Piltdown Man: The Great English Mystery Story

Keith Stewart Thomson

American Scientist May-June 1991

[194] The Piltdown man forgery of 1912 was one of the most successful and wicked of all scientific frauds. Although the discovery of the supposedly primitive British "dawn man"–scientifically christened Eoanthropus dawsoni–was announced almost 80 years ago, the forgery continues to attract attention because it has never been satisfactorily resolved. Even though the main culprit has probably been identified, there remain nagging doubts and obscure hints that the true story may be more complicated.

There has been a steady flow of books attempting to expose the Piltdown affair. After having been very dissatisfied by the latest of these (1), I decided to do a little sleuthing of my own; I now believe that an answer to the Piltdown riddle can be given. The answer fits every requirement of a classic English mystery story–including some high comedy. It may well be that a simply marvelous solution has been sitting in front of us all for a long time.

The Discoveries

The bare bones, so to speak, of the Piltdown hoax begin with a country solicitor by the name of Charles Dawson (1864-1916), who practiced law in the county of Sussex, England. Dawson was a somewhat pretentious man who, though not especially popular, was quite influential. He made significant contributions to his lifelong hobbies of geology and anthropology, including the discovery of the first Mesozoic mammals in Britain. In the decades before Piltdown, Dawson had built up an important collection of fossils for the British Museum (Natural History) and had developed a professional relationship with Arthur Smith Woodward of the Department of Geology at the Museum. But Dawson also had a less scrupulous side. He plagiarized a historical account of Hastings Castle, Sussex, from an earlier unpublished manuscript. And he apparently bought his elegant house on the grounds of Lewes Castle by pretending to act on behalf of the Sussex Archaeological Society.

In the first decade of the 20th century, Dawson, like many of his contemporaries, was actively searching for the fossil and artifactual remains of early humans. It was a time in which several discoveries of human ancestral remains were made throughout Europe. However, the most important discoveries–such as the Heidelberg jaw found in 1907–were being made on the European continent. No preglacial human remains had been found in Britain. There was also considerable argument over the significance of so-called "eoliths," simple stone artifacts that might logically have preceded the more finished "paleoliths," but which were also crude enough to have been caused naturally by abrasion. While many Pleistocene sites–dating from about 10,000 years ago to two million years ago–were being uncovered in Britain, there was a dire lack of Pliocene deposits–in the epoch spanning two million to five million years ago. But the fossil hunters believed they knew where the remains of early humans would be found; they focused their attention on the gravel beds of southern England and their counterparts on the European continent.

Dawson came upon one such gravel bed in 1898 when he became Steward of Barkham Manor, near the village of Piltdown, Sussex. Along the drive to the manor a small exposure of gravel had been partially excavated for a pond. Although Dawson held court at the manor only once every four years, he apparently took a keen interest in the gravel bed. In 1908 Dawson invited another enthusiastic amateur–a local chemistry instructor, Samuel Allinson Woodhead–to join him on an investigation of the Piltdown gravel bed. Dawson had told Woodhead that workmen had found peculiar flints and something "like a coconut," presumably a skull, in the gravel bed. The two of them searched the gravel, but ultimately found nothing except "pieces of dark brown ironstone closely resembling the piece of a skull" (2).

In May, 1909, Dawson was searching for bones in one of his favorite quarries near Hastings, when he met two strangers who were also exploring the deposits. The two other fossil hunters were Jesuit priests: Father Felix Pelletier and a young seminary student, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It was an auspicious occasion; Dawson and Teilhard became friends who would collect fossils together for several years afterward.

A series of other noteworthy events occurred during a six-year period leading up to the public announcement of the Piltdown find in 1912. In 1906 Dawson acquired a human skull, lacking a jaw, from a Mr. Burley of Nutley (3). Sometime between 1908 and 1912, Dawson asked the chemist Samuel Woodhead how one might treat a bone to make it look like a fossil (4). Between 1908 and 1911 Dawson showed pieces of a human skull–said to have been found at the Piltdown site–to members in his circle of amateur geologists, anthropologists and antiquarians. Among those who saw the remains were Teilhard, Henry J. Sargent, a [195] museum curator, and Lewis Abbott, who kept a jewelry and curio shop in Hastings. Abbott was a leading player in the "eolith" controversy and had an important collection of fossils. It has since become known that Abbott had Dawson's Piltdown fossils for a while during this period and soaked at least some of them in potassium dichromate solution "to harden them." Dawson also exchanged artifacts with another major collector of implements, Harry Morris.

 

Figure 1. Principal participants are gathered around the fossil remains of Piltdown man–the supposed "dawn man" of Britain, and one of the most embarrassing and successful scientific frauds in history–in this oil painting by the Chelsea artist John Cooke. The discovery of Piltdown man was announced in 1912, but its fraudulence was not uncovered until 1953. The forgery misled some of the leading anthropologists and paleontologists of the period. Even today, the identity of the perpetrators and the means by which the fraud was committed have not been satisfactorily resolved. The painting, entitled "A Discussion on the Piltdown Skull," is based on a meeting at the Royal College of Surgeons on the afternoon of August 11, 1913, during which the participants presented their views on the anatomy of Piltdown man. One or more of these men may have been involved in committing the fraud, while others were the unwitting victims. The anthropologist Arthur Keith (wearing the white laboratory coat) is seated at the table examining the Piltdown skull. Seated to Keith's left are the osteologist William Pycraft and the zoologist Ray Lankester. The dentist Arthur Underwood stands in front, to Keith's right. Standing in the back (from Keith's far left) are the geologist Arthur Smith Woodward, the amateur paleontologist Charles Dawson, the anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith, and Frank Barlow, an assistant to Woodward. Other notables in the Piltdown affair, such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Lewis Abbot and Martin Hinton, were not present at the discussion. On the back wall, a portrait of Charles Darwin presides over the meeting. (Photograph courtesy of the Geological Society of London.)

Then, in February of 1912, Dawson wrote to his colleague, the geologist Arthur Smith Woodward, telling him that he had discovered a fragment of a human skull at Piltdown (3). A month later Dawson sent Woodward one of the associated Piltdown specimens, which Woodward identified as a premolar from a hippopotamus. In late May, Dawson showed his human and animal specimens to Woodward; and on June 2, Dawson, Woodward and Teilhard visited the Piltdown site together. At the site, Dawson picked up another skull fragment, while Teilhard found part of an elephant molar; when Woodward saw the tooth, he "jumped on the piece with the enthusiasm of a youth and all the fire that his apparent coldness covered came out" (1). Teilhard, who had apparently been asked along as someone who could be trusted not to make the find public, also picked up a paleolith.

During the month of June–while Teilhard had left for France–Woodward and Dawson worked at the gravel bed, finding three pieces of a right parietal bone and a broken lower jaw, which was uncovered by Dawson. With the aid of various assistants, including the chemist Woodhead, Dawson and Woodward eventually assembled a collection of animal bones and what appeared to be eoliths. In July Dawson showed his Piltdown eoliths to the local expert Lewis Abbott, who pronounced them "man all over" (1).

[196] Back at the British Museum, Woodward and his assistant Frank Barlow attempted to reconstruct the Piltdown skull. It is not clear who saw the remains then, as Woodward was somewhat secretive. But at least two people certainly did: Arthur Keith, who was Conservator of the Hunterian Museum, at the Royal College of Surgeons, and E. Ray Lankester, a zoologist and popular author. Keith correctly foresaw a rivalry for the remains between the British Museum and the Royal College of Surgeons–particularly because Woodward was not a trained anthropologist. Keith was also annoyed, however, because Dawson did not bring the remains to him (5).

At this point only a small circle of specialists and amateurs knew of the Piltdown remains. On November 21, however, an unknown source leaked the story to the Manchester Guardian, which brought news of the find to the public. A month later, on December 18, 1912, the discovery was officially announced at a meeting of the Geological Society of London. Within several months, the British Museum made casts of the finds available for study.

The availability of the casts now meant that the fossils, or copies of them, could be examined by a number of specialists. The anthropologist Arthur Keith reconstructed the remains in such a manner as to give the skull an extremely modern appearance. In contrast, the geologist Arthur Smith Woodward put the fragments together in a more primitive shape. On July 12, 1913, Keith and Woodward had a meeting at the Royal College of Surgeons, and the battle over their respective interpretations of the skull began. Later, a number of other major and minor players entered the fray, including Grafton Elliott Smith, a professor of anatomy at Manchester University.

Even at this early point in the controversy some doubted that the jaw and the skull really belonged together. Although the combination of a modern cranium and a primitive mandible was what one might expect for an ancestral type, the match between the two was imperfect, and some even suspected that the jaw came from an ape. David Wateston, an anatomist at King's College in London, was one who never accepted that the jaw and skull were from the same animal. Nevertheless, many others, including Keith and Woodward, merely argued over how the skull should be reconstructed. Keith also disagreed with Woodward over the ape-like reconstruction of the missing canine teeth. Keith concluded that Woodward was totally mistaken about their probable shape and wear patterns, especially in view of the unusually modern wear pattern on the moles of the mandible. Keith and Woodward were so caught up in their anatomical reconstructions that they never questioned the origin of the remains.

Still, the possibility that the remains were a hoax was apparent to some. In May of 1913 two amateur archaeologists, Captain Guy St. Barbe and Major Reginald Marriot, discovered Dawson in his law office working with dishes of chemicals and pieces of bones. They suspected fraud but said nothing in deference to Dawson's wife and family. One of them may have told the story to Martin Allistair Campbell Hinton, junior zoologist at the British Museum (Natural History)–but only after Dawson's death. The observations of St. Barbe and Marriot came fully to light only in 1953 (3).

Perhaps not surprisingly, more fossil discoveries were made in 1913. In July, Dawson wrote Woodward that he had found some fragmentary human remains at a second site, Barcombe Mills, south of Piltdown. However, this discovery was largely ignored–possibly because so much was happening back at the original Piltdown site. Shortly thereafter, Teilhard resumed to England for a brief period, during which he again joined Woodward and Dawson in an exploration of the site. During one such expedition in August, Teilhard found a brown canine tooth: one that exactly matched Woodward's reconstruction. With this new find, Woodward began to carry the day in debates over the interpretation of the skull.

 

 

 

 

Figure 2. Two views of Piltdown man portray the supposed human ancestor as either ape-like (left), in a reconstruction by Arthur Smith Woodward, or more human (right), in Arthur Keith's restoration. Woodward constructed a jutting jaw, a large lower canine and a small cranial capacity, whereas Keith made the jaw less ape-like, the canine much smaller and the braincase much larger. The Piltdown bones–consisting of a human skull associated with an orangutan jaw–were stained with potassium dichromate to make them look older. The dark areas represent the original bone fragments, whereas the reconstructed regions are white. The diagnostic part of the ape jaw–the chin and the condyle that articulates with the skull–were broken off by the forger.

 

 

 

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Figure 3. Fossilized elephant-bone implement discovered at Piltdown looks strikingly like a cricket bat. The "bat" may have been planted at Piltdown by a knowing prankster in response to claims that Piltdown man was the first Englishman. In an attempt to reveal the fraud, the prankster decided that as a proper Englishman, Piltdown man must have had his own cricket bat. The nicks and cuts on the bone implement were made with a steel knife. (Photograph courtesy of The Natural History Museum, London.)

The anatomist William King Gregory of the American Museum of Natural History also studied the material in September 1913. Gregory made one of the clearest statements concerning the possibility of fraud: "It has been suspected by some that geologically they are not old at all; that they may represent a deliberate hoax, a Negro or Australian skull and a broken ape jaw, artificially fossilized and planted in the gravel-bed to fool the scientists" (6). Oddly, despite this apparent wariness, Gregory's initial response was to endorse the find.

Others also publicly expressed their doubts about Piltdown Man. In 1915, the zoologist Gerrit S. Miller, of the U. S. National Museum of Natural History, published a paper stating that the jaw was that of a chimpanzee (7). Although Miller's work was savagely attacked by the osteologist, William Plane Pycraft–a friend of Woodward–it did make an impression on some (8). William King Gregory, for example, reversed his decision and agreed with Miller's observations. Further evidence against the case for Piltdown man came from George Grant McCurdy of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, who marshalled strong arguments showing that the skull and jaw could not be from the same animal. A Birmingham dentist, W. Courtney Lyne, also published a paper noting serious inconsistencies concerning the canine tooth that Teilhard had discovered. There was, however, more to come that would silence the critics.

In January, 1915, Dawson wrote to Woodward that he had found the remains of a second dawn man, "Piltdown II," at another site in nearby Sheffield Park. Dawson wrote that he found part of a left frontal bone, an occipital bone, a molar tooth and the molar of a rhinoceros. However, this discovery was not formally announced until February, 1917. The two-year delay was partly due to the war and partly due to Dawson's death on August 10, 1916. He left no information on the precise location where he made this new find. Nevertheless, Piltdown II silenced the skeptics. Many of those who had expressed doubts, including William King Gregory–who reversed his position again–now came to accept the association of the jaw and the skull.

In addition to the controversy concerning the anatomy of Piltdown man, anthropologists had heated debates about the association of Eoanthropus dawsoni with the stone implements found at the site. Was Piltdown man the maker of these eoliths? One especially remarkable artifact was uncovered in 1914 by Dawson and Woodward during one of their frequent expeditions (Woodward actually unearthed the object). The extraordinary item was shaped like nothing less than the business end of a cricket bat. It was made from a piece of fossilized elephant bone that showed various nicks and cuts. No primitive tools were known that could have produced such scars, and no obvious use for the object could be suggested.

[198] The Repellent Idea

One of the reasons the forgery was so successful was that there were so many internal inconsistencies; scientists spent more time arguing over the interpretation of details than they did on validating the whole matter. For example, there were no systematic excavations at the site of Piltdown I, and the Piltdown II site was never found. The forger had also cleverly salted the gravel bed with faunal elements that indicated up to four separate horizons for geologists to fit into the existing Pliocene-Pleistocene chronology.

As the years went on, other paleontological finds– especially the discovery of Peking man in the 1920s and 1930s by W. C. Pei and Teilhard de Chardin, the australopithecine facial skeleton discovered by Raymond Dart in 1924, and many other European remains showed that Piltdown man's combination of an advanced cranium and a primitive jaw was anomalous. Piltdown man became very much a side issue.

In 1953, the Piltdown man controversy was revived at a London conference on human origins convened by the Weiner-Gren Foundation. Notably, the conference brought together two men: Kenneth Oakley, a geologist from the British Museum, who had been using various novel chemical analyses to test the age associations of fossil remains including Piltdown, and Joseph Weiner, a South-African-born anthropologist of Oxford University. The two shared a skepticism about the age of the Piltdown remains, the association of the jaw and the skull, and the haphazard pattern by which the fossils were collected. Oakley, for instance, had already shown that the remains were not very old at all.

After dining at the conference one evening with Oakley and the Chicago anthropologist Sherwood Washburn, Weiner found himself unable to sleep. The dinner conversation had turned to the subject of Piltdown man, and afterwards his thoughts stayed with the topic. A number of hypotheses raced through his mind–all led him with inexorable logic to one "repellent" idea: Piltdown man was a forgery (3). After this, all the pieces fell into place.

With remarkable speed, Oakley's chemical analyses exposed the whole fraud (3, 9). Not a single bone or artifact from Piltdown was authentic. Many had been stained with potassium dichromate to make them look older, but also so that they might resemble remains from another Pleistocene site, Red Crag in Sussex. As it happens, some of the animal remains were from Red Crag! The jaw was actually from a sub-fossil orangutan (Oakley thought it might have been stolen from the Museum); the cranium was modern, if unusually thick (perhaps that of an Australian aborigine), whereas the canine discovered by Teilhard came from a modern ape.

The faking of the other items also became apparent. Some of the bone elements had also been treated chemically to change the calcium phosphate to gypsum, or calcium sulphate. The Piltdown II material turned out to be from the same individual as Piltdown I. The Barcombe Mills material was also modern and chemically treated. The bone implement was from a fossil elephant femur that had been cut with a steel knife. The molar teeth on the jaw had all been shaped with a steel file. The canine that Teilhard had discovered was unusual because it had not been stained with potassium dichromate. It had merely been colored with artist's Vandyke brown oil paint. One of the elephant molars was particularly interesting because it had almost certainly come from a site in Tunisia.

In the course of the investigation Weiner located the collection of implements Harry Morris had accumulated–some of which he had traded with Dawson. Among the collection were undated notes stating that Dawson had cheated Morris of his best specimens. The notes also stated that his specimens had been chemically treated, and that he had overhead a conversation to the effect that the canine tooth had come from France (3). All in all, the suspicions that William King Gregory had reported in 1913 were remarkably accurate.

The Mysteries

In Weiner's 1955 book–still by far the best treatment of the hoax–the question of responsibility was dealt with somewhat circumspectly. Weiner may not have wanted to rub salt into a 40-year-old wound; although Woodward had died in 1948, many of the participants or their families were still living. Weiner did, however, strongly point to Dawson as the perpetrator of the fraud. But he was also not perfectly sure about the number of forgers. The forgery was exposed, but the mystery was not solved.

Now, nearly 40 years after Weiner's book, we still lack first-hand witnesses and death-bed confessions. If we are to find any more culprits, it will be through armchair detective work, focusing on the three classic questions of the roman policier: means, motive and opportunity.

Although the list of suspects has grown since Weiner's time, there is no question that Dawson was the central actor in the Piltdown hoax. Dawson had both the means and the opportunity to perpetrate the fraud. He could easily have obtained all the forged specimens; he had been observed chemically treating bones; as the Steward of Barkham Manor he had free access and every opportunity to salt the gravel beds; and he was the only person present on every occasion when specimens were found. Moreover, nothing more was found after he died.

What could have been Dawson's motive? It could simply have been a practical joke that worked unexpectedly well, and was ultimately taken too seriously for the joker to back out. But the fraud was a little too systematic for this to be likely. The next most probable motive may be found in Dawson's ambition. He longed to be accepted as a scientist and to belong to the Royal Society. The only reason he was not elected to the Royal Society may be because he died too soon. But he did pull off a fraud that made him famous for 40 years.

Dawson's ambition may have been a sufficient motive, but was the fraud also aimed at someone? Because the fraud was not unmasked until 1953, none of the principals–Arthur Smith Woodward, Arthur Keith or Grafton Elliott Smith– really suffered. But these men would have been ruined if the forgery had been exposed earlier. Dawson obviously chose Woodward (a cold man whom no one seems to have liked) as his scientific collaborator–or unwitting tool. Is it possible that Dawson meant to reveal his forgery as a great joke on Woodward, but then backed off in dismay when everyone swallowed the bait so completely? Probably not, because the forgeries continued to appear for two years. Actually, if any part of the fraud was aimed at an individual, it would have been at Arthur Keith, whose theories were shot down by the canine tooth. But Dawson scarcely knew Keith, if at all, before 1912. Overall, it is difficult to imagine that any of the scientists were deliberate targets of the forgery. To be sure they were taken in by the fraud, but they were also the most willing of all victims, greedily using Piltdown for their own ends.

[199] Did any of the scientists conspire with Dawson to perpetrate the fraud? Such possibilities have been raised, and many notable names have been dragged in on the flimsiest bit of evidence. But we can pretty much rule them out. Everyone agrees that Woodward was far too stuffy and boring to effect a forgery such as this. His career was already quite secure before the incident (10). Moreover, he was still dictating his "Piltdown" book on his death-bed. The attempts to incriminate Keith in a recently published book are very unconvincing (1). Grafton Elliot Smith entered the fray rather late suspiciously hovering on the sidelines for a time–but he is not known to have been connected with Dawson in 1911 or 1912.

Other possible conspirators have been sought among Dawson's circle of amateur scientists. The eolith specialist Lewis Abbott is a very likely choice, for example. He surely had the means to obtain the material and apparently did treat some of it chemically for Dawson–though perhaps not knowing its intended use. But it is hard to see his motive. Abbott is not known to have had any malice toward any of the scientists, and he did not benefit from the fraud. It is hard to imagine him sitting still while Dawson gathered all the fame. If he intended to double-cross Dawson, he failed to do so. And significantly, Abbott was not present at any of the Piltdown excavations.

In addition to the obvious suspects, there have been some obviously false confessions, and some very late accusations against a number of figures–ranging from the Oxford geologist William Johnson Sollas to Woodward's technician Frank Barlow. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived near Piltdown, has been accused of the fraud. None of these theories holds water. The search for other conspirators continues, however, fueled by vague and disquieting rumors. There are only two principal figures left: Martin Hinton, the British Museum zoologist, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Martin Hinton is a suspect who has recently been favored as a villain (11,12, 13). Not only did he strongly dislike Woodward, but it was well known that he was a practical joker. He was also familiar with Dawson and the amateur circle. He once claimed to know who had done it: not Dawson but "someone in the British Museum" (11). This has been understood by some to be a coded confession. But the same has been suspected of Teilhard. After the fakery had been revealed, Teilhard wrote a cryptic letter to Weiner concerning the finding of the canine: "it was so inconspicuous that it seems to me quite unlikely that the tooth could have been planted" (14). If no one else could have planted it, then it must have been Teilhard. Was this some sort of Jesuitical way of admitting that he put it there?

Surprisingly little attention was paid to the suspicion of forgery that William King Gregory reported in 1913. There was even the precedent of a similar forgery in France in 1863. With experience, paleontologists can usually ascertain where a particular fossil has come from; they may even recognize individual specimens if they have seen them before. One of the most puzzling aspects of the affair is that none of Dawson's specimens were recognized as ringers. Did someone, perhaps Barlow or Hinton, actually spot the fraud? In a letter to The Times of London in 1955, Hinton claimed that the zoologists at the British Museum would have recognized that the jaw and the canine were from an ape if they had been allowed to see them. But Hinton certainly saw them and failed to mention any suspicions when he listed Piltdown as an authentic element of the British Pleistocene fauna in 1926 (15). If Hinton was involved in the conspiracy, it appears that he backed away from springing the trap.

Figure 4. Charles Dawson, a country solicitor and amateur paleontologist, stands as the prime suspect in forging the Piltdown man remains. The case against Dawson is quite strong. As a collector of fossils and antiquities, he could easily have obtained the false specimens. He had frequent access to the Piltdown gravel bed where he could have planted the fossils, and he had been observed chemically treating bones. Dawson was also the only person present at the discovery of all the fossil bones and implements thought to be associated with Piltdown man. Nothing more was found after he died in 1916. Still, it is not at all clear that Dawson was acting alone. (Photograph courtesy of the Geological Society of London.)

Without better evidence on Hinton, let us now reconsider Teilhard de Chardin as a possible accomplice. Stephen Jay Gould accuses Teilhard directly, on the basis of a letter in which Teilhard reveals some information about Piltdown II that he could only have had as part of the fraud (16). [200] Moreover, Teilhard did have the means and the opportunity to be a conspirator. He may be the source of the Tunisian elephant molars uncovered at Piltdown I–a fragment of which he found at the site. And we must remember that he also found the painted brown canine. But in defense of Teilhard, let us consider the circumstances. Teilhard had no feuds with any of the principals in the case. He stood to gain no fame or other benefit from a fraud. He was not even in the country for many of the discoveries. It is also difficult to see why Dawson would have needed Teilhard; for that matter, it is hard to imagine Teilhard's motive for conspiring with Dawson. If Teilhard too part in the hoax thinking it was to be a joke, he would surely have revealed the fraud quickly. As far as the slip about Piltdown II in the letter, it was written nearly 40 years after the initial discovery– perhaps Teilhard's memory was faulty with respect to what he knew and when he knew it.

There is also another possibility: the whole affair was actually aimed at Charles Dawson himself. Was Dawson set up or double-crossed, perhaps by one of his amateur friends? There were certainly enough local people who disliked him. The biggest problem with this theory is that no one really had the opportunity to pull it off. How could Abbott, Woodhead or any of the others surreptitiously salt the gravel bed, while also making sure that the salted specimens would be found?

A Solution

I believe the most plausible answer to all this has been sitting around for about 10 years–unappreciated perhaps because everyone else has been pursuing their own pet theories. Back in 1980, Leonard Harrison Matthews devised a devilishly ingenious scheme that explains nearly all of the anomalies and motives. Matthews scheme can be modified and woven into an account of the whole affair, making the perfect English crime.

Once the extent to which he carefully prepared his story is appreciated, Dawson has to be seen as the sole instigator of the fraud. Perhaps the pieces of ironstone resembling a skull that he found at Piltdown in 1908 ultimately planted the seed in his mind. The discovery of the Heidelberg jaw may also have given him some impetus. The skull Dawson acquired from Mr. Burley in 1906 presented him with the means, and the barren gravel bed at Piltdown provided the opportunity.

Dawson appears to have assembled the faunal remains from his own collections, as well as from the purchase and exchange of specimens with others. With these he started to lay the ground work. First, he lured the chemist Samuel Woodhead and the eolith collector Lewis Abbott with his story of the workmen who discovered the coconut-shaped skull. Then he chanced upon Teilhard–a perfect addition, something of an innocent and a priest to boot. But he carefully kept Teilhard away from Piltdown at first. By getting Lewis Abbott to treat some of the specimens, Dawson gave himself someone else to accuse, should the fraud be discovered. He eventually tested the waters with Arthur Smith Woodward, first with a letter, then with the hippopotamus premolar. Would Woodward take the bait? He did, and when he was later shown the skull specimens, Woodward was hooked.

Dawson then took Woodward into the field for the first time; he made sure that Woodward himself found specimens while Teilhard served as a witness. But the skull alone, although unusually thick, was not enough. A lower jaw was also needed. It may have been during one of his visits to the British Museum at this time that Dawson stole a medieval orangutan jaw. A complete ape jaw would have been immediately recognized, so he broke off the segments that articulate with the skull as well as other diagnostic parts. Finally, he filed the teeth to simulate human wear patterns, and then he planted the specimen.

Woodward took the material to London, where he showed it to a few other scientists. They all accepted the authenticity of the find, although some questioned the association of the jaw and the cranium. It was a skillful forgery that was eagerly swallowed because now the British could claim a "dawn man" that countered continental discoveries such as the Heidelberg jaw. Dawson continued to plant material for Woodward to find at the site in 1912 and 1913. Although Dawson continued to experiment with other human material–fabricating the Barcombe Mills discovery–his work was essentially done.

At first, Woodward was very careful about who saw the Piltdown materials. In so doing he unwittingly reduced the chances that the fraud would be exposed. Even some staff members of the British Museum were not given full access to the specimens until the Geological Society meeting.

But there was probably at least one person who spotted the fraud at first sight: the zoologist Martin Hinton. Hinton had a number of things to go on: the associated fossils, the artificial color, the obviously ape-like jaw. Hinton must have realized immediately that the culprit was Dawson, and he probably suspected Woodward, Teilhard and Barlow as well. But what should he do about it? At that time he was only a temporary worker at the Museum; he could scarcely mount a direct challenge to Arthur Smith Woodward, who was so firmly committed to Piltdown. Nor could he question the judgment of Arthur Keith–who had already invested much during his reconstructions of the skull. Even though Hinton may not have felt the need to help these two pompous men out of a difficult spot, he had to find another way to reveal the fraud.

First Hinton tried dropping hints to William King Gregory. But even when Gregory published these "suspicions," Woodward was undeterred. If anything, Woodward plunged harder and deeper into the fray. So Hinton decided to let the forger know he had been detected, using his favorite weapon–a practical joke. After hearing the solemn debates between Keith and Woodward about the reconstruction of the jaw and teeth, he decided to salt the gravel bed with a patently false canine tooth. Perhaps this would flush the forger into revealing himself. At least the forger would know that the game was over.

So Hinton took a canine from an ape and filed it down so that it looked preposterously like the plaster canine in Woodward's reconstruction–the one that Keith had essentially proved was impossible. Not yet knowing that Dawson had used potassium dichromate to stain the other specimens, Hinton colored the tooth with artist's brown paint.

At this point we can expand the story by bringing in Teilhard de Chardin–recently arrived from France, and eager to get up to date on Piltdown. But we should consider three possible scenarios. In the first, Teilhard also spotted the forgery–most probably because of the Tunisian tooth. But Hinton may also have mentioned his suspicions to Teilhard, as he had with Gregory. In any case, angry at being duped, Teilhard joined forces with Hinton. Teilhard agreed to plant the canine that Hinton had painted; in the end it turned out to be easiest if he actually found it as well.

[201] In the second scenario, Teilhard came to conspire with Dawson some time after they met in 1909, although it is hard to imagine why. In this case, Hinton would have planted the canine himself; when Teilhard found it, he saw that the fraud had been discovered. The third possibility is that Hinton directly confronted Teilhard, who then agreed to plant the canine to make amends and to help reveal the fraud. In any case, Teilhard left England very soon afterward, and did not return for many years. Gould believes that Teilhard actually warns the reader about the forgery in a 1920 paper. Teilhard was forever after rather embarrassed by any mention of Piltdown (16).

The real difficulty with these schemes is that Hinton's bold maneuver had no known effect on Dawson. Dawson neither had a stroke nor did he make a sudden confession. Nor did anyone else. It must have been a nasty moment for Dawson when Teilhard produced the canine–unless, of course, he thought that God had saved him after all, by allowing a real fossil to be found at Piltdown! But we must also appreciate that, by this point, Dawson had no options. He had gone too far, dragged in by the eagerness of virtually every scientist from New York to Paris. In any case, his creation ought to be correct–a British fossil man should exist. So he showed his anonymous challenger that he would not be warned off, and salted a few more minor finds.

Interestingly, after Teilhard discovered the canine, Dawson made several trips to Arthur Keith's anatomical museum to study gorilla canines (17). Dawson's notes to Woodward have been seen as attempts to buttress the authenticity of the canine. They might also have been an attempt to raise Woodward's suspicions–at least about the canine–but this may be stretching things too far.

Hinton decided to strike again–this time through a simply tremendous joke. Having failed to wake the zoologists, Hinton decided to catch the anthropologists' attention. Woodward had started to refer to Eoanthropus rather portentously as the "First Englishman." So Hinton decided to provide what every true Englishman needs–his very own cricket bat. Hinton appears to have carved the cricket bat from a piece of fossil elephant femur that had been filched from a museum. Woodward found the bat, covered in yellow clay but actually lodged in a soil layer–separated from the clay by a layer of gravel. Surely, Hinton must have thought, this was an obvious hoax.

Hinton's joke turned out to be another flop–no one seems to have been the slightest bit suspicious! This gave Dawson an opportunity to move in for the kill. He struck back with Piltdown II. But, cleverly, he also wrote a paper backing off from his former claims about the significance of the artifacts (1). Now everyone eagerly fell into line, without even seeing the second Piltdown site.

At this point Hinton might have given up and kept his laughter–and no doubt his admiration for Dawson's nerve–to himself. It is hard to imagine what might have happened next, because something totally unexpected occurred: Dawson died. In so doing he neatly turned the tables on Hinton. Now Hinton was trapped; in an instant he and Teilhard had become the only living forgers! The two had no choice but to lie low, dropping hints.

It will be difficult to corroborate this theory of Hinton's role–but at least nothing yet falsifies it. While we can only deplore Dawson's wicked forgery, it has to be admitted that it would not have succeeded without the headlong acceptance of shoddy evidence by scientists who should have known better. As the W. C. Fields movie observes: "You can't cheat an honest man." Perhaps Dawson had the last laugh after all.

_____________________________________________________________________________

References

1. Spencer, F. 1990. Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery. New York: Oxford University Press.

2. Dawson, C. 1913. The Piltdown skull. Hastings and East Sussex Naturalist 2:73-82.

3. Weiner, J. S 1955. The Piltdown Forgery. Oxford Oxford University Press.

4. Costello, P 1985. The Piltdown hoax reconsidered. Antiquity LDC 167-171.

5. Keith, A. 1950. An Autobiography. London: Watts.

6. Gregory, W. K 1914. The dawn man of Piltdown. American Museum Journal 14:189-200.

7. Miller, G. S. 1915. The jaw of Piltdown man. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 65 (12).

8. Pycraft, W. R 1917. The jaw of the Piltdown man a reply to Mr. Gerrit S. Miller. Scientific Progress 11:389 409.

9. Oakley, K R and C. R. Hoskins. 1950. New evidence on the antiquity of Piltdown man. Nature 2165:179-382.

10. Woodward, A. S. 1948. The Earliest Englishman. London: Watts.

11. Halstead, L. B. 1979. The Piltdown hoax; cui bono? Nature 277:596.

12. Matthews, L. 1981. The missing links (Part 8): The planting of a tooth. New Scientist 90:785.

13. Zuckerman, S. 1990. A phony ancestor. New York Review of Books, November 8, 1990:12-16.

14. Matthews, L. H. 1981. The missing links (Part 10): Shall we ever know the truth? New Scientist 91:26-28.

15. Hinton, M. A. C. 1926. The Pleistocene Mammalia of the British Isles and their bearing upon the date of the glacial period. Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society 20:325-348.

16. Gould, S. J. 1980. The Piltdown conspiracy. Natural History 89:8-28.

17. Grigson, C. 1990. Missing links m the Piltdown fraud. New Scientist 89:55-58.

 

Piltdown Man, the Great English Mystery Story

The Common but Less Frequent Loon and Other Essays 1993

Keith Stewart Thomson

 

[89] What could have been Dawson's motive? The hoax could simply have been a practical joke that worked unexpectedly well and was taken too seriously for the joker to back out. But the fraud was a little too systematic for this to be likely. The next most probable motive may be found in Dawson's ambition. He longed to be accepted as a scientist and to belong to the Royal Society. The only reason he was not elected to the membership may be that he died too soon. But he did pull off a fraud that made him famous for forty years.

Dawson's ambition may have been a sufficient motive, but was the fraud also aimed at someone? Because the fraud was not unmasked until 1953, none of the principals–Arthur Smith Woodward, Arthur Keith, or Grafton Elliott Smith–suffered. But these men would have been ruined if the forgery had been exposed earlier. Dawson chose Woodward (a cold man whom no one seems to have liked) to be his scientific collaborator–or unwitting tool. Is it [90] possible that Dawson meant to reveal his forgery as a great joke on Woodward but then backed off in dismay when everyone swallowed the bait so completely? Probably not, because the forgeries continued to appear for two years. If any part of the fraud was aimed at an individual, the target would have been Arthur Keith, whose theories were shot down by the canine tooth. But Dawson scarcely knew Keith, if at all, before 1912. Overall, it is difficult to imagine that any of the scientists were targets. To be sure, they were taken in by the fraud, but they were also the most willing of victims, greedily using Piltdown for their own ends.

Did any of the scientists conspire with Dawson to perpetrate the fraud? The possibility has been raised, and many notable names have been dragged in on the flimsiest bit of evidence. But we can safely rule them out. Everyone agrees that Woodward was far too stuffy and boring to effect a forgery such as this. His career was already secure before the incident (10). Moreover, he was still dictating his Piltdown book on his deathbed. The attempts to incriminate Keith in a recently published book are very unconvincing (1). Grafton Elliot Smith entered the fray rather late–suspiciously hovering on the sidelines for a time–but he is not known to have been connected with Dawson in 1911 or 1912.

Other possible conspirators have been sought among Dawson's circle of amateur scientists. The eolith specialist Lewis Abbott is a likely choice, for example. He surely had the means to obtain the material and apparently did treat some of it chemically for Dawson–though perhaps not knowing its intended use. But what would his motive have been? Abbott is not known to have borne malice toward any of the scientists, and he did not benefit from the fraud. It is hard to imagine him sitting still while Dawson gathered all the fame. If he intended to double-cross Dawson, he failed to do so. And significantly, Abbott was not present at any of the Piltdown excavations.

In addition to the obvious suspects, there have been some obviously false confessions and some very late accusations against a number of figures–ranging from the Oxford geologist William Johnson Sollas to Woodward's technician Frank Barlow. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived near Piltdown, has been accused of the fraud. None of these theories holds water. The search for other conspirators continues, however, fueled by vague and disquieting rumors. Only two principal figures are left: Martin Hinton, the British Museum zoologist, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Martin Hinton has recently been favored as a villain (11, 12, 13). Not only did he dislike Woodward, but he was a well-known practical joker. He was also familiar with Dawson and the amateur circle. He once claimed to know who [91] had done it: not Dawson but "someone in the British Museum" (11). Some consider this a coded confession. But the same has been suspected of Teilhard. After the fakery was revealed, Teilhard wrote a cryptic letter to Weiner about the finding of the canine: "It was so inconspicuous . . . that it seems to me quite unlikely that the tooth could have been planted" (14). If no one else could have planted it, then Teilhard must have. Was this some sort of Jesuitical way of admitting that he put it there?

Surprisingly little attention was paid to the suspicion of forgery that William King Gregory reported in 1913. There was even the precedent of a similar forgery in France in 1863. With experience, paleontologists can usually ascertain where a particular fossil has come from; they may even recognize individual specimens if they have seen them before. One of the most puzzling aspects of the affair is that none of Dawson's specimens was recognized as a ringer. Did someone, perhaps Barlow or Hinton, spot the fraud? In a letter to the Times of London in 1955, Hinton claimed that the zoologists at the British Museum would have recognized that the jaw and the canine were from an ape if they had been allowed to see them. But Hinton certainly saw them, and he failed to mention any suspicions when he listed Piltdown man as an authentic element of the British Pleistocene fauna in 1926 (15). If Hinton was involved in the conspiracy, he backed away from springing the trap.

Without more conclusive evidence on Hinton, let us now reconsider Teilhard de Chardin as a possible accomplice. Stephen Jay Gould accuses Teilhard directly, on the basis of a letter in which Teilhard reveals some information about Piltdown II that he could only have had if he was part of the fraud (16). Moreover, Teilhard did have the means and the opportunity to be a conspirator. He may have been the source of the Tunisian elephant molars uncovered at Piltdown I–a fragment of which he found at the site. And we must remember that he also found the painted brown canine. But, in his defense, let us consider the circumstances. Teilhard had no feuds with any of the principals in the case. He stood to gain no fame or other benefit from a fraud. He was not even in the country when many of the discoveries were made. It is also difficult to see why Dawson would have needed Teilhard; for that matter, it is hard to imagine Teilhard's motive for conspiring with Dawson. If Teilhard had participated in the hoax thinking it was a joke, he would surely have revealed the fraud quickly. As far as the slip about Piltdown II in the letter, it was written nearly forty years after the initial discovery–perhaps Teilhard's memory was faulty with respect to what he knew and when he knew it.

Another possibility exists: the whole affair was actually aimed at Charles Dawson. Was Dawson set up or double-crossed, perhaps by one of his amateur [92] friends? Certainly enough local people disliked him. The biggest problem with this theory is that no one had the opportunity to pull it off. How could Abbott, Woodhead, or any of the others surreptitiously salt the gravel bed while also making sure that the salted specimens would be found?

The most plausible answer has been sitting around for more than a dozen years–unappreciated perhaps because everyone else has been pursuing pet theories. Back in 1980, Leonard Harrison Matthews devised a devilishly ingenious scheme that explains nearly all of the anomalies and motives. Matthew's scheme can be modified and woven into an account of the whole affair, making the perfect English crime.

Once we realize the extent to which Dawson carefully prepared his story, we must see him as the sole instigator of the fraud. Perhaps the pieces of ironstone resembling a skull that he found at Piltdown in 1908 planted the seed in his mind. The discovery of the Heidelberg jaw may also have given him some impetus. The skull that Dawson acquired from Mr. Burley in 1906 presented him with the means, and the barren gravel bed at Piltdown provided the opportunity.

Dawson appears to have assembled the faunal remains from his own collections, as well as through the purchase and exchange of specimens. With these he laid the groundwork. First, he lured the chemist Samuel Woodhead and the eolith collector Lewis Abbott with his story of the workmen who discovered the cocoanut-shaped skull. Then he chanced upon Teilhard–a perfect addition, something of an innocent and a priest to boot. But he carefully kept Teilhard away from Piltdown. By persuading Abbott to treat some of the specimens, Dawson gave himself someone

else to accuse should the fraud be discovered. He eventually tested the waters with Arthur Smith Woodward, first with a letter, then with the hippopotamus premolar. Would Woodward take the bait? He did, and when he was later shown the skull specimens, he was hooked.

Dawson then took Woodward into the field for the first time; he made sure that Woodward himself found specimens while Teilhard served as a witness. But the skull alone, though unusually thick, was not enough. A lower jaw was also needed. It may have been during one of his visits to the British Museum at this time that Dawson stole a medieval orangutan jaw. A complete ape jaw would have been immediately recognized, so he broke off the segments that articulate with the skull, as well as other diagnostic parts, and filed the teeth to simulate human wear patterns. Then he planted the specimen.

Woodward took the material to London, where he showed it to a few other scientists. They all accepted the authenticity of the find, although some [93] questioned the association of the jaw and the cranium. It was a skillful forgery that was eagerly swallowed because now the British could claim a dawn man to counter Continental discoveries. Dawson continued to plant material for Woodward to find at the site in 1912 and 1913. Although Dawson experimented with other human material–fabricating the Barcombe Mills discovery–his work was essentially done.

Woodward was very careful about who saw the Piltdown materials and, in so doing, unwittingly reduced the chances that the fraud would be exposed. Even some staff members of the British Museum were not given full access to the specimens until the Geological Society meeting.

But at least one person spotted the fraud at first sight: the zoologist Martin Hinton. Hinton had a number of things to go on: the associated fossils, the artificial color, the obviously apelike jaw. Hinton must have realized immediately that the culprit was Dawson, and he probably suspected Woodward, Teilhard, and Barlow as well. But what should he do about it? At that time he was only a temporary worker at the museum; he could scarcely mount a direct challenge to Arthur Smith Woodward, who was so firmly committed to Piltdown man. Nor could he question the judgment of Arthur Keith–who had already invested much during his reconstructions of the skull. Even though Hinton may not have felt the need to help these two pompous men out of a difficult spot, he had to find another way to reveal the fraud.

He dropped hints to William King Gregory. But even when Gregory published these suspicions, Woodward was undeterred. If anything, Woodward plunged deeper into the fray. So Hinton decided to let the forger know that he had been detected by using his favorite weapon–a practical joke. After hearing the solemn debates between Keith and Woodward about the reconstruction of the jaw and teeth, he decided to salt the gravel bed with a patently false canine tooth. Perhaps this would flush the forger into revealing himself. At least the forger would know that the game was over.

So Hinton took a canine from an ape and filed it down so that it looked preposterously like the plaster canine in Woodward's reconstruction–the one that Keith had essentially proved was impossible. Not yet knowing that Dawson had used potassium dichromate to stain the other specimens, Hinton colored the tooth with brown paint.

At this point we can expand the story by bringing in Teilhard de Chardin–recently arrived from France and eager to update his knowledge of Piltdown. Three possible scenarios are worth considering. In the first, Teilhard also spotted the forgery–probably because of the Tunisian tooth. But Hinton may also have mentioned his suspicions to Teilhard, as he had with Gregory. In [94] any case, angry at being duped, Teilhard joined forces with Hinton. He agreed to plant the canine that Hinton had painted and in the end "found" it as well.

In the second scenario, Teilhard came to conspire with Dawson some time after they met in 1909, although it is hard to imagine why. In this case, Hinton would have planted the canine himself; Teilhard, when he found it, saw that the fraud had been discovered. The third possibility is that Hinton confronted Teilhard, who agreed to plant the canine to make amends and to help reveal the fraud. In any case, Teilhard left England soon afterward and did not return for many years. Gould believes that Teilhard warns readers about the forgery in a 1920 paper. Teilhard was forever rather embarrassed by any mention of Piltdown (16).

The difficulty with these schemes is that Hinton's bold maneuver had no known effect on Dawson. Dawson neither had a stroke nor made a sudden confession. Nor did anyone else. It must have been a nasty moment for Dawson when Teilhard produced the canine–unless he thought that God had saved him after all by allowing a real fossil to be found at Piltdown! But we must also appreciate that, by this point, Dawson had no options. He had gone too far, dragged onward by the eagerness of virtually every scientist from New York to Paris. In any case, his creation ought to be correct–a British fossil man should exist. So he showed his anonymous challenger that he would not be warned off, and planted a few more minor finds.

Interestingly, after Teilhard discovered the canine, Dawson made several trips to Arthur Keith's anatomical museum to study gorilla canines (17). Dawson's notes to Woodward have been seen as attempts to buttress the authenticity of the canine. They might also have been an attempt to raise Woodward's suspicions, at least about the canine, but this may be stretching things too far.

Hinton decided to strike again–this time through a tremendous joke. Having failed to wake the zoologists, Hinton decided to catch the anthropologists' attention. Woodward had started to refer to Eoanthropus rather portentously as the First Englishman. So Hinton provided what every true Englishman needs–his very own cricket bat. Hinton appears to have carved the cricket bat from a piece of fossil elephant femur filched from a museum. Woodward found the bat covered in yellow clay but lodged in a soil layer, separated from the clay by a layer of gravel. Surely, Hinton must have thought, this was an obvious hoax.

Hinton's joke turned out to be another flop: no one seems to have been the slightest bit suspicious. This gave Dawson an opportunity to move in for the kill. He struck back with Piltdown II. But, cleverly, he also wrote a paper distancing himself from his former claims about the significance of the artifacts [95] (1). Now everyone eagerly fell into line, without even seeing the second Piltdown site.

Hinton might have given up and kept his laughter–and no doubt his admiration for Dawson's nerve–to himself. What might have happened next is open to conjecture, because something totally unexpected occurred: Dawson died. In so doing, he neatly turned the tables on Hinton. Now Hinton was trapped; in an instant he and Teilhard had become the only living forgers. The two had no choice but to lie low, reduced to dropping hints.

Corroborating this theory of Hinton's role will be difficult–but at least nothing yet falsifies it. Although we can only deplore Dawson's wicked forgery, we must admit that it would not have succeeded without the headlong acceptance of shoddy evidence by scientists who should have known better. As W. C. Fields observes: "You can't cheat an honest man." Perhaps Dawson had the last laugh after all.

______________________________________________________________________________

1. F. Spencer. 1990. Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

10. A. S. Woodward. 1948. The Earliest Englishman.. London: Watts.

11. L. B. Halstead. 1979. The Piltdown hoax: Cui bono? Nature 277:596.

12. L. H. Matthews. 1981. The missing links (Part 8): The planting of a tooth. New Scientist

90:785.

13. S. Zuckerman. 1990. A phony ancestor. New York Review of Books. 8 November:12-16.

14. L. H. Matthews. 1981. The missing links (Part 10): Shall we ever know the truth? New

Scientist 91:26-28.

15. M. A. C. Hinton. 1926. The Pleistocene mammalia of the British Isles and their bearing upon the date of the glacial period. Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society 20:325-48.

16 S. J. Gould. 1980. The Piltdown conspiracy. Natural History 89:8-28.

17. C. Grigson. 1980. Missing links in the Piltdown fraud. New Scientist 89:55-58.


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