The perpetrators of the infamous Piltdown hoax of the early 20th century have never been satisfactorily identified. For forty years (1913-1953), a collection of human and animal bones planted in a quarry site in Sussex was accepted by most of the scientific community as legitimate evidence of early human remains in the United Kingdom. How Piltdown came to be accepted as legitimate, and the search for the culprit, have been the focus of much scholarly and popular press attention since the hoax unraveled in 1913.
Birth of a Hoax
The bones unearthed by amateur geologist/archaeologist Charles Dawson between 1908 and 1912 were reportedly recovered from an undisturbed layer five feet from the modern surface in a gravel pit at Piltdown, Sussex, England. When the news broke in the Manchester Guardian in November 1912, Piltdown was described as lying in a depression with animal bones of extinct beaver, horse, hippopotamus, rhinoceros and elephant.
The putatively ancient human remains included parts of a human-like skull, an ape-like mandible, two lower molars and an upper canine. Paleonthropologist Arthur Smith Woodward analyzed the remains and reported in 1913 that they represented a new species of human, Eoanthropus dawsonii, the "missing link" between humans and apes.
Some scholars (such as Miller 1915) early recognized that the parts didn't match and couldn't have made up a single individual: others (if not the majority, then definitely the loudest) strenuously argued for the new species. Miller said that while the skull was archaic human; the jaw was from an archaic ape: the two simply could not be from the same creature. The British establishment, however, were convinced of Piltdown's authenticity, and as early as 1913, both Woodward and anatomist Arthur Keith had created competing reconstructions of Piltdown Man. For several decades, the debate receiving the most scholarly attention was which reconstruction was the best.
The Reveal
In 1953, however, the collection was revealed to be the result of a deliberate hoax, likely set out to embarrass the scientific establishment. Possible conspirators have included Arthur Keith, novelist Arthur Conan Doyle, French paleontologist and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and writer Rudyard Kipling, but the real perpetrators may never be identified. Teilhard in particular was fingered by Louis Leakey and Steven Jay Gould. Teilhard was a Jesuit scholar and a strict Darwinian evolutionist: but he was also known as a "great comedian" who had expressed his opinion that the field of paleoanthropology needed to be the subject of jokes (see Thackaray 2012).
Some scholarly interest in Piltdown has little to do with the remains, or even who might have set Woodward up to look like a fool, and more to do with the culture of scientific research and public opinion in the first half of the 20th century; and perhaps today. Goulden (2009) has argued that Piltdown represented not just the "missing link" of evolution, but a context of the human/nature paradigm that people were trying to understand as an outgrowth of the wider acceptance of Darwin. Others marvel at the length of time that Piltdown remained a viable hominid species despite early recognition of its impossibility, and compare it to the American Davenport Tablet hoax.
Sources
This glossary entry is part of the Dictionary of Archaeology.
Goulden M. 2009. Boundary-work and the human--animal binary: Piltdown man, science and the media. Public Understanding of Science 18(3):275-291.
Langdon JH. 1991. Misinterpreting Piltdown. Current Anthropology 32(5):627-631.
MacCurdy GG. 1914. The Man of Piltdown. American Anthropologist 16(2):331-336.
Miller Jr. GS. 1915. The Jaw of the Piltdown Man. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Stringer C. 2012. The 100-year mystery of Piltdown Man. Nature 492:177-179.
Thackeray JF. 2012. Deceiver, joker or innocent? Teilhard de Chardin and Piltdown Man. Antiquity 86(331):228-234.
Tobias PV, Bowler PJ, Chamberlain AT, Chippindale C, Dennell RW, Fedele FG, Graves P, Grigson C, Harrison GA, Harrold FB et al. 1992. Piltdown: An appraisal of the case against Sir Arthur Keith. Current Anthropology 33(3):243-294.
