7. Piltdown Man The story of Piltdown Man is a cautionary tale for those who think it's only the uneducated trailer-park masses who can be duped into believing faulty evidence of an uncovered missing link -- the scientific community at large can be fooled just as well. This infamous hoax dates back to 1910, when laborers at a gravel pit in the English village of Piltdown unearthed a peculiar fossil they thought looked like a shard of coconut. They brought it to Charles Dawson, an attorney who was the steward of the property, and also an amateur archaeologist. Dawson was thrilled with the artifact, which he thought might be a skull fragment of extreme antiquity. He gradually accumulated further pieces of bone from the gravel pit, and in 1912 he presented his findings to Arthur Smith Woodward, a geologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Soon afterward Smith Woodward led a thorough examination of the gravel pit, promptly discovering more skull fragments and a piece of jawbone. The skull bones seemed human, yet the jawbone was apelike. Given the proximity of the pieces and their uniform color, Smith Woodward declared them to have belonged to a single individual, a primitive species belonging to the undocumented transition between ape and human. The bones supported the theory that early man would have developed a larger brain before evolving a humanlike jaw. The news of Piltdown Man took the world by storm, but not everyone was willing to accept the existence of this proposed "earliest Englishman." The foremost objection was the unlikelihood of this skull and this jawbone fitting together in some unprecedented mishmash of a primate. But no one could conclusively disprove it, so for years Piltdown Man sat unmovable as a stumbling block that contradicted the rest of paleontology. In 1953, Oxford anatomist Joseph Weiner argued that Piltdown Man possessed a jawbone from an ape that had been deliberately stained and altered. After a series of tests using new dating techniques, it was discovered that all of the Piltdown bones were less than a thousand years old, and that the jawbone had been chemically treated to appear much older. Later tests would prove that the jaw had come from an orangutan. The Piltdown man was a complete hoax. The only question remaining, though, was whodunit. For nearly fifty years, the identity of the guilty party remained a complete and baffling enigma. Most people believed that Dawson was in on the scam, but he was too inexperienced an authority to have created the faked fossils alone. It appeared that the Piltdown prank was destined to be a mystery for the ages. But in 1996, a canvas trunk was discovered stashed away at the Natural History Museum, and it contained a number of fossils stained in the same manner as the Piltdown bones. The trunk bore the initials of Martin Hinton, a zoologist and fossil expert at the Museum, who was known for his love of practical jokes. Authorities now agree that Hinton was the mastermind behind Piltdown Man, and the bones found in his trunk were practice runs at the big prank. Hinton would have been motivated by a desire to humiliate Smith Woodward, whom Hinton considered pompous and arrogant, especially after refusing to support funding for a research project Hinton once proposed. You might say that Hinton's only failure was that his hoax was too good, since Smith Woodward died several before the embarrassing truth about his "scientific breakthrough" was revealed. Next: De Loys' Monkey Missing Links Primate Center Index Back to Cryptozoo Entrance