Forbidden History - Piltdown Man: History's Greatest Hoaxes

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

Forbidden History presents History's Greatest Hoaxes In 1912 the discovery of an unusual skull and jawbone in Sussex, England, led many to believe that a 'missing link' had finally been found. The revelation of a hoax, however, had wide reaching impact on anthropology and science. Cast List: Guy Walters: A British author, historian, and journalist who has written several books on WWII. As a journalist for The Times, he writes on historical topics for the national press. Dr. Linda Papadopoulos: Author & Psychologist Miles Russell: Archaeologist & Charles Dawson Biographer Alex Boese: Author, The World's Greatest Hoaxes Marcus Brigstocke: Author & Comedian Joe Nickell: Paranormal Investigator Keith Moore: Head Librarian, Royal Society Cathy Walling: Curator, Hastings Museum & Art Gallery Jo Hatton: Keeper of Natural History, Horniman Museum Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. In 1912, the skull and bone fragments from what was thought to be a prehistoric man were discovered in a gravel pit in Sussex, England. What became known as the Piltdown Man was claimed to be one of the most important archaeological finds of all time.

But was it genuine? or was it a carefully engineered hoax? The Pilled-down Man skull discovery was a huge hoax and it had enormous ramifications for the world of anthropology, science, understanding of mankind for almost half a century. At the time it was first revealed, it fitted pretty much exactly what scientists were looking for. The idea that early humans would have a really developed brain, an ape-like face.

As far as they were concerned, this was ideal. I mean, bonus, but it was discovered in Britain. Other reasons that this may have gained sort of the credibility that it did so quickly is because Britain needed a win. You know, you can still say whatever's happened, look at what our little island produced. We found right here the exact missing link that Darwin is talking about. There were a number of people conspiring to nudge Britain along. Perhaps they had a meeting and they went, look, this is probably a pretty good idea.

chaps and and off they went. There was certainly a willingness just to give this momentum, give it spin and keep it going. Whether we're talking about something like the Hitler Diaries in history or we're talking about build down skull and science or any other realm of human activity, truth matters. I think we can't be rigid enough in our desire for the highest standards from the people who we entrust our culture. Culture. Local solicitor and respected amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson was first brought bone fragments in 1908 by Workman at the Pilt Down Gravel Pit in East Sussex.

Dawson contacted his friend Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of the geological department at the British Museum of Natural History, to inform him of the discoveries. Dawson claimed that the find happened when he was simply walking along one day and he came past some workmen excavating a pathway or some roadway and and he said to them could you let me know if you find anything interesting you know when you're digging because i think this area could be potentially judging by the way that the earth looks and the layers look there could be something interesting in there so do let me know whether you ever find anything of any interest this is what he claims happen what he then says he's presented with slightly later date is a skull fragment

which he finds terrifically exciting, but the key is then the piece of jaw fragment that he also subsequently discovers in this area, which he then links together with the skull fragment to suggest the missing link.

Charles Dawson was a really interesting person in that he had this sort of very almost boring persona. It was a small town lawyer and landowner. you know very you know benign boring nine to five job but he wanted to be something bigger something more exciting he actually wanted to be a world-renowned archaeologist he dabbled in archaeology but it certainly wasn't something that that he was you know well known for he hadn't studied it as extensively as other you know his contemporaries and we now know that it wasn't just this

finding of the missing link that he was reported to faith he'd actually done several of these things leading up to it. Dawson and Woodward presented the skull to the Geological Society of London on December 18th, 1912. Woodward announced that a reconstruction of the fragments showed that the skull was remarkably similar to that of a modern human, and that the Piltdown Man, as it became known, represented an evolutionary missing link between apes and humans. It caused a sensation. The Manchester Guardian newspaper announced that one of the most important prehistoric finds of our time has been made in Sussex.

Dr. Miles Russell is a senior lecturer in archaeology at Bournemouth University. The Beltdown Man was the most explosive find at the time it was made because it was the fossil that it was the missing link. It proved that humans had evolved from apes and it showed that the earliest human had of a large intelligent brain. So as far as it goes, it was a major discovery. But of course, the critical thing was it was found in the home counties of England. So from that point of view, it proved that English archaeology was better than anywhere else in the world. And it also proved that humanity began here in the home counties. One of the reason why these two fragments are believed to be the missing

link is partly because Dawson is a credible collector in the eyes of many academics in London, including Woodward Smith, who looks at it and says, yeah, I believe it. He believes it to such an extent that people today still might think that Woodward Smith was in on the hoax. I think one of the reasons people didn't question this too much was it the idea of Piltdown played very much into British vanity. They liked the idea that the earliest human would have been British,

and it was this earliest human with a big brain. This was the height of the British Empire, so the idea that the first human was British, that mankind had evolved in Great Britain, very much played to national pride. Dr. Miles Russell has studied and investigated the Piltdown Skull hoax for more than 20 years.

He agreed to take us to Charles Dawson's office. Well, we're in the middle of Upfield now here. This is Dawson and Hart solicitors. This is the firm that Charles Dawson co-founded in the early 20th century. And I'm told there's one aspect of the Piltdown discovery still on display in here. And there he is, a replica of the Piltdown skull. Obviously, when the forgery was exposed in 1953, Dawson Hart actually wanted this back from the Natural History Museum.

And they were less keen to actually have it. obviously now it was a fraud, but they provided the company with the plaster cast. So here in the late 1960s, and ever since this has been on show. In fact, it's the only aspect of the entire Piltdown hoax story that's still on public display. Scientists like the rest of us are human. Sometimes they want to believe things. A decent scientist will keep testing his hypothesis to destruction. But sometimes they get it wrong.

Sometimes it's too big a find just to write off. Built down really did a lot for the scientific argument that we found a missing link. This was good news for evolutionists. This put those creationists kind of in their place. People will not scrutinize, I think this is just a categorical claim. People do not scrutinize that, which they are glad to hear. You've got to look at this discovery with the backdrop of when it happened. You know, Britain was in the throes of kind of this British empire that they'd built, collapsing.

They needed something to attest to their greatness. And this came along at exactly the right time. But almost from the outset, Woodward's reconstruction of the Piltdown Fragments didn't convince some experts. There were people who had grave doubts about what Dawson had discovered. But the most important people, certainly the most influential people at the time, managed to give this some momentum. And they were a combination of the sort of top flight of society, who may discreetly have said, look, whatever this turns out to be,

it's pretty good for Britain. The reconstructions that Sir Arthur Keith and others created in the 1920s. And there's a lot of dispute as to obviously how it all fits together because there's very little the face still, surviving, but we've got significant portions of the back of the head, and we know now that this is a human skull dating to about 1400 AD, but it's a very, very thick skull. We can't really see it the way it's been put back together, but it's been deliberately selected because the skull is abnormally enlarged.

That's why Dawson selected it, because it looked archaic, it looked particularly old, and suited his purposes. everybody up till that point felt that the way that mankind had evolved from Simeon's was that our jaws grew bigger and our teeth, this area started changing before our brains. And what the piltedown man showed was actually the brain had enlarged before the morphology of the jaw had changed. So this had turned the whole idea, the way in which we had evolved from apes on its head, literally. So Charles Dawson bought this stuff to the British Museum because he wanted their acceptors.

He bought it to them and said, look, you have it. You put on the grand exhibition that explains where we have all come from. One of the key questions. That's very good at the British Museum. So what critics, doubters and naysayers there were were relatively quickly swept aside by the establishment. I mean, obviously nowadays, nothing like that would ever happen, would it? If the head of the geological society was happy to go along with it, then frankly that was good enough for most other scientists. Saying that, there were quite a few, even after the great presentation of Pilt Down Man, who looked at it and went,

no, I'm not buying that. Woodward's reconstruction of the Piltdown skull included ape-like canine teeth, which were themselves controversial. In August 1913, Woodward, Dawson, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin began a systematic search of the soil heaps in Sussex, specifically to find the missing canines. And lo and behold, they soon found a canine tooth that, according to Woodward, fitted the jaw perfectly. I think the real brilliance of the piltdown discovery is the way in which the finds were made, because there was Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward, who were the major excavators or major directors of the project, but there was only one digger, a chap called Venus Hargreaves, who was a labourer.

He did all the digging, he piled all the soil up into spoil heaps, which were then sieved. So at no stage was it ever needed to put an artefact in the ground. Nothing was ever found in context, it was found in the spoil heap. So it's very easy, especially if you're Charles Dawson, you're living and working very close to the site, to sort of sort of sort of sort of sort of sort of the market, to put artifacts into the spoil heap where other people can find them.

You don't have to go through a careful procedure of placing them in the ground, making them look convincing. They've just been dug up, their loose fines, and that means anyone can find them, but it also means everyone's got access to the spoil heap. It's a great way of covering your tracks and making the hoax look genuine. Woodward expected the fine to put an end to any dispute over his reconstruction of the skull. However, Professor Arthur Keith from the Royal College of Sucke,

the Royal College of Surgeons attacked the latest discovery. He pointed out that human molars allow side-to-side movement when chewing, and yet the canine tooth in the pilt-down jaw prevented side-to-side movement. The interesting thing is that we now know this is an orang-a-tang's jaw. So it's an ape jaw that's been doctored and stained. But the critical thing there is that the bit that joins the jaw to the skull has been deliberately broken away. So we cannot see how the two fits together. And that what made a number of people at the time suggested this were two separate individuals, a human and an orangutan, that somehow

have become connected. But when you place the two together, the length of the jaw pushes the whole face out. It gives it that very ape-like appearance. And that fitted the Victorian idea of intelligence, large brain case, very ape-like face. And we know obviously now that pilt down man has got those features in reverse. It's the face that changes first. than the skull case. The timing was excellent. Like every decent hoax, there has to be an appetite for the thing that you're hoaxing.

And in this case, it was 1912, 50 years after the publication of the Origin of Species, and Britain is massively important, but hasn't necessarily achieved anything vast for a while. And suddenly Dawson shows up and says, as luck would have it, Great Britain, we've discovered this. So the rest of you stand down, we've got it.

We've now got this and it was a mile away from my house. So the appetite for it was already there, which probably explains why fairly quickly nobody went, but that's a jaw from an orangutan and the teeth from a chimp and a skull from a bloke. What forensic analysis was available in 1912, you know, for them to be able to, you know, disprove. Well, I think what's really key is that actually, you know, parts of the jaw were just painted.

And I think it wouldn't have taken much effort to discover that. You would have noticed if you're drilled into the teeth on the jaw, if you'd done it properly, you'd have noticed that discoloration was literally just a film of discoloration. And what was below it was pure white. and you might have noticed had you looked more clearly that the teeth had been filed down. In 1915, Charles Dawson claimed to have found three fragments of a second skull called Piltdown 2 at a new site called Sheffield Park, about two miles away from the original finds. Woodward Smith attempted several times to elicit the exact location from Dawson,

but without success, and he didn't present the new finds to the society until five. five months after Dawson's death in August 1916. In 1921, the Piltdown and Sheffield Park finds were examined by Henry Fairfield Osborne, president of the American Museum of Natural History, who declared that the jaw and skull belonged together without question. The Sheffield Park fragments were taken as final proof that Piltdown Man was genuine. There was doubts about the piled-down fossil. There were doubts about the piled-down fossil almost immediately.

There was a paper in nature in 1913, which said effectively that it was a mixture of chimpanzee and human remains. And in subsequent years, there were doubts expressed. Charles Dawson had some very good support. Some senior scientists were unsure of the fossil, but one or two of them were backers, and therefore it was enough for the materials to be taken seriously. All the fossil finds around the world were showing that in terms of man's evolution, that the human body evolved first and the brain later.

Piltdown was exactly the opposite. You had an ape body with a very large human brain. Totally contradicted everything else. And the fact that Pills built down was accepted for so long, kind of made it take much, much longer for this, all this other fossil evidence to be accepted as the absolute right story. There was a lot of opposition, really, to Dawson's discovery when it was first made. He hadn't made a lot of friends in Sussex. He'd alienated the Sussex Archaeological Society. There were a number of people who really called him the Wizard of Sussex on the basis that he had had so many amazing discoveries far more than anyone should be expected to have. So within his own

antiquarian circles there were a number of people who doubted that Piltdown was real. He got around that extremely well by making friends elsewhere, certainly with the Natural History Museum and with other sort of circles, other scientific circles. Piltdown is what they wanted, therefore they latched onto him and supported his excavations and his work. But I think the discovery of the jaw and the skull seemed to be amazing. That's what people wanted. There were flints nearby. They were all planted as well. So it looked like prehistoric tools. They're hippopotamus teeth. All the sort of things that an ancient human would have been hunting were found there. So Dawson, throughout the three years of the excavation at Piltdown, kept finding things

that answered the critics' problems. He was saying he couldn't have been a hunter, he couldn't have been a thinking individual. All these finds were made that answered, their queries. While the Natural History Museum was very excited about the find, the academic world certainly was not. As early as 1913, David Waterston of King's College London published in the Nature Journal his conclusion that Piltdown Man was an ape mandible attached to a human skull.

It fitted the theories of the time, but by the 1930s it was looking that Piltdown was out of touch. was out of touch. It was scientists were getting more and more embarrassed by it because other skull fragments didn't fit that. They had a more human-like face and an ape-like skull. And people didn't know where to place Pilkdown. So in scientific circles it was becoming more and more apparent that it didn't fit. It was just in the wider world, the public loved the idea of Pilk Down Man as the first human and the media was certainly extremely attached to it, but scientists were distancing themselves from it more and more. And so in a way, the discovery in the 1950s that

it was a hoax. For them, it was a relief. From the outset, many experts were skeptical about the Piltdown find. But it wasn't until 40 years later that Joseph Weiner, Kenneth Page Oakley, and Professor La Grohl-Clock carried out more tests that revealed once and for all that the skull was a hoax. On November 21st, 1953, the British Museum published the scientists' findings in a journal which confirmed the hoax to the world. The Naturalistian Museum were extremely protective of the remains. Arthur Smith Woodward, who'd worked with Dawson,

didn't want them studied, didn't allow anyone to look at them. So it wasn't really until he died in the late 1940s that the possibility arrived that Piltdown could be examined. And in the early 1950s, a whole new series of tests were available to science, which weren't in 1912 when the final final. were first made. So radiocarbon dating was the first real major breakthrough. It was discovered the skull itself was medieval. The jaw that belonged to an orangutan was only a couple of hundred years old, so they were indeed two separate individuals.

Close examination of the teeth show that the very human-like wear patterns on them had actually been created by filing them down. Somebody had artificially abraded the teeth to create these wear patterns. It's a really obvious fraud. It's very basic, because no one had been able to had been able to look at the join detail it had no one had noticed no one had really understood that it was wholly artificial all the bones and the flint work had been stained to make it look as if it had come from the gravels one or two individuals had artifacts had also been painted so all these things suddenly appeared once the assemblage could be looked at in detail but it was really the fact that it had been held onto in a museum archive as this holy grail of british archaeology that

They meant that no one had been able to study it and these obvious aspects of the fraud had lain undiscovered. The news that Piltdown Man was a hoax was received, I think, with a lack of surprise amongst the academic community because a lot of people, 40 years on from the discovery, were working out that Piltedown Man

literally didn't fit in to all the other people who were meant to be walking around the planet at that time. It made a lot of evolutionarists go, few. You know, actually our theories are right, Piltdown Man is a nonsense, and in fact we know that human beings did involve in the way we now know. Keith Moore, head librarian of the Royal Society in London, has a collection of letters and newspaper clippings, which cover both the discovery in 1912 and the exposure of the hoax in 1953. We have a spread of material from the post-pilt-down period, including this letter from 1937,

in which James Reed-Meyers writing to Sir Arthur Woodward. Just expressing mild reservations about the ongoing excavations at Piltdown, he says it is remarkable that having yielded such important specimens, the site now seems so barren, but there are many parallel cases. So after the death of Charles Dawson, there had been doubts expressed about Pillar. Piltdown and there's clearly a question mark going on there. I think after the Piltdown fakes were unmasked,

there was a rather unholy beauty parade of people whom the press lined up as potential forges. So professor is named as the Piltown hoaxer. So this is William Solas, who was a professor of geology. And many of these newspaper cuttings honed in on scientific rivalries of the period as explanations as to why one scientist might want to deep another. On the whole, they got it wrong until Charles Dawson's wider career as a faker was exposed. The true identity of the Piltdown Man Hoaxer remained a mystery. But the main suspects are Charles Dawson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,

and Martin Hinton. The Hastings Museum and Art Gallery has a Charles Dawson collection and replica Piltdown Skull within its archives. Museum curator Kathy Walling. Charles Dawson, the discoverer of a Piltdown Man, was an early benefactor of this museum, in fact one of the co-founders of Hastings Museum and Art Gallery,

back in 1889, and he was in charge of collecting artifacts and documents for the collections and really rearranging them here. The story with the brick, the little bit of tile, changes what the whole history of that last century really of Roman occupation of Britain in the fourth century when it was assumed that they were leaving the country.

But Dawson's tile found it in that place and with that emperor's name on it, was trying to show that the Romans were actually far from withdrawing. They were still here and they were actually still building and refurbishing their defences at Pevency Castle. And this was in the history books right up until the 1970s. So this really was something that people were sitting learning.

I think Dawson was a very complex character and it would be fascinating really to know why he was doing this. And I don't suppose we ever will know. And what I often wonder is if he had lived beyond the age of 56 or whenever it was he died, whether he was just waiting to turn around to everybody and say, I fooled you all, I did all this, or whether he would have anyway gone to his grave,

keeping them all as secret hoaxes. It is an amazing story. So the weight of evidence about hoaxes perpetrated by Charles Dawson in the years leading up to the Piltdown Discovery certainly made him the prime suspect as the mastermind behind the entire fraud. Charles Dawson was immediately the first suspect

and the obvious suspect because he was a guy there, He found the majority of the stuff. He was constantly at the dig. If anybody had an opportunity to do it, it would have been him. So yeah, he was definitely the first person people looked into. At the time, though, he was kind of flagged as the obvious suspect, but there wasn't a full investigation of his background. It took really decades for people to,

because the interest in Piltdown continued, people actually took the time to go back and pick through every single one of Dawson's finds over his career. And the more people look, the more they realized this guy was from the start, you know, up to something. Archaeologist Miles Russell of Bournemouth University, England, has analyzed Dawson's antiquarian collection, and has concluded that at least 38 of his specimens were fakes.

Among these were the teeth of a reptile mammal hybrid, Plagio laxedosone, discovered in 1891, which had been filed down in the same way that the teeth of Piltown Man would be some 20 years later. When we look back at the career of Charles Dawson, we can see really ever since the 1896, he's associated with specific frauds and fraudulent fines. And each one seems to have been deliberately targeted for a specific audience, which gains him extra credibility, it gains him. extra academic recognition. So it's whether it's a museum curator or a member of a prominent society, he's specifically identifying what's missing in the archaeological record and then discovering it. This was a man who hankered after recognition by people who had degrees and doctorates, and yet he wanted those same sort of accolades that they were getting, but without having to do

all the graft of writing papers and doing all the academic research. Somehow he kept finding the fossils that those people wanted and he got the pats on the head and he loved those pats on the head, whether it was, you know, the letters after your name and who knows what he would have been awarded had he lived. Chances are yes, he would have been awarded with some sort of doctorate or professorship somewhere. Who knows? He loved all that. He sought that status. That's where he felt that he belonged and he would find the toys and trinkets under the ground that those people so craved. Unlike a lot of other hoaxes, uh, where eventually some money is made, sometimes immediately, you know, if you look at uh, Loch Ness, for example,

you know, there's a whole industry exists around Loch Ness. If you look at the sale of the Hitler diaries, stuff like, you know, there's a lot of money to be made. Dawson didn't make any money, but he was already a well-to-do chap, he already had some money. In fact, he probably spent money making this happened because what he was after was recognition. He didn't get a penny for this, but I don't think he wanted the money. I think this guy clearly had money. What he wanted was standing in the community that he valued, in the community of archaeology, and that's exactly what he got.

He was made a fellow of the Royal Geological Society and won several awards attesting to the fact that this man had done something brilliant, not just for his country, but for this discipline where perhaps he saw himself as being a champion for him. The Victorians were scientifically open-minded. Such was their burning desire for progress, innovation and discovery in all walks of life. The Hornemann Museum in London houses another curiosity from around the same time as the Piltdown Man appearance. It's called a Murman and was claimed to be the Mummafififax.

body of a fish monkey hybrid, which was found in Japan in the 19th century. Keeper of natural history, Joe Hatton, agreed to explain the history of this curiosity. Here we have the Hornierman Murman, or Japanese mermaid, as they were sometimes called. They were imported into Britain from parts of Asia, mainly Japan, where they were originally made. The first time that the public were able to see a Fiji mermaid was it was popularised by a showman P.C. Barnum in the United States who had acquired one of these specimens and he displayed it in his sideshow and the public just flocked to see it.

They really did think that it was a mummified mermaid of some kind and it really popularised this idea that mermaids were real. Missing links and transitional creatures and this was part of the the interest in evolution that actually predated Charles Darwin. For many centuries on, people had been collecting these transitional, strange creatures. You can go back into the Middle Ages and you had cabinets of curiosities where rich people would collect these bizarre creatures, which were known as Lusus Naturae, Jokes of Nature,

where they were seen as things that you couldn't categorize. And perhaps the idea was that nature was plain jokes purposely putting these odd, you know, creatures that combined elements of other creatures together just to confound man's effort to properly categorize nature. Merman were quite quickly seen by people who had knowledge of animals and who were more scientifically inclined. They looked at the merman and soon realized that it was probably two organisms that were joined together.

It just didn't look right. So they started to examine what they looked like. They called them Japanese monkey fish so that they had the tail and body of a fish and the head of a monkey. As it turns out, most of these mermaids, as we've recently found out, really have no monkey component in them at all. They're all pretty much fake. mainly made from wood components and wires and papiomache and clay to make the body shape. In the case of our merman here, they use fishers, type fish as jaws for the teeth that are fixed in there as well.

And then fish skin and scales and the fins are all made out of a type of species of carp. In 1912, we were emerging from a century in which fantastical finds were often believed by a very credulous and scientifically ignorant public. There were freak shows going around with fossils of mermen. There was Dodgson photographing fairies in his garden, which was widely believed. You know, we didn't know the world 150 years ago in the Victorian period as well as we know it today. So if we're willing to believe in mermen and fairies, that actually believing in a hominid that linked apes to modern mankind,

that wasn't so outlandish. so outlandish. The Piltdown Man hoax succeeded so well because, at the time, the scientific establishment believed that it provided unique proof of a link between apes and humans. It satisfied European expectations that evidence of the earliest humans would be found in Eurasia, while the British wanted a find of their own to set against fossil hominids discovered elsewhere in Europe, including France and Germany. But the Pilk Down Man hoax had a detrimental effect on early research into human evolution.

Most of all, it led scientists down a blind alley in the belief that it proved the human brain had expanded in size before the jaw adapted to new types of food. It's difficult to say quite why the scientific community didn't rumble Charles Dawson earlier. I mean, it is true to say, I think, that people in a way wanted to find fossils such as this. They half expected them to be there, and therefore Dawson was providing something that they would find fitted quite nicely with theories of the period. And I think that's a danger for scientists. They shouldn't be looking for things that agree with their point of view. Quite often the best science is materials that don't agree with prehist.

prevailing thought. So I think there is a lesson there. What's really interesting is the role that class plays in the UK. I think if you've not lived in the UK, you don't understand how fundamental it is to the way people to understand the world around them, from the newspapers that you read, to the accent that you have, you know, to your, whether you're a royalist or not, to some extent comes down to this idea of a class system. I guess it's kind of as contentious as a as races in America. Everything comes down to race.

And it's embedded in our psyches. And as a consequence of that, you've got to look at the way that people were believed at certain points in history depending on their class. There's no question that if you pollute the standards of science or history with falsehoods, if you put into what should be sort of the canonical body of truth of, science or history or what have you, if you put in bogus pieces into that, you create havoc. You, you, because you, it's like science and history are big puzzles and the pieces are trying to fit with other pieces.

And bogus works that are accepted as, as canonical and legit, will cause you to say, oh, this, this, this doesn't, I guess this is wrong. I think that Piltdown Man had an enormously deleterious effect on anthropological research. It is estimated that some 700 academic papers were written about Piltdown Man. That is a lot of man hours that could have been devoted to studying, you know, proper things and not hoaxes. So there's just on that ground alone, those grounds alone, you can actually say that's wasted a lot of time. It also has this immense impact on our understanding of evolution.

We often talk about academics standing on the shoulders of giants. What Piltedown Man did was dug a great big trench for academics to stand on. So they were only looking over a parapet. You know, had Piltdown Man not been then, I think the curve of learning and discovery would have been a lot steeper than it actually was. So in the end, what many believed to be one of the most important evolutionary discoveries in human history turned out to be an artful hoax, carried out by a man once thought of as the greatest amateur archaeologist of his time,

but who was eventually exposed as nothing more than a serial fraudster. Charles Dawson died age 52 in 1916. He was very much at the height of his powers then. He was still making discoveries. On his death certificate, it says that he died of blood poisoning. But we know it wasn't a sudden demise. It was very drawn out through much of the 1916 until the end of August when he finally died.

Looking at it now, we know that the chemicals that he used, he actually admitted using chemicals to stain the bone, to stain the flints, to make it all look like they had come out of one source out of the gravel. And he describes causing bichromate of potash, or potassium dichromate, as we call it now. It's used for staining woods. It's extremely carcinogenic, it's highly toxic. And Dawson was experimenting with this chemical in his offices, in Uckfield, several people burst in on him when he was staining the bone, he was doing it at home, he was exposing everyone who visited to him to this environment, to these dangerous chemicals with no breathing apparatus, no gloves, no mask or anything.

I think it's highly likely that it's this continual exposure to that chemical that finished him off so we could say that it was a built-down man who eventually murdered Charles Dawson.