The Piltdown Fraud

History of Science 3333 H
December 8, 1997

The case of the Piltdown man is the case of one of the most prominent scientific frauds of this century. The incident raised issues of the credibility of science itself. Science, that temple of empirical reasoning and observation, was led astray. Its established representatives had betrayed it, and the scientific community had failed to sufficiently examine its data. Doubt was cast upon scientists as well as their methods.

The story of the Piltdown man begins in 1856, when the first fragments of a hominid from the Pleistocene epoch were discovered in the Neander valley, Germany. Three years later, Darwin published his monumental Origin of Species, and paleontology was off and running. Over the years excitement grew, as important remnants of Man’s ancestors were unearthed all over Europe and Asia, from the Iberian Peninsula to Indonesia.

While their colleagues on the continent were making important discoveries, British paleontologists had to content themselves with a few extremely crude stone implements. They hypothesized that the maker of these tools would have been an intelligent hominid with a large cranial capacity, but still retaining an ape-like jaw. But as of the turn of the century, they had no substantial evidence for this claim.

Arthur Smith Woodward was one of those who held to this theory. Woodward directed the geology department at the British Museum of Natural History. He had an excellent reputation and was widely respected in the scientific community. When his friend and colleague, the amateur paleontologist Charles Dawson, found fossil hominid fragments in 1908, Woodward grew excited. Competition was fierce amongst other scholars, and these fragments purposed to be the long-sought confirmation of his theoretical work. It is not impossible that his judgment was affected by his desire to show up his peers.

The fragments, reportedly, had come to light when workmen in a quarry in East Sussex had accidentally shattered a complete skull with a pick. Most of the pieces were lost, but someone had retained the presence of mind to bring a sliver to Dawson.

Dawson contacted Woodward and they headed up further investigation of the gravel pit near Piltdown. By 1912, Dawson, Woodward, and their colleagues had uncovered several pieces of skull, most of a jaw, and a couple of teeth. The reconstruction of these pieces indicated a new type of ancient hominid, with a mixture of features of both man and ape. It matched Woodward’s theory’s predictions.

The announcement of the find at Piltdown caused a great stir in both public and scientific circles. The newspapers and the public imagination were fascinated by the idea of the ‘missing link,’ and the find instantly gained importance by virtue of its popularity. There were several enthusiastic supporters from the scientific community, mostly in Britain. However, acceptance of Piltdown was by no means immediate or universal. British scientists were in competition with scientists in Europe. They wanted a significant find in order to establish Britain’s paleontological community. Scientists in other countries were skeptical of the remains. Many believed that this was merely the jaw of an ape and the skull of a human, brought together through an accident of placement. Others, who did not doubt the fossils’ authenticity, thought them to be remains of an evolutionary ‘dead end’—a species which had failed to survive and was unimportant in human evolution.

This controversy continued for a number of years, and Dawson died in 1916. In 1917, Woodward announced that Dawson had found another skull at Piltdown, the year prior to his death. Piltdown II and the sterling reputation of Woodward convinced much of the opposition and a great deal of work was devoted to unraveling evolution based on these fragments.

The years went by, and more and more fossils were discovered—some in Australia, and many more near Beijing in China. As the evidence accumulated, the Piltdown man came to seem more and more anomalous. His features simply did not fit with the rest of what was being discovered. Increasingly, Piltdown was ignored. The American Museum of Natural History classified it as a juxtaposition of human and ape bones. Piltdown was nearly forgotten, until the advent of fluorine absorption dating.

In 1949, the test was applied to the Piltdown fossils and they were found to be no more than 600 years old. Even so, the test was new and did not immediately give rise to suspicion. Many scientists doubted the accuracy of the technology. Others suggested theories to account for Piltdown’s modernity. Perhaps, it was proposed, Piltdown is not an ancestor of humanity but rather a cousin, the product of an early forking of our evolutionary tree. It took four more years until a new possibility dawned on J.S. Weiner. What if the Piltdown man had not actually existed at all? What if it was all a hoax?

J. S. Weiner was a professor of physical anthropology at Oxford. He had long believed that the Piltdown bones were from two different species. However, it wasn’t until a conversation at a banquet in 1953 that he began to suspect anything more sinister. In speaking with Sir Kenneth Oakley, an expert on Piltdown, it struck him that the details of the Piltdown finds were almost impossibly vague. In fact, there existed no documentation whatsoever on the exact whereabouts of either find—a staggering lapse for a paleontologist. Weiner regarded this as a "curious piece of information", and took his suspicions to W. E. Le Gros Clark, head of Oxford’s anthropology department. With Le Gros Clark’s assistance, Weiner examined the original fossils. The evidence of forgery was immediately obvious.

The teeth had been worn in the wrong direction. A glance through a microscope instantly revealed regular, crosshatched abrasion patterns—a sure sign of the work of a file. Weiner compared the Piltdown teeth to chimpanzee teeth that he filed down himself, and found the markings identical. The bones had been coated with a solution of iron to give them an aged look, but upon drilling beneath the surface the teeth were found to be pure white. While they were indeed fossils, they were far more recent than Woodward had claimed, and eventually were determined to have belonged to an elephant and a hippopotamus.

Reaction amongst scientists was instantaneous. Most were relieved—at last, no one had to try to make Piltdown fit with the rest of the fossil record; an impossible task which many had already despaired of. A few, who had worked closely on Piltdown, refused to accept the evidence. One such was the outspoken Alvan Marston, a dentist and archaeologist who wrote to a colleague in 1955: "…Get it into your noodle that there was no Piltdown forgery…Le Gros Clark the wind-bag and Weiner as the garbage collector…I have got them ‘holed’ and am biding my time…"

Critics aside, there was obviously a great deal of interest in discovering the identity of the forger. Weiner originally pointed the finger at Dawson. Others have implicated numerous others and ascribed various motivations to them all, ranging from a money dispute to a practical joke to an attempt to tarnish the image of the Royal Society. No conclusive proof of guilt has yet been established, and the subject of the hoaxer’s identity remains a viable topic today.

The incident raised two different ethical issues. The first, clearly, was in the perpetration of the fraud. Someone had used the tools of science to obscure the truth rather than discover it. That hoaxer played upon the public’s trust in science to promote his (there are no female suspects) fabrication. The second issue lies in the British paleontological community’s acceptance of the fake, and its subsequent failure in detecting the deception for forty years. Such laxity in investigation is contrary to the stated methods of science—objectivity and rigorous analysis.

In the wake of the incident, several consequences bob to the surface. The case of the Piltdown fraud has become a banner for those who wish to discredit science and its conclusions. It would be difficult to prove, but it has perhaps contributed to a general public disillusionment with science in general. It could be argued that Piltdown has had a sobering effect on the scientific community. It has shown that a good reputation should never be enough to earn respect for findings—they must be rigorously tested and cross-checked.

In summary, Piltdown was created in relation to a small existing body of knowledge about early hominids. It was plausible; the fossils fit with current theory. However, that theory became impossible as more evidence was gathered. Eventually, the forgery was exposed and the scientific community was transformed. In the words of Frank Spencer, "The lesson of Piltdown is that dishonesty must be included among the factors that influence the rejection or acceptance of scientific discoveries and concepts."

In February 1991, the journal Science referred to fraud in science as ‘a growth industry.’ By April of that year no fewer than five conferences on scientific misconduct had been sponsored by the National Institutions of Health in Maryland. The Piltdown episode serves as a warning to those who would commit fraud in the name of science. The vast scientific enterprise is in the end a relentless pursuer of truth.

Sources:

Chippindale, Christopher, 1990. "Piltdown: Who Dunit? Who Cares?", Science 250 (November 23): 1162-3.

Cincinnati Skeptics, 1997. The Piltdown Man Hoax. http://cyberwarped.com/~ art/blurbs/piltdown-man.html.

Grigson, Caroline, 1990. "Missing links in the Piltdown fraud", New Scientist 125 (January 13): 55-8.

Menon, Shanti, 1997. "The Piltdown perp", Discover (January): 34-5.

Shipman, Pat, 1990. "On the trail of the Piltdown fraudsters", New Scientist 128 (October 6): 52-4.

Spencer, Frank, 1990. Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tobias, Phillip V., 1994. "Piltdown Unmasked", Sciences 34 (January/February): 38-42.

Walsh, John E., 1996. Unraveling Piltdown. New York: Random House Inc.