Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Piltdown Man Hoax

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

In 1912, a discovery was announced that shocked the world. A British paleontologist announced what was perhaps the most important find in the history of paleontology.  The announcement was about the discovery of a fossil, which was claimed to be the missing link between apes and humans.  It was a groundbreaking discovery that, if true, would rewrite what we knew about early humanity. Unfortunately, it was all fake. Learn more about Piltdown Man and what was perhaps the biggest scientific hoax of the 20th century on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Available nationally, look for a bottle of Heaven Hill Bottled-in-Bond at your local store. Find out more at heavenhilldistillery.com/hh-bottled-in-bond.php Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free offer and get $20 off. Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month. Use the code EverythingEverywhere for a 20% discount on a subscription at Newspapers.com. Visit meminto.com and get 15% off with code EED15.  Listen to Expedition Unknown wherever you get your podcasts.  Get started with a $13 trial set for just $3 at harrys.com/EVERYTHING. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1912, a discovery was announced that shocked the world. A British paleontologist announced what was perhaps the most important find in the history of paleontology. The announcement was about the discovery of a fossil, which claimed to be the missing link between apes and humans. It was a groundbreaking discovery that, if true, would rewrite what we knew about early humanity. Unfortunately, it was all fake.

Learn more about the Piltdown Man and what was perhaps the biggest scientific hoax of the 20th century on this episode of Everything Airbus. everywhere daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now.

Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The story of Piltdown Man actually begins in the 19th century. When Charles Darwin published his book The Origin of Species in 1859, it had profound implications. Darwin suggested that all species evolved over long periods of time via a process known as natural selection. The biggest controversy surrounding the origin of species was that Darwin's theory of natural selection would also have applied to human beings. Needless to say, this was not accepted by everyone at the time.

Many people in 19th century society rejected the idea that humans may have evolved. from some earlier species. In particular, they claimed it implied that humans came from monkeys. Natural selection actually didn't claim that, but it was the popular perception of the theory at the time. Religious criticism of Darwin aside, there were scientific critics of Darwin who raised an excellent point. If Darwin's prediction was true, there had to be some transitional life form between

our early ape-like ancestors and modern humans. This transitional life form was known at the time as the missing link. The term missing link was first coined in 1851 by one of Darwin's mentors, Charles Lyle, to describe some fossils that he had found. And just as an aside, the term missing link is seldom used anymore because it implies a linear path that evolution has to follow. In reality, there are all sorts of side branches that aren't necessarily links between anything. That being said, I'll be using the phrase missing link for the rest of the episode because it was the term used at the time, and it's relevant to this story. In the 19th century, paleontology was still

a very young discipline, especially hominid paleontology. There wasn't at the time enough fossil evidence or enough understanding to put all the pieces together. Several early hominid fossils were found in the 19th century, the most famous of which was a fossil discovered in 1856 in the Neander Valley of Germany. This fossil was later identified to be Homo Neanderthalus, which wasn't an ancestor of humans, at all, but rather more like our cousins. In 1868, the first evidence of what was called the Cro-Magnon man was discovered in France, and these were later determined to be early humans that lived about 50,000 years ago. In 1891, part of a fossil skull dubbed Java Man was found on the island of Java in Indonesia. It has subsequently been classified as being the species Homo erectus.

In 1907, the skull fragment was found in Maur Germany, which was later classified as Homo Heidelbergensis due to its location. This was the rough state of hominid paleontology when the story of Piltdown Man began. The story starts with a man named Charles Dawson. Not to be confused with Charles Darwin. Dawson was a lawyer and an amateur archaeologist. In 1889, he co-founded a private museum with voluntary submissions of artifacts. In 1893, he investigated a flint mine that was filled with Roman artifacts.

He explored and excavated the tunnels under the tunnels under the Hasting Castle. He found a cast iron Roman statue, some Neolithic stone axes, and several other artifacts. He also found several interesting fossils, including a petrified toad inside of a flint nodule, which he donated to the British Museum. For his efforts, he was named an honorary collector of the British Museum and selected as a fellow for the Geological Society of London. In 1895, he was elected as a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. He had achieved all of this at the age of 31, despite not having a university degree. So he was a known entity and a respected figure in the world of paleontology before the events of this episode ever took place. According to the testimony

of Dawson, as early as 1908, he was given a skull fragment by a worker at a gravel quarry in Piltown in East Essex, England. Darwin was the steward at Barkham Manor and the gravel pit was on the Barkham Manor estate. The workman didn't know what it was, but he figured that Dawson would be interested in it. Dawson then went to look for additional parts of the skull but found nothing. Three years later in 1911 he was supposedly walking around the estate when he came across a much larger piece of skull sticking out of a piling's heap. He assumed that this was part of the same skull fragment given to him back in 1908. How such an old fossil was just sitting on the surface was not explained, nor how it could be part of the same exact fossil found three years earlier, but that was his

story. In early 1912, he informed his friend, Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, a paleontologist at the British Museum about his discovery. Dawson and Woodward conducted an expanded excavation at the site from June to September 1912. They found several more fragments. However, it should be noted that Dawson found all of the fragments, not Woodward, and all of the fragments were not buried, but found in piling seeps. Included in the find were large pieces. of a jawbone. The two believe that they had discovered the most important find in the history of paleontology, and they dated the find to about half a million years in the past. I should note something else. This find was made in the middle of the First World War. Ever since the discoveries

of Homo Neanderthalus and Homo Heidelbergensis in Germany, there was a sense of inferiority amongst some British paleontologists. Based on the fossil finds at the time, the Germans could claim to be the cradle of humanity. With Dawson and Woodward's discovery, they can now point to Britain as being the cradle of humanity. I should also note that there was a third person, a French Jesuit paleontologist and geologist named Pierre de Chardin, who also volunteered at the dig site during this period. Finally, on December 12, 1912, Dawson and Woodward presented their findings at a meeting of the Geological Society of London. They claimed that they had found the missing link.

In that same presentation, they also announced a recreate. creation of the skull using the fragments that were found. Almost immediately, some scientists felt that something wasn't right. The cranium seemed almost too human. The jaw seemed almost too ape-like, including an ape-like canine tooth. However, other paleontologists such as Otto Schotentzak, the man who found Homo Heidelbergensis fossils, declared the discovery to be legitimate. In 1915, Dawson claimed to have found some more skull fragments from another skull at a site several miles away, and in 1916, Dawson died at the age of 52. Initially after the announcement, the paleontology community largely accepted Pilt

Down Man as legitimate, despite the questions that had been raised. Many people came to observe and study the Piltown Man's skull, and many of the most vocal supporters did so because it supported their theories that human populations evolved separately and that humanity did not originate in Africa. It was also used to support various racial theories that were popularized before the Second World War as well as to promote the idea of eugenics. One of the biggest supporters of these theories and of the legitimacy of the Piltown man was a paleontologist by the name of Henry Osborne.

Over time, problems began to arise. More and more hominid fossils were found all over the world. Piltown didn't seem to fit with any of the other findings. All of the other hominid fossils that were found, seemed to fit together and at least had a coherent consistency, except for Piltdown Man. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, skepticism around Piltedown Man grew amongst paleontologists. By the end of the Second World War, Piltdown Man was simply considered to be an unexplained outlier. However, some people weren't satisfied with it simply being an outlier.

Dating techniques and other form of testing had become much more sophisticated by the early 1950s, and a group of researchers from the University of Oxford decided to put the Piltdown Man fragments to the test. One of the tests conducted on the Piltdown fossils was fluorine absorption dating. The principle behind fluorine absorption dating is that groundwater contains fluorine ions that will be absorbed into bone when it's buried. The longer that a bone is buried, the more fluorine will be absorbed. By analyzing the amount of fluorine in the bone and comparing it with other objects which were buried for a known period of time, you can get an approximate idea for how long it was buried.

Using the fluorine absorption dating method, the Oxford team determined that the bones couldn't have been buried for more than 50,000 years. Piltdown man had to have been a hoax. The fact that it was a hoax explained all the discrepancies between it and the other hominid fossils that had been discovered around the world. Fluorine absorption dating wasn't the end of exposing the hoax. In 1959, an anatomist by the name of Wilfred Lagrange, Ross Clark was given access to the original Piltown artifacts. He was allowed to examine them

closer than anyone had in decades. What he found was that the Piltown skull actually consisted of bones from two completely different species. The bones of the cranium came from at least one human being who lived during the Middle Ages. The jaw was that of an orangutan. Using x-rays, they found that the molars on the jaw had actually been filed down to make it appear more human. The exposure of the hoax didn't really take the world of paleontology by surprise. In fact, it just confirmed what many people had already suspected. The big question was who was behind the hoax. The natural suspect was Charles Dawson.

As far as we know, it was Dawson who found all the pieces of the piltdown skull. He also seemed to have a very strong motive in that he desperately wanted to become a member of the Royal Society. However, for decades, many paleontologists actually defended Dawson. One of the problems was that Dawson died in 1916, so it simply wasn't possible to question him. The other suspect, of course, was Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, the paleontologist who helped promote Piltown Man. And the only other real suspect could have been Pierre Des Chardin, who worked on the dig site. To get to the bottom of the mystery, in 2009, a team of researchers led by Isabel de Groot of Liverpool John Moore's University, began testing the skull with modern techniques, including DNA testing and computer tomography.

They found that the human fragments came from at least two different humans, and that the orangutan parts came from a single orangutan, although they weren't able to extract DNA samples from the human bones. They also found that the bones have been covered with a thin layer of putty and stained to make them appear older. While they were not able to conclusively point to who was behind the hoax, they concluded it had to have been a single person. And they also concluded that the orangutan came from Borneo and was probably brought to England sometime in the late 19th century. Given modern dating techniques, it would be

difficult to pull off a hoax like piltdown man today. However, that doesn't mean scientific fraud is the thing of the past. Instead of trying to pass off an orangutan bone as a human bone, today it might just be something as simple as fabricating data or using shoddy statistical techniques to come to a predetermined conclusion. The lesson of Piltdown Man is that you have to be skeptical of any scientific claims, especially extraordinary claims. And the lesson for anyone who wants to perpetrate a hoax is that eventually the truth is going to come out.

The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Ben Long and Cameron Kiefer. Today's review comes from listener Dan the Zombie Dragon over on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, Perfect for Everybody Everywhere. This podcast is perfect for my easily bored ADHD. I love the wide variety of topics. I'm currently racing back in time to join the exclusive completionist club.

Confession, I've been skipping the encore episodes knowing I would eventually get to the original airing. Can I still be part of the club upon completion? Thanks, Dan. My attitude towards encore episodes is the same as it is with learning any subject. You need repetition for something to truly sink in. Just being exposed to something once usually isn't enough to achieve math. mastery. Remember that if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you two can have it read on the show.