Revisiting Britain's Biggest Hoax: Who Faked The Bones Of The Piltdown Man?
The "Piltdown Man" painting by John Cooke, 1915 Wikimedia CommonsOne hundred years ago today, scientists hailed the discovery of our earliest ancestor. The bones turned out to be a fraud. But who planted them, and why? On December 18, 1912, Charles Dawson told The Geological Society of London that a workman had uncovered the remains of one of the earliest humans in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England. The skull fragments and lower jaw bone of the "Piltdown Man" showed that it had a brain two-thirds the size of a modern human's and a jaw remarkably similar to that of a young chimpanzee. The Piltdown Man became a starring figure in the human evolutionary tree over the next 40 years. (Popular Science even published a feature in 1931 about the "man-ape.") But the discovery was actually an incredibly successful hoax: In 1953, chemical testing and microscopic analysis revealed that the...