Piltdown Man

Piltdown Man: Britain's Greatest Hoax

By Kate Bartlett

Last updated 2011-02-17

Piltdown Man fooled the scientific community for some forty years before the hoax was finally discovered. Kate Bartlett explores the curious case of the bogus ancestor, and tries to unmask the perpetrator of the cunning deceit.

Who was Piltdown Man?

On 18 December 1912 newspapers throughout the world ran some sensational headlines - mostly along the lines of: 'Missing Link Found - Darwin's Theory Proved'.

That same day, at a meeting of the Geological Society in London, fragments of a fossil skull and jawbone were unveiled to the world. These fragments were quickly attributed to 'the earliest Englishman - Piltdown Man', although the find was officially named Eoanthropus dawsoni after its discoverer, Charles Dawson. Dawson was an amateur archaeologist, said to have stumbled across the skull in a gravel pit at Barkham Manor, Piltdown, in Sussex.

Some 40 years later, however, on 21 November 1953, a team of English scientists dramatically exposed Piltdown Man as a deliberate fraud. Instead of being almost a million years old, the skull fragments were found to be 500 years old, and the jaw in fact belonged to an orang-utan. So what had really happened?

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Search for missing link

Sir Arthur Smith of the British Museum (left) with English antiquarian Charles Dawson (centre), standing on Barkham Avenue, Piltdown, Sussex in 1908. ©The story of Piltdown Man came out at just the time when scientists were in a desperate race to find the missing link in the theory of evolution. Since Charles Darwin had published his theory on the origin of species in 1859, the hunt had been on for clues to the ancient ancestor that linked apes to humans.

Sensational finds of fossil ancestors, named Neanderthals, had already occurred in Germany and France. British Scientists, however, were desperate to prove that Britain had also played its part in the story of human evolution, and Piltdown Man was the...