Piltdown Man hoax exposed in press - November 21, 1953

On this day in 1953, the Piltdown Man, supposedly the remains of a missing evolutionary link between apes and humans, was revealed to be a hoax in the press. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class. It's a production of I
Heart Radio. Hi again everyone, It's Eves and welcome to
This Day in History Class, a show where history waits
for no One. Today is November one. The day was

(00:23):
November twenty one, nineteen fifty three. The pilt Down Man,
the supposed fossil remains of a species of extinct comin in,
was exposed as a hoax. Charles Dawson was an amateur
antiquarian who lived in Lewis, Sussex. He claimed that in
nineteen o eight he began to find fossilized remains in
a gravel formation at pilt Down Common. Major evidence of

(00:47):
early humans in the British Aisles had not yet been uncovered,
so his discoveries were potentially groundbreaking. They attracted the attention
of Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of the Geological Department of
the British Museum. Woodward and Dawson continued to search the
gravel pit and discovered fragments of a cranium, jaw and teeth.

(01:08):
They suggested that all of the fragments belonged to one individual.
At a meeting of Geological Society of London on December eighteenth,
nineteen twelve, Woodward announced the discovery of the Piltdown remains.
He proposed that the pilt Down Man represented an unknown
species of extinct hominin that was the missing evolutionary link
between apes and early humans. He dubbed the pilt Down

(01:31):
Man Theoanthropist Dawson E or Dawn Man, after Dawson. From
nineteen thirteen to nineteen fifteen, more fragments were excavated from
the site and another one nearby. Dawson died in nineteen sixteen.
Many scientists accepted his view that the fragments all belonged
to the same individual, but others believed that the fragments

(01:53):
came from more than one source, possibly a modern man
and an anthropoid eight. In nineteen fifteen, Garrett Miller published
the results of a study that concluded that the job
was that of a chimpanzee. This conclusion was supported by
other scientists, but debate continued over the origin of the
Piltdown remains. People began to doubt the legitimacy of the

(02:16):
Piltdown Man in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, when
other early human remains began to be discovered around the world.
Plus it was determined that the piltd Down gravels were
not as old as they were once thought to be.
By the nineteen forties, more advanced dating technologies had been developed.
In nineteen forty nine, paleontologist Kenneth Oakley and colleagues cr.

(02:37):
Hoskins tested the Piltdown remains using a kind of chemical
analysis called florine testing. It was determined that all the
fragments were from around the same time period, but we're
much younger than suggested, possibly somewhere around fifty thousand years
old rather than five hundred thousand. That meant that the
pilt Down Man could not be the missing link between

(02:58):
apes and humans. In nineteen fifty three, after an improved
method of florine analysis had developed, Oakley physical anthropology professor
Joseph Winer an Oxford anthropologist Wilfrid Lagros Clark determined that
the jaw and teeth were not the same age as
the skull. They reported their discovery in the bulletin of
the Natural History Museum on November ninety three. The next day,

(03:22):
the hoax was announced in the press. The remains included
fragments of a six year old human cranium. The jaw
and teeth of an orangutan and the tooth of what
was likely a champion z. The fragments had been stained
with chromium and an iron sulfate solution, and the teeth
had been artificially rated to simulate where. On top of that,

(03:43):
the remains were not even from Britain. The pelt Down
Man was a hoax. A number of people have been
pegged as the perpetrator of the hoax, including Dawson and
a museum volunteer turn keeper of zoology at the museum
named Martin A. C. Hinton. In s teen, researchers published
an article that concluded new evidence suggested Dawson was responsible

(04:06):
for the hoax, though he may not have acted alone.
They said his quote hunger for acclaim may have driven
him to risk his reputation and mis direct the course
of anthropology for decades. I'm Eve Jeff Coote, and hopefully
you know a little more about history today than you
did yesterday. If you know you already spend too much

(04:26):
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this day at i heart media dot com. Thanks for
going on this trip through history with us. We'll see
you again tomorrow with another episode Rests. For more podcasts

(04:56):
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