Yeah. Not quite. From this webpage:
The hoax was swallowed uncritically
This is a half truth; almost no one publicly raised the possibility of a deliberate hoax. There were rumors circulating, however. William Gregory, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History wrote in Natural History in May of 1914:
"It has been suspected by some that geologically [the bones] are not that old at all; that they may even represent a deliberate hoax, a negro or Australian skull and a broken ape jaw, artificially fossilized and planted in the grave bed, to fool scientists."He went on, however, to vigorously deny the charge, concluding
"None of the experts who have scrutinized the specimens and the gravel pit and its surroundings has doubted the genuineness of the discovery."In general, however, the finds were accepted as being genuine fossils but were not accepted uncritically as being from an ancient human ancestor. There was an early and recurring doubt that the jaw and the skull were from two different animals, that the jaw was from an archaic chimpanzee and that the skull was from a relatively modern human being. Notable critics include Dr. David Waterston of King's College, the French paleontologists Marcellin Boule and Ernest Robert Lenoir, Gerrit Miller, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian, and Professor Ales Hrdlicka.
Initially there were many more critics, e.g. Osborn. However the finding of the second skull converted many of the critics. Finding a jaw from one animal near the skull of another might be an accident of juxtaposition -- two such finds is quite unlikely to be an accident. Some critics, e.g. Lenoir and Hrdlicka remained unconvinced none-the-less.
The following quote comes from a "The Evolution of Man", a 1927 book by Grafton Elliot Smith:
"Yet it [the skullcap] was found in association with the fragment of a jaw presenting so close a resemblance to the type hitherto known only in Apes that for more than twelve years many competent biologists have been claiming it to be the remains of a Chimpanzee."Franz Weidenreich in 1946, in his book "Apes, Giants, and Men" (Note that Weidenreich was an extremely respected scientist, having done most of the work on the Peking Man skulls):
In this connection, another fact should be considered. We know of a lower jaw from the Lower Pleistocene of southern England which is anatomically, without any doubt, the jaw of an anthropoid. The trouble is that this jaw, although generally acknowledged as a simian jaw, has been attributed to man because it was found mixed with fragments of an undoubtedly human brain case. I am referring to the famous Piltdown finds and to Eoanthropus, as the reconstructed human type has been called by the English authors... Therefore, both skeletal elements cannot belong to the same skull.It should also be mentioned that in 1950 Ashley Montagu and Alvan T. Marston mounted major attacks on the interpretation of the Piltdown fossils as being from a single animal.