Today in History—December 18: Piltdown Man: The Missing Link That Wasn’t

December 18, 1912: The biggest hoax in history?

At a meeting of the Geological Society of London on this day in 1912, respected paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum made an announcement that seemed to rewrite human history. For the next 40 years, anyway.

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Woodward debuted the bones of what he believed to be a previously unknown extinct hominin (Eoanthropus dawsoni), asserting that they represented the long-sought missing evolutionary link between apes and humans. The fossils—pieces of a cranium and jawbone—had come to Woodward by way of Charles Dawson, an English lawyer and amateur fossil hunter. Dawson claimed that they came from a gravel pit at Piltdown Common in southeastern England, giving the remains their common name: Piltdown man.

Some reacted with skepticism to the British Museum’s bold claim. But national pride and deeply ingrained racial and cultural prejudice also influenced reactions. Many Europeans wanted to believe that humanity had evolved on the British Isles, despite mounting evidence pointing to Africa as the cradle of humankind.

Subsequent digs at Piltdown turned up other artifacts that appeared to confirm the discovery. But something didn’t add up. Piltdown man’s jaw didn’t fit together properly, and no other ancient human fossils showed the same combination of features, with such a large brain case and thick jaw. Piltdown man increasingly clashed with other humanoid fossils emerging in Africa and Asia. By 1930 Piltdown man had become a glaring anomaly in an otherwise orderly fossil record.

Fun Fact

Piltdown man’s bones were colored with chromium and iron salts to look aged.

It took until 1953—and the advent of carbon, fluorine, and radioactive dating—to unravel the mystery. With the help of these advances, the bones were exposed as a deliberate forgery: a human skull with orangutan and chimpanzee jaw fragments, chemically treated to appear half a million years old.

Dawson (who died in 1916) remains the likely perpetrator of the hoax, but more than a dozen other suspects have been proposed, some as recently as the 1970s, after the discovery of similarly treated bones among the belongings of a disgruntled British Museum volunteer.

The story of the hoax endures as a cautionary tale; the bones, fittingly, are tucked away in the museum archive, preserved but hidden as a slightly embarrassing chapter in British history.