Pulling the Wool Over Our Eyes: The Piltdown Man Fraud

Figure 1: Charles Dawson & Piltdown Man

In honor of today’s holiday (April’s Fools Day) this blog post will discuss one of the biggest and most infamous anthropological frauds: Piltdown Man.  This blog post will cover what Piltdown Man represented and actually was, why the fraud occurred, and the implications of it in light of the real information that came about to refute it.

Piltdown Man (Figure 1) came about to fulfill a need among early scholars who explored the origins of modern Homo sapiens.  These scholars believed that what differentiated humans from nonhuman primates was a large brain, and they expected that was the first step in human evolution.  They also believed the cradle of human civilization was in Europe or the Middle East, and they refused to consider any other possibilities.  These ideas were influenced by prevailing ideas and attitudes of the day, which were deeply steeped in prejudices against nonwhites. 

Scholars eventually had the discovery to substantiate their racist ideology.  In 1912, Charles Dawson (Figure 1) claimed he had found the “missing link” between humans and apes, and not only that but he discovered it in England, the first fossil human found in the country.  He made this discovery in the city of Piltdown, England.  This fossil find included a complete skull that resembled both human and apes: the cranium was diagnostically human but the jaw was large and diagnostically ape.  He also found a series of primitive tools.  Scholars hailed the find as one of the most important finds of the time, and they dubbed the skull as a new species known as Eoanthropus.

But not all scholars agreed with Dawson’s discovery or the prevailing ideas at the time.  Most did not comment on the topic for various reasons, the primary of which was because many scholars were very comfortable with the find as it supported their prevailing and largely prejudicial attitudes.  As a result, the discovery went unchallenged for forty years.  Then in the 1950s, it was discovered that Piltdown Man was a fraud and not an actual fossil.  It was a fabrication by Dawson who fabricated the find with a modern human skull and a lower jaw of an orangutan.  The falsification of the Piltdown Man also coincided with discoveries of several “anomalous” fossils in Africa, which caused scholars to rethink the Piltdown Man discovery because no subsequent and related discoveries were found in that time.

But why did it take so long to prove this skull to be a fraud?  For two reasons: first, Eoanthropus/Piltdown Man was the first human ancestor found not only in Britain but also in Europe, and the Eurocentric scholars were loathe  to disprove something that instilled national pride and  an interest in  science.  Second, there was this long held idea that the first hominid feature was the enlarged brain because it is such a distinguishing feature between humans and nonhuman primates today.  It was believed that this feature must be the one that differentiated human and nonhuman primate ancestors.  The other “weird” and “anomalous” African fossils did not demonstrate this enlarged brain that Eoanthropus/Piltdown did, so the discovery of Eoanthropus/Piltdown laid scholars’ fears to rest about these African fossils versus the English one.  But subsequent evidence and reanalysis of existing evidence has demonstrated that human evolution went down a different path as it was not a large brain that came first but bipedal locomotion that distinguished humans and nonhuman primates.

So there you have it: why the Piltdown Man fraud occurred and persisted for a number of decades.  Science has come a long way since then and we have rigorous standards and expectations that prevent such falsehoods from occurring again.  You can be rest assured that such a fraud will not occur when reputable and reliable science is occurring.

References

Jurmain, Robert, Kilgore, Lynn, Trevathan, Wenda, Ciochon, Russell L. Introduction to Physical

Anthropology. Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 2014. Print.

Stein, P.L. & Rowe, B.M. (2014). Introduction to Human Evolution and Prehistory.  United States of America: McGraw Hill Education.