#archeology

Author: Pedja Kabwe Radovi

This year marks an unusual anniversary

hundred years from the presentation of
so called Piltdown Man fossil remains.
Today known as one of the most elaborate
and long lasting hoaxes in science, these
remains were once believed to be a very
important for the understanding of our
own evolution.
In 1871 Charles Darwin published his famous book The Descent of Man in which
he predicted discoveries of transitional
fossils, the missing links between apes
and humans. A Dutch anatomist Eugne
Dubois discovered what he believed to be
Darwins missing link in 1891 at Trinil,
Java. A skullcap and a thigh bone from
Java (Homo erectus) alongside skullcap
from Neanderthal, Germany, were the
only human fossils known at the beginning
of the 20th century. Impatient scientific
community wanted more fossils to test
evolutionary ideas. The Trinil discovery,
that implicated Asia as the possible birthplace of humanity, did not fit well with

Eurocentric views, which dominated the

European intellectual landscape and had
its historical roots in European colonialism
and imperialism. The discovery of skull and
jawbone fragments at Piltdown gravel pit
(East Sussex, England) had been greeted
with great enthusiasm by British scientists, since they thought this confirmed
that Europe played a major role in the early human evolution. The remains were first
presented at a meeting of the Geological
Society of London in December 1912, by
an amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni
(Dawsons dawn-man) was given to the
specimen which was about to change the
face of human evolutionary studies.
After the initial examination, Sir Arthur
Smith-Woodward, a geologist and famous
scientist at the time, concluded that the
Piltdown fossil presented the combination of primitive, ape-like teeth and almost
fully modern skull, with the large brain.
Arthur Smiths initial reconstruction of the

Piltdown skull rendered cranial volume of

1070 cm3. Curator of the Museum of the
Royal College of Surgeons, Arthur Keith,
later corrected Piltdowns cranial volume
to about 1500cm3 which is a modern human cranial capacity. So, it seemed that
during the course of human evolution the
brain expanded very early on, before jaw
and teeth were adapted to new types of
food. This fitted perfectly well with the
common notion at the time that our intellect had a major leading role in the early
human evolution: change of the human
mind was followed by the change of the
body. The already existing evidence, contrary to the early evolution of a large brain
in the form of Trinil fossil skull with a small
cranial volume (850 cm3), combined with
fully modern-looking thigh bone, was totally ignored.
Likewise, the Piltdown Man discovery
was partially responsible for the severe
dismissal of the fist Australopithecus fossil find. In 1924, an Australian anatomist
Raymond Dart discovered a juvenile fossil
skull in Taung, South Africa, that showed
a small chimpanzee-like brain (340cm3)
and almost modern teeth with reduced canines. This indicated an evolutionary his-

The painting by John Cooke,

exhibited in 1915, shows the
examination of the Piltdown
Man remains by the famous
scientists at the time. Front
Row: Dr. A. S. Underwood, Prof.
Arthur Keith (central figure in
white), W. P. Pycraft, and Sir
Ray Lankester. Back Row: Mr. F.
0. Barlow, Prof. G. Elliot Smith,
Charles Dawson, and Dr. Arthur
Smith-Woodward

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#archeology

The Piltdown Man skull

reconstruction. Darkest colored
areas represent the original
fragments.
tory very different from the one suggested
by the Piltdown remains, which showed
combination of the big brain and primitive
teeth. Like Dubois, Dart believed the fossil
to be a transitional form between apes and
humans, a pre-human in his own words.
Contrary to his view, strong proponents of
the Piltdown Man, like Arthur Keith, characterized Taung as an anthropoid ape
that had little to do with the evolution of
humans. However, during 1930s, Robert
Broom, a medical doctor and paleontologist, discovered more specimens of the
same species in South Africa, which finally

Raymond Dart with his famous

Taung child, the first fossil
Australopithecus specimen ever
discovered.

led Arthur Keith to

accept australopithecines as a part of
the human lineage.
In a letter to Nature
in 1947, Keith apologized to Dart: ...I
am now convinced,
on the evidence submitted by Dr. Robert
Broom, that Prof.
Dart was right and
that I was wrong; the
Australopithecinae
are in or near the line
which culminated in
the human form. The
discoveries of the
Peking Man (Homo
erectus) at Zhoukoudian near Beijing, China, further expanded
the knowledge of our
evolution. From this
point onward, the
Piltdown Man lost its scientific validity.
Since there was a strong indication, both
from Africa and Asia that brain size increased relatively late during the course of
human evolution, the doubts about the validity of the Piltdown specimen grew into
the scientific community.
In spite skepticism about the Piltdown
find that some scientists from the outset
expressed, it was finally exposed as a forgery only four decades later. In 1953, Dr.
J. S. Weiner of the Department of Human
Anatomy at Oxford University carefully
examined the fossils, when he noticed
inconsistencies
in
teeth wear patterns
and revealed unnatural alignment of the
teeth. The fluorine
content test proved
that the fossil was
made as a combination of different specimens. The forger had
mechanically modified a juvenile orangutans mandible and
teeth to reduce them
and fit them to an
anatomically modern
human cranium! Artificial staining was
used to give the fake
fossil more authentic
superficial
appearance. The identity of
the Piltdown forger
remains
unknown,
although there have

been many suspects, like Charles Dawson,

Arthur Keith, and even sir Arthur Conan
Doyle. But the prime suspect of the fraud
discussed today is Martin Hinton, a zoologist and curator of the Natural History
Museum, London. In 1996 a trunk belonging to Hinton was found in the museums
attic, that contained bones manipulated
in a similar way to the Piltdown chimera.
Whoever the perpetrator of the hoax, he
was well aware of the attractiveness of human fossils, the rare resources that help to
decipher our place in nature.
Today, the Piltdown Man has no scientific significance for the study of the
human evolution. We now know that the
first hominins were bipedal creatures from
East Africa that had chimpanzee-sized
brains and human-like teeth. It seems
that change of the body was followed by
a change of the mind (brain), not the other
way around. However, the Piltdown hoax
represents one of the best examples of
how preconceived notions in science can
change assessment of available evidence,
and thus misleading scientific research.

Sources:

In 1938 Sir Arthur Keith

unveiled a memorial stone to
mark the site where Piltdown
Man was discovered by
Charles Dawson in 1912.
Henke W (2007) Historical Overview of
Paleoanthropological Research. pp. 1-56
in Handbook of Paleoanthropology, eds.
Henke W, Tattersall I, Hardt T, Springer
Berlin-Heidelberg.
Cela-Conde CJ, Ayala FJ (2007) Human
Evolution: Trails from the Past, Oxford University Press.
Lewin R (2005) Human evolution: an illustrated introduction-5th edition, Blackwell Publishing.

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