http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54672-2003Nov2.html
Dusting Off the Remains of a Hoax
Piltdown Man Comes Out of Storage, but Perpetrator of the Original Fraud Is Still a Mystery
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 3, 2003; Page A08
As scientific hoaxes go, few have matched it. Sometime early in the 20th century, someone -- it is still unclear who -- "salted" a gravel pit near the town of Piltdown, England, with what were purported to be the 500,000-year-old fossil remains of a human ancestor -- half human, half ape.
The timing couldn't have been better. Darwin's "Origin of Species" was barely 50 years old, the French and Germans had found Neanderthals, and the race was on to discover the storied "missing link" in the evolution from apes to humans.
"In Britain we had some early modern humans, but nothing really old," paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer said in a telephone interview from his office in Britain's Natural History Museum. "There were stone tools, though, so there was almost a national expectation that we should have something."
And suddenly, there it was. Piltdown man made his appearance in 1912 and held a place of honor in the museum until Nov. 21, 1953, when a new generation of scientists announced that the famous fossil was a fraud.
Modern dating techniques established that the skull came from a modern human and the jawbone was an orangutan's. The ape teeth had been filed with a rasp to match the human teeth above them.
This month, the museum will take the Piltdown remains out of storage and put them on display during the Pfizer Annual Science Forum to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the fraud's discovery.
But who did it? The prime suspect has always been Charles Dawson, the lawyer and amateur paleontologist who "discovered" the fossil in the gravel pit, but over the years virtually everyone connected with it has come under suspicion, either as a lone actor or as part of a conspiracy.
The list also includes outsiders, among them Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an ardent spiritualist whose disdain for evolutionary theory stood in stark contrast to the cold logic practiced by his fictional hero, Sherlock Holmes.
And why did it take half a century to figure out that Piltdown man was a phony? "The people who believed in it were very powerful," Stringer said, especially Arthur Smith Woodward, the museum's leading geologist at the time of the discovery. "You had to be very cautious about taking after people like this."
U.S. scholars had no such compunctions, however, and expressed early skepticism over the find. Smithsonian mammologist Gerrit Smith Miller even suggested the possibility of a forgery.
"But then came World War I," Stringer said. People had other things to think about, "and when it was over, the agenda moved on."
And finally, suggests James Randi, a retired magician who has made a successful second career calling attention to the shortcomings of pseudoscience and claims of the supernatural, the story of Piltdown man was simply too good to check.
"Britain always wanted to be the source of all life and culture, but they needed an early artifact that the public was willing to accept," Randi said in a telephone interview from Plantation, Fla. "They needed it to be true."
Such a hoax is hard to kill, he added. "People go to healers and say, 'Praise Jesus, I can walk!' but when you see them after the service, they're still in a wheelchair," Randi said. "They tell you the devil's interfering, and they're still happy even when the paramedics take them home in an ambulance."
As the years passed, Piltdown man lost favor among paleontologists and came to be ignored in scholarly texts. An increasingly multi-branched evolutionary tree no longer accommodated the presence of a single missing link.
And with the advent of modern dating techniques after World War II, Piltdown's days were numbered. In 1953 a team of scientists at the British Museum's Natural History Branch (which would become the Natural History Museum) announced that fluorine-based tests showed that the skull was that of a modern human approximately 50,000 years old. Later tests would show the skull was less than 1,000 years old.
The orangutan jaw, the 1953 team said, was probably new when the fossil was found. The hoaxer had stained it with potassium dichromate to make it look older. The museum -- keepers of the Piltdown flame for half a century -- had extinguished it.
In retrospect, the fraud seemed obvious. Stringer said all the animal bones accompanying the remains were recognizable and "diagnostic" in pinpointing the age of the find. "We know now that that never happens," he said. "Half the stuff you find in a fossil bed, you don't know what it is."
Still, he added, "some people say it was very amateurish, but given the time, I thought they did a pretty good job." He acknowledged that investigators had failed for decades to notice the filed teeth, "but nobody ever looked."
Randi suggested the culprit was an outsider such as Conan Doyle, who lived close to Dawson and may have wanted to discredit him. "It would have been a tremendous satisfaction to him to know that it was a hoax," Randi said. "He would never have to say anything ."
But Stringer argued against an outsider: "If your motive is enmity, you want to expose the discovery" as a fraud in order to expose the discoverer as a charlatan. But by 1953 almost everyone -- including Conan Doyle -- was long dead.
Stringer said Dawson is still "my prime candidate," a paleontology wannabe who probably perpetrated the fraud, perhaps with an accomplice, to enhance his academic credentials. Dawson died suddenly in 1916, taking his secrets to the grave.
"It's possible, though, that there's a more complex scenario," Stringer added, suggesting that a series of analytical articles written in 1981 for New Scientist magazine by L. Harrison Matthews, a British biologist, may hold some clues.
In this reconstruction, Dawson plants the phony artifacts and then convinces his friend Woodward of their authenticity. Two young museum researchers, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Martin A.C. Hinton, think Piltdown man is a fraud but are afraid to risk Woodward's disfavor by contradicting him.
Instead, they decide to salt the Piltdown site themselves, hoping to expose the hoax by planting preposterous fossils, including an elephant bone known as "the cricket bat," a fitting tool for "the first Englishman." To their horror, however, their artifacts are accepted as authentic, effectively silencing them as unwitting abettors of the fraud.
Stringer noted that everyone in the story has been accused elsewhere of being the primary hoaxer, but he said that Woodward, at least, was probably a true believer. "He retired near Piltdown and spent time digging there," Stringer said. "He never found anything."
