In 1907 a group of Belgian, French and German scientists discovered the first fossils that shed light on human evolution. A jaw of remarkable importance for anthropology was found near the German city of Heidelberg as the oldest fossil of what was to be a new species, Homo heidelbergensis . At that time, the geopolitical ties between the United Kingdom and the continent were relatively weak, tensions that were revealed years later with the outbreak of the First World War. The British, jealous of these finds, wanted to find their own “primitive man” to bring glory to their lands.
In this context archaeologists Charles Dawson and Smith Woodward appeared . At a meeting of the Geological Society of London in December 1912, they claimed to have discovered the missing link between apes and humans with the discovery of fossils in the town of Piltdown, south London. These included an apelike jaw, human-like skull parts, and a canine tooth that could well have belonged to either species. Together they seemed to suggest that its owner had exhibited characteristics of both and supported Darwinian postulates.
They called their discovery Eoanthropus dawsoni , although it was commonly known as the Piltdown Man. Most of the scientific community and the public accepted the story as true, save for a few scientists, mostly from outside the UK, who expressed skepticism about the Piltdown finding. Three years later, Dawson had a stroke of luck and found the remains of a second Piltdown Man , calming the few remaining skeptics. Paleontologists pointed to it as the direct primitive source of modern man, and even textbooks began to include it in their pages.
Over the next several decades, more human fossils were discovered, but scientists noted that they had little in common with Piltdown Man. The development of new chemical dating methods allowed it to be reexamined, and in 1953 three renowned British anthropologists proved it was all a sham. The skull once belonged to a medieval man, that is, about 500 years old and not 50,000 years old as Dawson had suggested; the jaw was from an orangutan and the canine from a chimpanzee. Not only were they not that old, but the fossils actually belonged to different species . In addition, tests showed that they had been stained with iron and potassium dichromate to make them look ancient and that the teeth in the jaw had been filed to give them a more suitable shape for a human diet.
The Piltdown Man was successful because, at the time of its discovery, the scientific community believed that the large brain preceded the modern omnivorous diet, and the fake provided exactly that evidence. Nationalism and cultural prejudice also played a large role in this whole story, as the British refused to accept that the remains of the first human beings were found on the continent and not on their lands. As for the sex of the find, it was always made clear that it was a man. The only exception came from the Daily Express newspaper, referring to the discovery as a woman, although only to mock the suffrage movement of the time, of which it was highly critical.
Obstacles to the study of evolution
The fraud significantly affected early research on human evolution. It led scientists down a dead end in the belief that the human brain increased in size before the jaw adapted to new types of food. Australopithecus fossils of the Taung Child (South Africa, 1924) were ignored due to support for Piltdown Man as the missing link, thus confusing the reconstruction of human evolution for decades.
Up to twelve suspects were charged with the hoax, but three of them quite strongly. One was Smith Woodward, Dawson’s assistant, in whom a collection of stained and altered bones was found. Another was Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest, who assisted in the excavations at Piltdown. The famous creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived near the English town and was a member of the same archaeological society as Dawson and the others, did not escape suspicions. Doyle wrote about ancient apes in his novel “The Lost World,” which he may have been inspired to fool the scientific community.
Last August, more than a hundred years after the perpetration of the fraud, the results of a review of the case that began in 2008 were revealed. High-tech forensic analysis has led to the conclusion that the Piltdown Man’s teeth belonged to the same person. orangutan and skull to two or three medieval humans. They have also been able to identify the modus operandi , showing that there was only one person handling the samples, and Charles Dawson was the only one associated with the second Piltdown Man. Dawson’s motivation would likely have been scientific ambition and a desire to be accepted into the elite.
It is curious that the same science that Dawson used to deceive and boast, has been the one that has unveiled one of the greatest frauds in history.
