In December 1912, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward of London’s Natural History Museum presented a skull and jaw to a Geological Society meeting. The bones came from a gravel pit at Piltdown, in East Sussex, England. They named the find Eoanthropus dawsoni, or “Dawson’s dawn man,” according to Live Science.
Dawson said a workman had given him a piece of the skull years earlier, per Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum. He later found more fragments at the site. The find was billed as the “missing link” between apes and humans, according to PBS.
Some experts backed it. Scientist Arthur Keith spent more than five years studying the fragments, per PBS. Others doubted it almost at once. David Waterston and Marcellin Boule each concluded that the sample mixed an ape jaw with a human skull, according to Bite Sized Britain.
The truth took decades. In 1949, a fluorine test by Kenneth Oakley suggested the bones were about 50,000 years old, PBS reported. Then in 1953, Joseph Weiner noticed that the teeth looked deliberately ground down. He and Oakley ran new chemical tests with Wilfrid Le Gros Clark.
Their findings, published in November 1953 in a Natural History Museum bulletin, showed that the jaw and teeth were not fossils. The bulletin called the find “a most elaborate and carefully prepared hoax,” per PBS.
The jaw came from an orangutan, and the skull was human and far more recent than believed. Carbon-14 dating in 1959 put the skullcap at 520 to 720 years old. The bones had been stained to look ancient, according to PBS.
Nobody confessed. At least 25 men have been accused over the years, Stringer wrote. Dawson died in 1916.
In 2016, a team led by Isabelle De Groote of Liverpool John Moores University used DNA analysis and scans to look again. They concluded the work was done in one consistent way with a small set of specimens. “It is clear from our analysis that this work was likely all carried out by one forger: Charles Dawson,” De Groote said, per ScienceDaily. DNA suggested the orangutan came from Borneo, and at least two human skeletons were used, according to Liverpool John Moores University.
The hoax also had lasting effects. Laura Buck of the University of Cambridge noted that the Taung child fossils were initially overlooked because they did not fit the Piltdown model, per ScienceDaily. The Piltdown fakes are still kept at the Natural History Museum.
Piltdown was not the first famous fake to fool the public. In 1869, George Hull sold most of the Cardiff Giant for $23,000, and when P.T. Barnum was refused, he made a copy instead.
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