Piltdown Man's "Discovery" Announced - Dec. 18, 1912

The "discovery" of the Piltdown Man was announced on this day in 1912. There's more to the story in the December 26, 2016 episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History class from how Stuff
Works dot com and from the desk of Stuff you
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. In its December,

(00:22):
the discovery of the Piltdown Man was announced at the
Geological Society of London on this Day in l The
word discovery should probably go in quotation marks because the
pilt Down Man was a hoax or a fraud, depending
on exactly what happened, which isn't totally clear. In February

(00:43):
of nineteen twelve, Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, who was the
Keeper of Geology at the British Museum which is now
called the Natural History Museum, he got a letter from
his friend Charles Dawson, and in addition to being a solicitor,
Dawson was an amateur archaeologist and he told Woodward he
had found something really exciting in some gravel beds and

(01:04):
pilt down, Sussex. He said that some workers had been
digging in this pit and they had dug up something
that they described as being kind of like a coconut,
along with some other fragments, and they had thrown them away.
Dawson had gone and retrieved all of this stuff and
dug up some of the things and had several pieces
of skull and jaw bone before writing this letter to Woodward.

(01:26):
This set of remains looked kind of human, but not exactly.
He compared it to another find that had been dug
up in Germany five years or so before. So the
two men, Dawson and Smith Woodward went back to the pit.
They did a lot more excavating before having that Geological

(01:48):
Society of London meeting, and when they got to the meeting,
they had an ape like mandible or jaw bone. Two
of its mohlers were there and had significant wear on them.
They were also the pieces of the brain case of
a skull, which seemed a lot more human than the
mandible part did. They also found some stone tools and

(02:09):
fragments of other non human mammal fossils. The coloring of
all of this was very similar to what was in
the gravel bed. Their conclusion was that these fossils were
at least five hundred thousand years old. Everyone was really
excited about this. People considered it to be a very
major find, not just because it seemed to be evidence

(02:32):
of a transitional fossil in the human family tree, but
also because it meant that England was a very important
place when it came to human evolution. A lot of
papers were written about this find, basically a huge chunk
of scientific literature. This chunk of literature was generally credulous

(02:53):
and uncritical of the find itself. It wasn't really looking
into whether the find was legitimate, but into what the
fine meant. There were some doubters though, right from the start,
but things didn't really start to fall apart for the
Piltdown Man for about ten years. First, in ninety six,
it was discovered that those gravel beds where the fossils

(03:14):
had been found were not nearly old enough to have
five hundred thousand year old fossils in them. Then people
started finding fossils in other parts of the world that
showed a very different track of human evolution. And then
in the nineteen forties people started to develop isotopic testing
and that quickly proved that these bones were nowhere near

(03:38):
five hundred thousand years old. It was more like maybe
fifty thousand years old at most, and that was from
the very earliest generation of these sorts of tests. Those
tests got better, and when they got better, the findings
got more precise, and when the findings got more precise,
the bones were even newer, more like about six hundred

(04:00):
years old, not anywhere in the vicinity of five thousand
at all. Further analysis showed that this jawbone was not
from a human ancestor. It was from a young orangutan,
and all these various pieces had been meticulously altered to
look like they were genuine. They had been stained to

(04:21):
match the material and the gravel beds, the mohlers had
been artificially worn down, and the other mammal fossils that
had been found they were genuine, but they weren't actually
mammals that lived in that area. It became clear that
someone had done this on purpose, and a lot of
people were extremely embarrassed and very worried about what this

(04:44):
said about the state of science and what damage it
might have done to people's understanding of science. So we
know a lot more today about exactly how these hoax
remains were doctored to look real, but there are still
some doubts about exactly who the hoaxer was. It's generally
pinned on Charles Dawson, with the idea that he was

(05:04):
trying to bolster his own career, but it's possible that
he might have been the dupe of some other person's deception.
You can learn more about this in the December sixteen
episode of Stuffy. Missed in History Class Thanks to k
c P. Grimmant, Chandler Mays for their audio work on
the show. You can subscribe to the Stay in History
Class on Apple Podcasts, Google podcast, I Heart Radio app,

(05:27):
and wire reals. You get podcast and you can tune
in tomorrow for a very famous Christmas story.