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Fossil fools: Return to Piltdown
BBC ^ | Thursday, 13 November, 2003, 03:33 GMT | Paul Rincon

Posted on 11/13/2003 5:06:54 AM PST by Colosis

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Last Updated: Thursday, 13 November, 2003, 03:33 GMT

Fossil fools: Return to Piltdown

By Paul Rincon


BBC Science


The fossil remains of early humans are exceptionally rare. Scientists trying to reconstruct the evolutionary history of our species often have to draw long, dotted lines between a few key fossils.

Face, Skull, Natural History Museum
Piltdown reconstruction: The face of a fraud

So introducing a bogus ancestor into our family tree can throw the entire study of human evolution off course.

This is exactly what happened on 18th December 1912, when the Piltdown skull was thrown into the spotlight before a crowded meeting of the Geological Society in London.

The discovery generated frenzied excitement. Piltdown man was argued to be 500,000 years old and therefore an irrefutable "missing link" between humans and apes.

Only one fossil of such great antiquity was accepted by British scientists of the day - the Heidelberg jaw found in 1907. But Piltdown, named after the Sussex village where it was discovered, was more complete - and English to boot.

Practical joke

Plaudits were heaped on the amateur geologist Charles Dawson and his friend Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of geology at the British (now Natural History) Museum, who had unearthed the fossil together.

Piltdown had a large, human-like braincase, but its jaw was ape-like, fitting predictions about how our ancestors looked. Bones from a beaver, rhino and hippo were also found, along with supposed stone tools known as eoliths.

In 1914, a curious elephant bone implement was found under a hedge at Piltdown. One unidentified wag suggested that it looked like a cricket bat.

Piltdown is a piece of nonsense which has used up a phenomenal amount of good time


Andy Currant

In fact, Piltdown man was a modern forgery and not even entirely male. The jaw belonged to a female orang-utan. The skull was human. Much of the material had been stained brown to make it look fossilised.

"The cricket bat was a joke - though Dawson and Woodward obviously didn't get it," says Dr Andy Currant, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London.

Piltdown was accepted as genuine until 1953, when scientists from Oxford University and the British Museum used chemical testing to prove it was a fake.

The high forehead and heavy jaw of Piltdown had reinforced misconceptions that human brains grew large at an early stage in our species' evolution. In 1925, a genuine fossil ancestor from South Africa was dismissed in England because it didn't look like Piltdown.

Missing artefacts

The hoaxers made other anatomical gaffes. They filed down molars in the jaw to remove obvious orang-utan dental traits, but were blissfully ignorant of the way human teeth wear down.

"Human teeth wear more on the buccal [cheek] side of the crown and not as much on the lingual [tongue] side," says Professor Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley.

Bat, BBC/Natural History Museum
The joke: The "first Englishman" had a "cricket bat"

Where the hoaxers obtained their specimens is a mystery. One possible trail leads to the Natural History Museum. In 1911, the British Museum bought a collection of animal remains from Borneo. An original inventory appears to list the lower jaw of an orang-utan as missing.

Radiocarbon dating showed the human skull from Piltdown was less than 1,000 years old. Its unusual thickness suggests the owner suffered from Paget's disease, a hereditary thickening of bone.

A similar skull reportedly disappeared in the 1900s from Hastings Museum, an institution with which Charles Dawson had strong connections.

Dawson has long been prime suspect as the forger. But a clever piece of scientific detective work has implicated another character in the saga.

Suspects list

In 1976, an old canvas trunk belonging to Martin Hinton, a volunteer in Smith Woodward's geology department at the time of Piltdown, was found in the Natural History Museum.

It contained mammal bones and teeth stained a similar mahogany brown as the Piltdown material and carved like the cricket bat.

PILTDOWN MAN IN TIME

1911 - first skull fossils found

1912 - discoveries publicised

1914 - cricket bat surfaces

1915 - Charles Dawson dies

1949 - Piltdown ages queried

1953 - Fossil fakes unmasked

Palaeontologist Brian Gardiner has subjected the Piltdown bones and the Hinton items to a technique called flame atomic absorption.

The chemical signature of the Piltdown material matches Hinton's bones and teeth, suggesting they were stained using the same methods.

Gardiner believes this lays the blame squarely at Hinton's door. But not everyone is convinced.

The continuing fascination with Piltdown, 50 years after it was exposed, stems partly from its status as an unsolved case.

The list of suspects is long and constantly expanding. One investigator has even accused Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - creator of Sherlock Holmes - of conceiving the hoax.

Many hands

Professor Chris Stringer, palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum and Andy Currant believe Charles Dawson was the main culprit, planting everything except perhaps the cricket bat.

Dawson was no stranger to archaeological forgeries. He exhibited bizarre phoney fossil toads and almost certainly forged two Roman tiles with rare inscriptions.

Hinton
Many suspect Hinton was behind the fraud - but was he?

"Ninety-nine per cent of the evidence points towards Dawson. But Hinton might have been behind the cricket bat," says Currant.

"Whoever planted the cricket bat wasn't part of the original hoax and had a different message, namely: 'We're on to you and we're going to mess your site up,'" says Stringer.

This may have prompted the original forger to plant more human bones at a site nearby called Piltdown II. Dawson discovered these in 1915.

"Piltdown II was an attempt by the original forger to throw people off the original site. It was a reaction to the discovery of odd material they hadn't planted," adds Currant.

Wasted time

Whether Hinton planted all the material, or just some, he had a motive. He quarrelled with Smith Woodward over payment he said he was owed for an academic contract. He may have wanted to humiliate his boss as an act of revenge.

But Smith Woodward's arrogance and aloofness had made him many enemies in the British Museum, raising the possibility that others assisted Hinton in his vendetta.

Map, BBC

At a dinner party in 1975, Kenneth Oakley, one of the team that exposed Piltdown in 1953, allegedly named Charles Chatwin as a conspirator. Chatwin was an assistant for Smith Woodward in the geology department at the time of Piltdown.

If the hoaxers could see the fuss still generated by their handiwork, they would no doubt be amused.

"Piltdown is a piece of nonsense which has used up a phenomenal amount of good time," says Currant.

"I'd like to see the 50th anniversary commemorated by the crushing of all the material and the burning of the Piltdown archive."

Piltdown Man: The Context And Exposure Of A Scientific Forgery is an exhibition that runs at the Natural History Museum from 25 November.

The fraud is also the subject of the Pfizer Annual Science Forum at the museum on the same date.





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TOPICS: Culture/Society; United Kingdom
KEYWORDS: darwin; godsgravesglyphs
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1 posted on 11/13/2003 5:06:54 AM PST by Colosis
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To: Colosis
looks like Gollum
2 posted on 11/13/2003 5:14:40 AM PST by camle (no fool like a damned fool)
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To: Colosis
For reference...
3 posted on 11/13/2003 5:15:10 AM PST by GrandEagle (I would like to say a hearty, heart felt THANKS to those who served in our nations armed forces.)
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To: camle
looks like Gollum

I was thinking James Carville.

4 posted on 11/13/2003 5:26:02 AM PST by asformeandformyhouse (If it's not a baby, then you're not pregnant.)
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To: asformeandformyhouse
that'll work. he's a cro-magnon lizard if ever I seen one!
5 posted on 11/13/2003 5:28:46 AM PST by camle (no fool like a damned fool)
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To: Colosis
Not everyone was fooled:

The association of a human cranial vault with a pongid mandible into the taxon Eoanthropus dawsoni (1) was not accepted by all authorities. The dualist theory, that the two elements were associated by chance in the same gravels, was proposed as an alternative by David Waterston, professor of anatomy at King's College, London (2); and the distinguished zoologist Gerrit S. Miller, of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., strongly supported this point of view (3, 4).

Miller went so far as to restrict Woodward's name to the cranial fragment, describing the jaw as that of a new species of chimpanzee, Pan vetus (3 ) . His paper contains this remarkable statement, which now reads like prophecy:

"Deliberate malice could hardly have been more successful than the hazards of deposition in so breaking the fossils as to give free scope to individual judgement in fitting the parts together."

The late T. D. McCown told one of us (C.P.G.) in 1966 that Miller had confided to him his suspicion that things were not quite right about Piltdown but had been persuaded by his colIeagues not to publish his suspicion on the grounds that without positive proof this would be too serious an allegation of scientific fraud.

It may be that Miller already suspected fraudulence when he wrote his 1915 paper. For a number of reasons, however, this seems unlikely; in particular, his description of the mandible as a new species of ape was too serious a committal if at that time he believed its features might not be wholly natural.

Americans suspected something was wrong as early as 1915

6 posted on 11/13/2003 5:33:45 AM PST by js1138
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To: camle
A fraud? I could swear I used to work with this guy;

Face, Skull, Natural History Museum

He had a spot worn on the time clock where he leaned, waiting for the time to punch out.

7 posted on 11/13/2003 5:34:27 AM PST by NicknamedBob (Tag line roulette wheel spinning, ... spinning, ... (FREE SPIN))
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To: <1/1,000,000th%; Aric2000; balrog666; BMCDA; CobaltBlue; Condorman; Dimensio; Doctor Stochastic; ...
Piltdown ping.
8 posted on 11/13/2003 5:37:08 AM PST by js1138
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To: js1138
Within a few decades, Piltdown Man was looking like an odd, very isolated data point.

Roger Lewin quotes Sherwood Washburn as saying
"I remember writing a paper on human evolution in 1944, and I simply left Piltdown out. You could make sense of human evolution if you didn't try to put Piltdown into it."
Piltdown Man, by Richard Harter.
9 posted on 11/13/2003 5:53:15 AM PST by VadeRetro
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To: Colosis
Piltdown was accepted as genuine until 1953,...

More correctly, British scientists accepted Piltdown. American, French, and German scientists were more skeptical, at least according to the published papers. (Similar to the French and the N-Rays.)

10 posted on 11/13/2003 6:08:51 AM PST by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch is der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)
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To: VadeRetro
Piltdown is an example of a designed entity rather than an evolved one.
11 posted on 11/13/2003 6:12:22 AM PST by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch is der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)
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To: Doctor Stochastic
The only evidence there ever was for the "Out of England" theory and it just didn't hold up.
12 posted on 11/13/2003 6:27:27 AM PST by VadeRetro
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To: VadeRetro
The timing here is critical. Within a couple of years of the "discovery" England was at war with Germany and not inclined to take any scientific criticism from them.

The specimens were locked away in a vault and not available for examination for 40 years. (another world war, a depression, and a lot of national pride got in the way)

This is an example of what can happen when you place the testimony of men above the examination and analysis of evidence.

In the long term scheme of things I think of this the way I might think of a murder investigation in which the allege perp has gunpowder residue on his hand, the victim's blood on his clothing, his fingerprints on the victim's wallet, his image on surveillance cameras, and a bit of false testimony from the arresting officer. Do you throw the case out because the police botched Miranda? In the legal system, maybe, but it makes not a whit of difference as to what really happened.
13 posted on 11/13/2003 6:42:23 AM PST by js1138
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To: Colosis
Off topic, but you have a really great home page.

http://www.freerepublic.com/~colosis/
14 posted on 11/13/2003 6:46:16 AM PST by js1138
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To: All
We had a Piltdown Man thread last week: The rise and fall of Piltdown Man, a 20th-century hoax.
15 posted on 11/13/2003 6:55:25 AM PST by PatrickHenry
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To: PatrickHenry
Yes but it did have my number 6:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1020785/posts?page=6#6
16 posted on 11/13/2003 6:57:35 AM PST by js1138
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To: PatrickHenry
Not to mention Piltdown Rides Again.
17 posted on 11/13/2003 6:59:41 AM PST by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch is der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)
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To: Colosis
Piltdown was accepted as genuine until 1953...

Guess it depends on who you believe. There were folks as early as 1913 who questioned Piltdown.

18 posted on 11/13/2003 8:33:39 AM PST by <1/1,000,000th%
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To: Doctor Stochastic; Piltdown_Woman
Not to mention Piltdown Rides Again.

Don't forget Piltdown_Woman. :-)

19 posted on 11/13/2003 8:43:03 AM PST by RadioAstronomer
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To: Doctor Stochastic
Piltdown is an example of a designed entity rather than an evolved one.

21 syllables, limitless wisdom. Well done.
20 posted on 11/13/2003 8:44:31 AM PST by whattajoke (Neutiquam erro.)
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