In February 1912 a Sussex solicitor named Charles Dawson wrote to the Natural History Museum in London to say that he had been given some unusual skull fragments from a gravel pit near Piltdown, and that he thought they might be important. By December the find had been announced to the Geological Society, named Eoanthropus dawsoni, and reported in newspapers as the earliest Englishman.
It was a medieval human skull and the jaw of an orangutan, filed down and stained with iron solution and chromic acid. It took forty one years for anyone to say so in print.
What Was in the Pit
The material accumulated conveniently. Dawson produced skull fragments, and then, digging alongside Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of geology at the museum, produced a jawbone with two molars still in place. Over following seasons came a canine tooth, flint tools, and fragments of extinct animals that gave the deposit an apparent age.
The combination was exactly what the leading theory of human evolution predicted. The cranium was large and thoroughly human. The jaw was ape like. Here, apparently, was a creature that had evolved a big brain first and kept a primitive jaw, which is what most anatomists at the time expected the sequence to be.
There was one awkward detail. The part of the jaw that would articulate with the skull, the point at which a human jaw and an ape jaw are unmistakably different, was missing, and so was the region of the canine where the two differ again. The pieces that would have settled the identification were precisely the pieces that were broken away.
Why It Was Believed
It is easy to treat the affair as a case of scientists being gullible. The specific reasons it was accepted are more interesting than that.
- It confirmed the expected order. The brain first model was the consensus, and Piltdown was the missing evidence for it. A find that confirms what a field already believes gets far less scrutiny than one that contradicts it
- It was national. Neanderthals had been found in Germany, Cro Magnon in France, Java Man in the Dutch East Indies. Britain had produced nothing comparable, and Piltdown supplied an early human on English soil at the height of European scientific rivalry
- The gatekeepers were involved. Woodward was a senior figure at the Natural History Museum, and Arthur Keith, the most influential anatomist in Britain, championed the specimen and built his account of human evolution around it
- Access was restricted. The originals were kept in the museum and most researchers worked from plaster casts, which do not show file marks, staining or the texture of a cut surface
The wider setting mattered too. Fifty years after Darwin and Wallace had published natural selection, human ancestry was the most contested question in the life sciences and the fossil evidence for it amounted to a handful of specimens. A single find could carry far more weight than it deserved.
Doubts existed from the start. David Waterston in London stated in 1913 that the jaw was an ape’s and the cranium a human’s. Marcellin Boule in Paris said much the same, as did Gerrit Miller at the Smithsonian, who wrote that combining them was like fitting a chimpanzee’s foot to a human leg. Franz Weidenreich, who knew fossil humans as well as anyone alive, called it an artificial combination.
The objections were brushed aside, and then in 1915 Dawson announced a second site a few kilometres away with fragments of the same kind. Two independent finds of the same improbable creature settled the matter for most doubters. Nobody has ever located that second site.
The Damage
This is the part that matters, and it is the reason Piltdown is more than an amusing story.
In 1924 Raymond Dart, in South Africa, was given a fossilised skull from a limeworks at Taung. It was a child, its brain was small, and the position of the opening where the spinal cord enters showed that it had walked upright. Dart published it in 1925 as Australopithecus africanus and argued that upright walking had come first and the large brain later.
He was dismissed. Keith led the criticism, and the reasoning was straightforward: the Taung specimen contradicted the sequence that Piltdown established, so the Taung specimen must be an aberrant ape.
Dart was right. Every hominin fossil found since confirms that bipedalism precedes brain expansion by several million years, and Africa rather than Europe or Asia is where the early record lies. Because of a forgery in a Sussex gravel pit, the correct interpretation of the correct evidence was resisted for roughly twenty five years, and African finds were treated as a sideshow.
How It Fell Apart
The exposure came from a dating technique rather than from anatomy. Bones buried in the ground gradually absorb fluorine from groundwater, so the fluorine content indicates how long a bone has been in a particular deposit.
Kenneth Oakley applied the test at the Natural History Museum in 1949 and found that the Piltdown remains were far younger than the gravel they came from. That alone made the find worthless as evidence of great antiquity. In 1953, with Joseph Weiner and Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, he examined the material properly.
What they found was almost insulting in retrospect. The teeth had been filed flat with an abrasive, leaving parallel scratches visible under a microscope. The bones had been stained with iron salts and chromic acid to match the gravel. The canine had been painted. The jaw was that of an orangutan, less than fifty years old. Some associated animal fossils had been imported from Malta and Tunisia.
The report was published in November 1953 and the newspapers enjoyed it thoroughly.
Who Did It
No one was prosecuted, and the suspects have included nearly everyone connected with the site. Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived nearby and played golf on Piltdown Common, has been proposed. So has the palaeontologist and Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was present at some of the digs, in a theory advanced by Stephen Jay Gould. Martin Hinton, a museum zoologist, became a candidate when a trunk of his was found in the 1970s containing bones stained in the same way.
The most thorough modern investigation, published in 2016, used DNA and spectroscopy on the specimens and found that both the Piltdown I and Piltdown II material came from the same orangutan and the same human skull, prepared in the same way with the same dental putty as filler.
A single forger, then, working across both sites. The only person present at both, and the only person with access to all the material, was Charles Dawson, who is also known to have faked or misrepresented at least thirty other archaeological finds during his career, and who had been trying for years to be elected to the Royal Society.
What It Is Actually Evidence Of
The comforting reading is that science is self correcting, and it did correct itself, only slowly. The uncomfortable reading is more useful.
The hoax survived because it agreed with what senior people already believed, because the physical evidence was controlled by the institution that had staked its reputation on it, and because the specialists best equipped to detect it were working from casts. The doubters were right from 1913 onwards and were not listened to, and the eventual exposure came from a technique nobody had in 1912.
The same protection did not extend to inconvenient evidence. The Taung child was scrutinised ferociously and rejected. Piltdown was scrutinised gently and accepted. That asymmetry is the whole lesson, and it is not confined to palaeontology.
The genuinely unsettling comparison is with Mary Anning, who spent decades pulling real and extraordinary fossils out of the cliffs at Lyme Regis and whose finds were repeatedly published by gentlemen who did not name her. Piltdown made a solicitor famous for forty years. Anning had to fight to be cited at all, and everything she found was real.
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