleontologist Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, announcing that he had uncovered a “thick portion of a human skull which will rival H. heidelbergensis in solidity” near the Sussex village of Piltdown.

Smith Woodward and Dawson jointly presented their findings to the Geological Society of London in 1912. From their first excavation, they claimed to have discovered several pieces of a humanlike skull, an apelike mandible, some worn molar teeth, stone tools, and fossilized animals. Excavations over the following 2 years by the team revealed canine teeth that were somewhere in between a human’s and an ape’s in size. Based on the bones’ color and the fossilized animals surrounding them, Dawson and Smith Woodward speculated that the individual lived some 500,000 years ago. The U.K. human evolution research community enthusiastically embraced Eoanthropus dawsoni, better known as the pilt down man which was considered to be a missing link at that time. 

As more and more hominine fossils were discovered over the next few decades in Africa, China, and Indonesia, however, Piltdown Man lost its significance as a singular missing link. The hoax came to light in 1953 when scientists at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, using the then-new technique of fluorine dating—which relies on the fact that older bones absorb more fluoride from groundwater over time—revealed that Piltdown Man’s bones were not all the same age. Further analysis revealed they were an amalgam of carefully carved and stained human and ape bones.

The potential perpetrators included Dawson and Smith Woodward, naturally, but also Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest who assisted the excavation, and Martin Hinton, a volunteer who worked with Smith Woodward, among others. Even Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was considered.

This 1915 painting by John Cooke depicts scientists comparing Piltdown Man's remains to other species. Charles Dawson and Sir Arthur Smith Woodward stand next to each other toward the upper right.

 

JOHN COOKE/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Isabelle De Groote, a paleoanthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the United Kingdom, began looking into the question in 2009, applying modern scanning technology and DNA analysis to the original materials. She and colleagues compared computer tomography (CT) scans of the mandible and teeth to known ape specimens and concluded that all these pieces originated from an orangutan. DNA sequencing of the teeth suggested they all came from the same orangutan, which De Groote suspects the forger or forgers might have obtained from a curiosities shop.

Examining the CT scans, De Groote also noticed a strange, off-white putty on the surface of virtually every bone. This putty had been painted over and stained, and in some cases was used to fill in cracks and gaps that the forger accidentally created. Inside the crania and teeth, she found tiny pebbles stuffed inside hollow chambers sealed over with the same putty. De Groote thinks the hoaxer used these pebbles to weigh down the bones, as fossilized bones are noticeably heavier than recent bones.

The likeliest hand belonged to Charles Dawson, who died almost exactly 100 years ago, De Groote says. An amateur geologist, archaeologist, and historian, he regularly attended meetings of geologists and anthropologists, she notes. He was an inveterate fossil hunter with access to collections and the knowledge of what prehistoric finds should look like. He also had a habit of small-time forgery, with several other of his less-celebrated findings later being shown to be fakes. More than anything, he was desperate for acceptance and recognition within the U.K. scientific community, De Groote says.

 

Charles Dawson, left, and Sir Arthur Smith Woodward excavate the gravel pit outside U.K. village Piltdown.

 

COURTESY OF ISABELLE DE GROOTE

(Source: sciencemag.org)