THE PILTDOWN MAN

 
 
 
 

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     A relatively recent Sussex legend concerns Eoanthropus Dawsoni, the so-called Piltdown Man. The Lewes solicitor, Charles Dawson, was walking on Piltdown Common in the
vicinity of a gravel digging gang when he happened upon a fragment of human skull.   In the following spring (1912) he unearthed the rest of the upper part of the skull and half the lower jaw whereupon archaeologists and learned scholars fellabout with excitement at this 'discovery' of the Missing Link. The experts were fooled for years until, in the fifties, modern methods proved the Piltdown Man to be a hoax.
     Shortly after the alleged discovery, E.V. Lucas wrote: 'I was amused by the thought of the power that the dead hand -or, in this case, the dead head - can exert; this poor prehistoric peasant, for instance, who could neither read nor write and had only a small series of sounds with which to communicate his needs, being able, some thousands of years after his death, to start scores of scholarly pens in England, Italy, Germany, France and America theorising and even quarrelling over his identity; human or simian. Yes, and Swedish too, the anatomist Ramstrom of Upsala having the hardihood to suggest that at the same time that the Piltdown Man expired a chimpanzee also gave up the ghost, and whereas the skull that the Lewes archaeologist, Charles Dawson, excavated in 1912 belonged to a prehistoric man - Homo sapiens - the jaw belonged to the ape, and therefore no valuable inferences could be drawn.' All very well for Mr. Lucas to be patronising about the Swede's hardihood but, as it turned out, Ramstrom had hit on the truth years before modern science came to the same conclusion.
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PILTDOWN MAN, scientific hoax involving the supposed discovery near Piltdown, England, of an apelike fossil ancestral to modern humans. Reported in 1912, the discovery included fragments of what were later proved to be a modern human cranium and an ape's jawbone. Piltdown man was assigned a genus, Eoanthropus ("dawn man"), and a species, dawsoni, named after the discoverer, Charles Dawson (1864-1916), an amateur naturalist. For many years the fossil was a subject of anthropological controversy. In 1953, scientific analyses proved it a forgery. 

Early Man: Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus dawsoni)

In 1908 a workman at a gravel pit in Piltdown, England found a portion of a human skull and gave it to an amateur geologist by the name of Charles Dawson. Subsequent digging by Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum and Catholic paleontologist-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin revealed more skull fragments and the lower jaw of Piltdown man. The Piltdown pit also produced fossil bones of elephant, mastodon, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, beaver and deer.

Most scientists accepted this find as a genuine subhuman ancestor of man. For forty five years, until 1953, this find was considered to be a missing link between man and ape. The only problem was that this was a total hoax! Someone had taken a human skull cap and a jaw of an orangutan, filed the teeth and planted the evidence. This fossil might still be considered legitimate today, had it not been for the popularity of australopithecines as candidates for human ancestors, which caused a more detailed investigation in the 1950's.

This raises some interesting questions. Why was the fraud so successful? Could it be that evolutionary theory demanded the missing links so scientists found them. It is often claimed that science is objective and self-correcting, however in retrospect we see that the evidence to reject this find as legitimate was there all along. The file marks on the teeth of the lower jaw were clearly visible, the molars were misaligned and filed at two different angles. The canine teeth had been filed so far down that the pulp cavity had been exposed and plugged (Lubenow 1992, 43).

Much literature was written on Piltdown and it is estimated that more than 500 doctoral dissertations were based on this "find".

References:
Lubenow 1992, 39-44
Gish 1984T
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