We'll never know who perpetrated the Piltdown hoax, although according to a recent article in Nature, a prominent suspect is Martin A. C. Hinton, an embittered employee of Arthur Smith Woodward, the keeper of the British Museum's Natural History Department. Hinton was angry, so the story goes, because Woodward, who knew little about human anatomy, had turned him down for a position at the British Museum. Whoever the perpetrator was combined an orangutan jaw with a Medieval human skull, stained them with chemicals and paint to make them look old, and planted them in a gravel quarry which had been known for decades for its Pliocene fossils. In 1912, when the "discovery" came to light, the number of fossil hominids known to science were few, and dating and evaluative techniques expensive or not as yet thoroughly tested. Still, only a handful of scientists were ever convinced by the hoax--Ales Hrdlicka for one, refused to believe it. Contined early human and hominid discoveries over the next forty years made the reliability of Piltdown less and less likely, and in 1953, the Piltdown find was proved a fake. I suspect that some of the caution you hear in the scientists' voices concerning the Kennewick Man debate is the lasting legacy of the Piltdown hoax.
The winner of the Anthropology Newsletter's Piltdown Prize can be a person, place, organization, thing, idea or cartoon character--as long as it's not a fellow anthropologist or the AAA. The contest's authors warn that you must be prepared to explain how this entity has set back the field of anthropology.
Semi-Official Rules
- All entries must include an explanation.
- Mean-spirited entries or entries abusing other anthropologists or the AAA will be summarily discarded.
- Judging will be at the whim of the AAA staff, their friends, families and pets.
- Entries will be judged on humor, truthfulness, humor, aerodynamics of the printout, humor and grammar, but not necessarily in that order.
- All entries must be received by January 31, 1999 and winners will be printed in the To Wit column of the AN.
The best Piltdown site on the web, by my lights, is Tom Turritten's A Mostly Complete Piltdown Bibliography. Add your comments on this and any other feature on the bulletin board--competing theories on perpetrators welcomed!
