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[♪ INTRO] If I were to ask you to name a scientist who
shaped our understanding of human evolution, the name
you’d pick would probably start with “Charles” and
maybe end with “Darwin”.
But what if I told you that there’s another British
Charles who played a major role in early research in
human origins?
This man was Charles Dawson, and while he wasn’t a scientist or academic, his contributions
had a big impact on the way scientists of his time
understood where we came from.
The problem was, none of it was true.
It was a carefully crafted hoax that lasted for decades.
The story begins in the year 1912.
At the time, Charles Darwin’s theory about evolution by natural
selection had been marinating in the public’s consciousness
for around 40 years.
What’s more, human-like fossils were being discovered all over the world, generating
tons of excitement about the origin of our species.
There was Cro-Magnon man, an early human discovered
in France, as well as the Neanderthals, first found in
Germany.
From further afield, there was even “Java man”
from the Indonesian island of Java, which is the first
known fossil of Homo erectus, though it wasn’t named that
at the time.
Now, they didn’t really have good ways to date fossils in
those days, but at the time Java man was thought to be
around half a million years old.
The scientists of Britain who were interested in human origins were
feeling a bit left out of the human ancestor hunt, since none
of these fossils had been found within the United Kingdom.
There were two main questions floating around about human
origins at the time.
One was exactly where humans first evolved, and
the other was which of our unique traits came first,
bipedalism or our big brains?
And when they approached answering these questions, some European scientists
definitely knew what they expected to find.
They assumed that because Europeans were the most “advanced”
race, humanity must have first evolved somewhere
in Europe, despite Darwin’s hypothesis that our species
first evolved in Africa.
They also believed that our large brains and flat
faces came before walking upright, as intelligence must be
the ultimate driver of human’s uniqueness.
That Homo erectus fossil from Indonesia threw a wrench
in this idea, since Homo erectus clearly walked on two legs
but had a smaller brain than modern humans do, and it
even started to make people question whether humanity really
did first evolve in Europe.
Then, along came Charles Dawson.
Dawson was an amateur antiquarian and excavator of
fossils.
He had no formal education in science, but he did
have a knack for finding fossils and other old things in the
Sussex region of the United Kingdom.
And some of his finds were truly unbelievable, as in, nobody
should have believed him when he said he found them.
My personal favorite example is the “toad in the hole”,
a mummified frog that Dawson claimed had been found inside
a geode, which is just not how anything works.
But the specimen that would forever place his name in paleontological
history was yet to come.
In 1912, he wrote to paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward at the British Museum in London
to report that he'd discovered several skull
fragments and a jawbone in Piltdown, Sussex, England.
The bones were found with some animal fossils and stone tools
in a layer of gravel, all of which suggested the site was
about 500,000 old.
The skull was human-like, with a flat face and high
forehead, and would have housed a large, modern-human-sized brain.
But the jawbone was weird.
It was decidedly ape-like in shape, but its teeth
were worn down in a similar way as humans tend to wear
down their teeth.
All that adds up to a species that was not as evolved
as modern humans, but getting close.
Dawson and Smith Woodward called this specimen Eoanthropus
dawsoni, or more simply, Piltdown Man.
Together, Dawson and Woodward argued that this was the missing
link everyone had been looking for: a proper, British gent
from half a million years ago.
This would have made Piltdown Man another human ancestor from the same time
as Java Man, but one with a much larger brain, which supported
the idea that humans in Britain were somehow “more
evolved” than those in other places.
But not everyone was convinced.
Almost immediately after the find was announced, it
caused a massive rift in the scientific community.
While some, like Smith Woodward himself and others,
agreed the fossil was genuine, other scientists published
their doubts, saying the skull fragments and jaw didn’t
look like they were from the same individual.
In 1913, for example, David Waterston from King's College in London wrote
to the journal Nature that the cranium was just way
too human, and the molars were just way too ape.
And scientists from outside the United Kingdom seemed a little
less likely to accept the discovery than those in the UK.
Still, Dawson kept on “finding” bones until his death
in 1916, including some additional human-like remains that he
argued belonged to the same species.
But after Dawson’s death, no one else ever found fossils at Piltdown,
possibly because Dawson never revealed exactly where
within the area he’d been finding all those fossils.
Over the next few decades, additional examples of Homo erectus
were unearthed in Java and China.
And in 1924, a completely new genus of human ancestor called Australopithecus
was discovered in South Africa.
This pivotal fossil was called Taung Child, although its significance wasn’t
fully understood for many years, partly because
European scientists were so convinced that Piltdown
man made a better ancestor than Taung Child did.
As more fossils were discovered, researchers continued to question
where Piltdown fit in the human tree, growing more
suspicious as the years went on.
Then in 1953, chemical analysis of the skull and teeth finally concluded that Piltdown
man was a hoax.
The cranium was from a modern human, while the
jaw and teeth came from a modern-day orangutan.
And, the orangutan’s teeth were deliberately filed down to make
them resemble the wear of a typical human’s teeth.
So the story of Piltdown Man shifted from exploring
where this oddball ancestor fit on our evolutionary tree,
to figuring out who was the fraudster that tried to put it
there.
Suspects included Dawson himself, several other prominent
scientists, or an infamous prankster named Horace de vere
Cole.
Some even briefly considered Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes series,
as the possible architect of the scheme.
But this problem, like that of Piltdown itself, had a rather obvious answer.
Researchers in 2016 found evidence that a second forged
specimen from a different location used teeth from the
same orangutan individual as was used in Piltdown, and
the discoverer of that second forgery was none other than
Charles Dawson.
What isn’t as clear is whether the scientists who vouched for Piltdown’s validity
knew it was a fake, or if they just wanted so badly to believe
it was real that they never thought to question it.
Besides being an embarrassing chapter in anthropological history,
there are some larger takeaways from this story.
The biggest of these is what it says about confirmation bias
in science.
When we’re more willing to accept someone’s theories if
they already support what we wanted to believe in the first
place, we’re setting ourselves up to reject new ideas or
change our worldview.
Many British scientists of the time wanted to believe what other British people
believed: that the British were the original humans, which
somehow made them superior to other humans.
Confirmation bias in science still exists today, despite sincere
efforts to defeat it.
This is because even scientists who are trying their best to
be unbiased are still human, and still let their biases
influence them.
Today’s anthropologists, for example, still do much of their research on people living
in industrialized nations, and often make the mistake of generalizing
their findings to include all humans, past and present.
In order to combat this assumption that industrialized nations can be representative of humanity
as a whole, some researchers now call this group of people
WEIRD.
Not in a mean way, it’s an acronym that stands for
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic,
and it’s a reminder that these factors don’t represent the
entirety of human culture and evolution.
We’ve come a long way since 1912.
Or at least, we like to think we have.
We are still vulnerable to our own biases, just like the
scientists of a hundred years ago were.
And that just means we need to actively watch for bias and
bad science, so these things can be challenged and defeated.
But also, the next time someone tries to pass off a
frog in a geode as a real specimen, maybe we don’t base
decades of work on his other discoveries.
And if you’re looking for monthly blurbs about fact-checked science, look no
further than the 2023 SciShow calendar.
It’s filled with iconic animals, but you’ll have to order your own to find out
who makes an appearance.
You never know what you’ll get each month of
this rollercoaster of a calendar.
One month you’re learning about the first IBM magnetic memory computer
and the next you’re learning how tall polar bears
get when they stand on their hind legs.
And it’s all linked together by the digits of pi.
Intrigued?
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end of this video and by ordering your calendar today!
[♪ OUTRO]