Piltdown Man

The Piltdown Man is the anthropological hoax about the finding of the remains of the previously unknown early man or human being. The anthropological hoax consisted of the parts of the jawbone and a skull collected in the year 1912 from the gravel pit at Piltdown, in Uckfield, East Sussex, England.

The story of the 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 afterwards, Smith Woodward led a thorough examination of the gravel pit, promptly discovering more skull fragments and a piece of jawbone. The Piltdown Man 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.

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