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This year marks an unusual anniversary

hundred years from the presentation ofso called Piltdown Man fossil remains.

Today known as one of the most elaborateand long lasting hoaxes in science, theseremains were once believed to be a very

important for the understanding of ourown evolution.

In 1871 Charles Darwin published his fa-

mous book The Descent of Man in whichhe predicted discoveries of transitional

fossils, the missing links between apesand humans. A Dutch anatomist Eugne

Dubois discovered what he believed to beDarwins missing link in 1891 at Trinil,

Java. A skullcap and a thigh bone from

Java (Homo erectus) alongside skullcapfrom Neanderthal, Germany, were the

only human fossils known at the beginningof the 20th century. Impatient scientic

community wanted more fossils to test

evolutionary ideas. The Trinil discovery,that implicated Asia as the possible birth-

place of humanity, did not t well with

Eurocentric views, which dominated the

European intellectual landscape and hadits historical roots in European colonialism

and imperialism. The discovery of skull andjawbone fragments at Piltdown gravel pit(East Sussex, England) had been greeted

with great enthusiasm by British scien-

tists, since they thought this conrmed

that Europe played a major role in the ear-

ly human evolution. The remains were rstpresented at a meeting of the Geological

Society of London in December 1912, byan amateur archaeologist Charles Daw-

son. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni(Dawsons dawn-man) was given to the

specimen which was about to change the

face of human evolutionary studies.After the initial examination, Sir Arthur

Smith-Woodward, a geologist and famousscientist at the time, concluded that the

Piltdown fossil presented the combina-

tion of primitive, ape-like teeth and almostfully modern skull, with the large brain.

Arthur Smiths initial reconstruction of the

Piltdown skull rendered cranial volume of

1070 cm3. Curator of the Museum of theRoyal College of Surgeons, Arthur Keith,

later corrected Piltdowns cranial volumeto about 1500cm3 which is a modern hu-

man cranial capacity. So, it seemed that

during the course of human evolution thebrain expanded very early on, before jaw

and teeth were adapted to new types of

food. This tted perfectly well with thecommon notion at the time that our intel-

lect had a major leading role in the earlyhuman evolution: change of the human

mind was followed by the change of thebody. The already existing evidence, con-

trary to the early evolution of a large brain

in the form of Trinil fossil skull with a smallcranial volume (850 cm3), combined with

fully modern-looking thigh bone, was to-

tally ignored.

Likewise, the Piltdown Man discovery

was partially responsible for the severedismissal of the st Australopithecus fos-

sil nd. In 1924, an Australian anatomistRaymond Dart discovered a juvenile fossil

skull in Taung, South Africa, that showeda small chimpanzee-like brain (340cm3)

and almost modern teeth with reduced ca-

nines. This indicated an evolutionary his-

Author: Pedja Kabwe Radovi

The painting by John Cooke,exhibited in 1915, shows theexamination of the PiltdownMan remains by the famousscientists at the time. FrontRow: Dr. A. S. Underwood, Prof.Arthur Keith (central gure inwhite), W. P. Pycraft, and SirRay Lankester. Back Row: Mr. F.0. Barlow, Prof. G. Elliot Smith,

Charles Dawson, and Dr. ArthurSmith-Woodward

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tory very dierent from the one suggestedby the Piltdown remains, which showed

combination of the big brain and primitive

teeth. Like Dubois, Dart believed the fossilto be a transitional form between apes and

humans, a pre-human in his own words.Contrary to his view, strong proponents of

the Piltdown Man, like Arthur Keith, char-

acterized Taung as an anthropoid ape

that had little to do with the evolution of

humans. However, during 1930s, RobertBroom, a medical doctor and paleontolo-

gist, discovered more specimens of thesame species in South Africa, which nally

led Arthur Keith to

accept australopith-

ecines as a part of

the human lineage.

In a letter to Naturein 1947, Keith apolo-

gized to Dart: ...Iam now convinced,

on the evidence sub-

mitted by Dr. RobertBroom, that Prof.

Dart was right andthat I was wrong; the

Australopithecinaeare in or near the line

which culminated in

the human form. Thediscoveries of the

Peking Man (Homoerectus) at Zhoukou-

dian near Beijing, Chi-na, further expanded

the knowledge of ourevolution. From thispoint onward, the

Piltdown Man lost its scientic validity.Since there was a strong indication, both

from Africa and Asia that brain size in-

creased relatively late during the course ofhuman evolution, the doubts about the va-

lidity of the Piltdown specimen grew intothe scientic community.

In spite skepticism about the Piltdownnd that some scientists from the outset

expressed, it was nally exposed as a for-

gery only four decades later. In 1953, Dr.J. S. Weiner of the Department of Human

Anatomy at Oxford University carefullyexamined the fossils, when he noticed

inconsistencies in

teeth wear patternsand revealed unnatu-

ral alignment of theteeth. The uorine

content test provedthat the fossil was

made as a combina-

tion of dierent spec-

imens. The forger hadmechanically modi-

ed a juvenile oran-

gutans mandible andteeth to reduce them

and t them to an

anatomically modernhuman cranium! Ar-

ticial staining wasused to give the fake

fossil more authentic

supercial appear-

ance. The identity of

the Piltdown forgerremains unknown,

although there have

been many suspects, like Charles Dawson,

Arthur Keith, and even sir Arthur ConanDoyle. But the prime suspect of the fraud

discussed today is Martin Hinton, a zo-

ologist and curator of the Natural HistoryMuseum, London. In 1996 a trunk belong-

ing to Hinton was found in the museumsattic, that contained bones manipulated

in a similar way to the Piltdown chimera.

Whoever the perpetrator of the hoax, hewas well aware of the attractiveness of hu-

man fossils, the rare resources that help todecipher our place in nature.

Today, the Piltdown Man has no sci-

entic signicance for the study of the

human evolution. We now know that the

rst hominins were bipedal creatures fromEast Africa that had chimpanzee-sized

brains and human-like teeth. It seemsthat change of the body was followed by

a change of the mind (brain), not the otherway around. However, the Piltdown hoax

represents one of the best examples ofhow preconceived notions in science canchange assessment of available evidence,

and thus misleading scientic research.

Sources:

Henke W (2007) Historical Overview ofPaleoanthropological Research. pp. 1-56

in Handbook of Paleoanthropology, eds.Henke W, Tattersall I, Hardt T, Springer

Berlin-Heidelberg.

Cela-Conde CJ, Ayala FJ (2007) Human

Evolution: Trails from the Past, Oxford Uni-

versity Press.

Lewin R (2005) Human evolution: an il-

lustrated introduction-5th edition, Black-

well Publishing.

The Piltdown Man skull

reconstruction. Darkest colored

areas represent the originalfragments.

In 1938 Sir Arthur Keith

unveiled a memorial stone to

mark the site where Piltdown

Man was discovered by

Charles Dawson in 1912.

Raymond Dart with his famous

Taung child, the first fossilAustralopithecus specimen ever

discovered.