It’s 1908 or maybe 1909,
and you’re walking down a farm road somewhere in southeast England.
You notice that the road has recently been repaired with chips of a brownish rock that
seem out of place.
You’ve studied a little geology, so you ask around in the nearby village to find out
where the rock came from.
It turns out that it came from a gravel pit on a farm close to where you’d been walking.
You decide to head back out there and visit the pit, and when you arrive there are two
workers digging out more gravel for road repairs.
You make conversation, asking them if they’ve found anything interesting.
You’re also a bit of an amateur archaeologist.
And you want to know if they’ve encountered bones or fossils and if they’ll hang onto
‘em for you if they do.
They don’t have anything for you...this time.
But you keep visiting, hoping something will turn up.
And eventually, something does - one of the workmen shows you what appears to be a piece
of a human skull.
It’s strangely thick and stained a dark brown color, like the rocks in the pit, and
you immediately start searching through the gravel for more pieces.
But you don’t find anything else
Still, you’re convinced enough that there must be more to discover, that you keep coming
back to the pit.
And in the fall of 1911, your persistence pays off.
As you look through the piles of dirt and rock left behind by the diggers, you spot
another piece of bone - part of the same skull.
And you realize you might be holding something important
- part of the skull of an ancient human ancestor.
You take your finds to the Keeper of Geology at the British Museum of Natural History,
a paleontologist named Arthur Smith Woodward.
He’s thrilled and impressed by your discoveries, and the two of you arrange for further excavations.
Back at the gravel pit, you and a team of workers continue digging.
You go through the discarded dirt piles, and you dig up and sieve the undisturbed layers
of the pit.
In the piles, you find more fragments of that same skull.
And in the pit, you uncover the right half of an ape-like jaw-bone and Smith Woodward
finds yet another piece of that skull.
Based on where they were found, you think they must go together.
You also turn up some bones and teeth from ancient animals,
and what appear to be a few stone tools, too.
In December of 1912, you present your finds to a packed meeting of the prestigious
Geological Society of London, concluding that they’re half a million years old.
The fossil is named Eoanthropus dawsoni - Dawson’s dawn man - in your honor.
It’s the scientific discovery of the century - just what everyone’s been looking for
to shine a light on human origins, especially in England.
It’s the kind of thing that could get you elected as a fellow of the Royal Society,
the United Kingdom’s national academy of sciences.
But... not everyone in the scientific community is convinced...and they are right not to be.
Because, the so-called fossil human you claimed to have discovered is a fake.
And how you happened to come across it...well, it certainly sounds like a good story...
Instead of the find of a lifetime, what you’ve really started is a mystery that will outlive you
What we now call the Piltdown Man Hoax.
Hello and welcome to Eons: Mysteries of Deep Time,
a podcast about some of the most perplexing problems
and unanswered questions about life in the ancient past.
I’m Kallie Moore, co-host of PBS Eons,
a YouTube channel about the history of life on Earth.
Today’s episode is a mystery in the most classic literary sense of the word.
It’s a whodunit detective story that spans more than a century
- the saga of the Piltdown Man Hoax.
From that gravel pit in Sussex, we’ll follow the faked fossils through history, to what’s
now the Natural History Museum in London, where scientists are using new technologies
to try to unravel the identity of the fraudster.
We’ll meet three of the prime suspects:
Charles Dawson, an amateur fossil hunter with grand scientific ambitions;
Martin Hinton, a museum volunteer with a grudge;
and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest known to be a joker
We’ll hear the arguments for and against their involvement, and explore how this hoax
impacted the study of human origins.
This story has everything, from old timey science drama to workplace politics, and even
an accusation of the creator of Sherlock Holmes, himself - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
While there’s no question that the Piltdown Man was a forgery, as for whodunit and why...
well, there may yet be evidence out there that could put this mystery to bed once and for all
If we could just find it.
Don’t forget: Our 2023 calendar featuring some of
our favorite “main characters of paleontology”
from classic Eons episodes
is available now at ComplexlyCalendars.com!
And, exciting announcement, we also just released a puzzle!
For our first-ever puzzle, we’re celebrating
the process of carcinization with a reconstruction
of what’s thought to be the oldest false crab: Platykotta.
It’s available now at DFTBA.com!
When Dawson and Smith Woodward presented their finds at the Geological Society meeting, they
made headlines.
And many British paleontologists were very willing to believe that the fossils were genuine.
But other experts in the US and continental Europe were skeptical.
It would take more to convince them.
Like, uncovering additional fossils at Piltdown...which Dawson and Smith Woodward and others would go
on to do.
In 1913, for example, a canine tooth was found that matched the tooth Smith Woodward had
sculpted in his reconstruction of the original fossils for that first presentation.
Because he thought the so-called Eoanthropus represented a “missing link” between humans
and apes, he’d modeled the canine as being intermediate in size and shape between the two
And that’s just what the new Piltdown canine looked like - found by the Jesuit priest named
Teilhard de Chardin, who’d helped out with earlier excavations
at the site.
In 1915, Dawson claimed to have found a second fossil site, just two miles or 3.2 kms from
the Piltdown gravel pit.
It contained additional skull pieces and a molar that looked a lot like the original material
And then, in 1916, Dawson died -- and no other fossils were ever found at Piltdown.
But their impact didn’t die with Dawson.
Because, Piltdown Man’s large brain and ape-like jaw seemed to fit in perfectly with
the other fossils of human ancestors known from Europe at the time.
These included Neandertals from Germany and France, and the ancient Homo sapiens fossils
from Cro-Magnon, also in France - all with relatively large brains.
So when anatomist Raymond Dart announced his discovery of a much different-looking human
ancestor from South Africa in 1925 - the famous Australopithecus africanus fossil called the
Taung Child - prominent paleontologists in the UK were quick to criticize.
They dismissed the small-brained fossil as irrelevant to human origins.
But over the next two decades, as more and more small-brained hominin fossils were excavated
in South Africa, they became impossible to ignore.
And it became increasingly difficult to see how Piltdown Man’s odd combination of features
fit in with the newly emerging understanding of our evolutionary history.
While discoveries elsewhere in the world had started to erode Piltdown Man’s relevance
to the story of human origins, scientists back in London were about to put it to bed
for good.
In 1949, a new technique for dating fossils had been developed and Kenneth Oakley, a geologist
at the Natural History Museum, decided to apply it to the Piltdown fossils.
To his surprise, they turned out to be much younger than Dawson and Smith Woodward had
suggested, and that raised some red flags.
So, he enlisted the help of two other experts to re-examine the material.
And what they found would have Piltdown Man making headlines again.
In 1953, they published a paper exposing the fossils as “deliberate fakes.”
The jaw actually came from an orangutan - and had been broken in exactly the right places
to keep its real identity a mystery, even to scientists familiar with primate anatomy.
The teeth had been filed down to give them a human-like wear pattern.
The skull fragments seemed to come from a recent human, though they were on the thick side.
And all the so-called fossils had been stained to match each other and the color of the Piltdown
gravel - every one of the finds from the site had been planted.
The supposed missing link was finally revealed as a hoax.
But who was behind it - and why?
In the almost 70 years since the forgery was uncovered, at least a dozen different people
have been named as suspects - by themselves or in combination - with motives ranging from
personal grudges against members of the scientific establishment to the whole thing being just
an elaborate practical joke that went too far.
As far as proof goes, some of the cases rest mostly on circumstantial evidence, while others
are more convincing.
The case against Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer behind Sherlock Holmes, for example,
includes him living very close to the Piltdown gravel pit, having the necessary connections
through which to get the kinds of fossils that were planted there, and a line in his
novel The Lost World about being able to “fake a bone as easily as you can a photograph.”
For the three prime suspects, however, there’s more behind the accusations.
Take Charles Dawson, the discoverer of the so-called fossils.
Being the person who “found” the first of them - and the fact that no more appeared
after his death - makes him an obvious potential hoaxer.
His motive?
Scientific acclaim - he wanted to be a Fellow of the Royal Society.
He wrote more than 50 papers in pursuit of this goal and was even nominated as a Fellow,
but was never elected to the Society.
One author writing about the hoax suggested that sibling rivalry was ultimately behind
Dawson’s ambition - his younger brother had been knighted and became a baronet.
And the case against him is pretty clear.
He was the only person who was present at all of the so-called “discoveries” from
both Piltdown sites and he was later revealed to be behind
at least 38 other archaeological forgeries.
Dawson clearly had the means and opportunity to carry out the fraud, and he’d hardly
be the first or the last person to fake scientific results for the sake of recognition.
But...
there’s one interesting wrinkle in his case - the two other prime suspects both allegedly
said Dawson wasn’t the hoaxer... but they knew who was.
So, what about the two of them?
Martin Hinton worked as a volunteer in the Department of Geology at the Natural History
Museum from 1910 to 1916 - which was generally when the Piltdown hoax took place.
In 1911, he wrote a letter to Smith Woodward who was the head of that Department, asking
about payment for the work he was doing and maybe even regular employment.
Smith Woodward refused - and a possible motive was born.
By late 1917, Hinton had left the Geology Department for Zoology, which hired him in
1921.
He eventually rose to the post of Keeper of Zoology from 1936 to 1945.
Becoming staff at the Museum would’ve been a reason for him not to expose the hoax
- it would’ve embarrassed his employer along with Woodward.
Now, there are accounts of Hinton having visited Piltdown while the excavations there were
in progress and later suggestions that he tried to implicate de Chardin as the hoaxer.
There are also old letters that describe his unhappiness with Smith Woodward and the situation
in the Geology Department.
But the strongest piece of evidence comes from the 1978 discovery of old trunks stashed
in the attics of the Department of Zoology - directly above Hinton’s old office.
They contained mammal bones and teeth that looked a lot like what had been “found”
at Piltdown.
Several of the pieces had been carved in a way that looked identical to one of the artifacts
that accompanied the so-called fossils from the site and they were all stained the same
chocolate brown as the Piltdown material.
And the discovery of the trunks led to a second stash of human teeth, hidden away in a tobacco
tin, among Hinton’s personal effects after his death.
Based on the bones in the trunks and the additional teeth, Hinton seemed to know - or he just
figured out - both of the methods the hoaxer used to treat the Piltdown material to make
it look old.
But was this proof of Hinton faking the fossils to try to embarrass Woodward or did it mean
he was trying to figure out how it was done in order to figure out who did it?
And why did he try to point the finger at de Chardin multiple times - what role did
he play?
Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest and a paleontologist.
And at least one scholar who knew him described him as a “joker.”
During the main Piltdown “discoveries,” he was based at a seminary relatively close
to the site and participated in the excavations there.
He even found the canine tooth in 1913 that helped quiet some of Piltdown Man’s original critics.
But almost immediately after Dawson and Smith Woodward had presented the first so-called
fossils to the Geological Society in December 1912, he’d written to a colleague,
“'We must do nothing...”
“...We must wait for the criticisms that will follow.“
...Which seems...odd.
Especially given that, in 1920, he suggested that part of the Piltdown Man’s jaw bone
seemed intentionally broken, well before anyone else suspected the fossil was fake.
And in several papers he wrote about human evolution before the hoax was revealed, he
seemed to have referenced Piltdown Man as little as possible
- a strange way to treat a supposedly important fossil.
Either de Chardin was skeptical on the scientific merits of the material or...he knew it wasn’t real.
His possible motive is less clear than Dawson’s or Hinton’s, which weakens the case against him.
It’s been suggested that he might’ve realized Dawson had faked finds before and was trying
to set him up again, potentially through an accomplice with access to an orangutan jaw.
So, with all of the prime suspects dead for at least over half a century at this point,
where does the cold case stand?
Well, a paper published in 2016 by a team based at the same museum where Hinton and
Woodward worked used DNA analysis and CT scans to try to solve the whodunit once and for all.
Based on its DNA, they found that the ape material used for the Piltdown jaws and teeth
probably came from a single Bornean orangutan.
They weren’t able to extract any DNA from the human bones, but determined that they
likely came from two or three different people, possibly from medieval times.
Using CT scans, they also found that a number of the so-called fossils were filled with
gravel, held in place with plugs made of pebbles and dental putty.
The gravel was similar to what’s found at Piltdown and would’ve helped make the bones
feel heavier, as fossils weigh more than unfossilized bone.
Ultimately, they concluded that the hoax was the work of a single forger - they point to
Dawson - based on the consistency of their methods and the limited number of specimens used
And while that’s all that science can tell us right now, there’s still one thing left
that might solve the mystery: a letter.
Teilhard de Chardin allegedly wrote a letter that was only supposed to be opened after his death.
It was deposited in a bank somewhere, but was never found - so, the missing piece to
this whole puzzle might still be out there.
In the end, the Piltdown Man hoax is a story about how science gets done
and how it can self-correct.
It’s also a story about human expectations and biases, ones that set the study of our
evolutionary history back a couple of decades.
And we still care about it because we care about possibilities - we’re compelled
by mysteries that could still be solved.
And this one gets at the heart of how we understand ourselves, and what kinds of stories we’re
willing to tell and believe about our origins.