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| Piltdown Man's Reconstructed Skull |
Between 1911 and 1915, researcher Charles Dawson found fragments of a cranium, a tooth and some tools in a gravel deposit in Piltdown, in Sussex, England. The scientific world was agog with the findings — anthropologists believed that the fossilized remains of an ancient hominid had been discovered, a missing link between ape and man. The fossil was called the Piltdown man after the area in which he was found. However, much as the word Edsel has become synonymous with lemon, Piltdown has become synonymous with fraud. It took 40 years for the discovery to be scientifically disproved. On this date in 1953, the Piltdown man was declared a fake. The skull was found to be composed of a combination of the remains of a man and an orangutan.
Identity of the forger
The identity of the Piltdown forger remains unknown, but suspects have included Dawson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Arthur Keith, Martin A. C. Hinton, Horace de Vere Cole and Arthur Conan Doyle as well as numerous others.
The recent focus on Charles Dawson as the sole forger is supported by the gradual accumulation of evidence regarding other archaeological hoaxes he perpetrated in the decade or two prior to the Piltdown discovery. Dr Miles Russell of Bournemouth University has recently conducted a detailed analysis of Charles Dawson's antiquarian collection and it is clear at least 38 are obvious fakes. Among these are the teeth of a reptile/mammal hybrid, Plagiaulax dawsoni, "found" in 1895 (and whose teeth had been filed down in the same way that the teeth of Piltdown man would be some 20 years later), the so-called "shadow figures" on the walls of Hastings Castle, a unique hafted stone axe, the Bexhill boat (a hybrid sea faring vessel), the Pevensey bricks (allegedly the latest datable "finds" from Roman Britain), the contents of the Lavant Caves (a fraudulent "flint mine"), the Beauport Park "Roman" statuette (a hybrid iron object), the Bulverhythe Hammer (shaped with an iron knife in the same way as Piltdown elephant bone implement would later be), a fraudulent "Chinese" bronze vase, the Brighton "Toad in the Hole" (a toad entombed within a flint nodule), the English Channel sea serpent, the Uckfield Horseshoe (another hybrid iron object) and the Lewes Prick Spur. Of his antiquarian publications, most demonstrate evidence of plagiarism or at least naïve referencing. At Piltdown itself, of the faked skull, jaw, teeth, animal bone assemblage, flint tools, and other remains, Dr Russell has shown that the only clear suspect is Charles Dawson, stating that: "Piltdown was not a 'one-off' hoax, more the culmination of a life's work".
Dawson was in fact a suspect from the very beginning. On one occasion, as an example, a collection of flints he exchanged with another collector, Hugh Morris, turned out to have been aged with chemicals, a point Morris noted down at the time and which was later unearthed. There were also numerous individuals in the Sussex area well-acquainted with Dawson who long held doubts about Piltdown and of Dawson's role in the matter, but given the sheer weight of scholarly affirmation regarding the find few if any were willing to publicly speak out for fear of being ridiculed for their trouble.
His initial motivations may well have lain along the lines of gaining further fame and notoriety in his native Sussex, but it is clear that his increasingly successful early frauds may well have emboldened him to pull off the master stroke that would have landed him his most cherished goal, that of a fellowship in the prestigious Royal Society. It was a long ambition that ultimately went unfulfilled.
"Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it."
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