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1859
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Paving the way to Piltdown
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In 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. One of the implications of this work, which he later developed in The Descent of Man (1871), was that human beings were descended from an ‘ape-like progenitor’. If true, there should be some evidence in the fossil record to support such an argument. The search for the ‘missing link’, an ape-man, had begun.
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1863
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Neanderthal Man (H. neanderthalensis)
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Fossil remains of ancient man had been found in Belgium (1829) and Gibraltar (1848), but had been either misinterpreted or ignored. In 1856 a human skullcap and partial skeleton of peculiar form were recovered from a cave in the Neander Valley (Neanderthal), near Düsseldorf. Thought to represent ‘a barbarous and savage race’, the remains were recognised in 1863 as a distinct species, Homo neanderthalensis. By the end of the 19th century many more examples of ‘Neanderthal Man’ had been discovered. It was clear however that despite the somewhat bestial appearance Neanderthal Man was anatomically only slightly removed from modern humans (Homo sapiens) and was not the ‘missing link’.
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1891
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Java Man (Homo erectus)
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In 1891 Eugène Dubois found an ape-like skullcap, a human-looking thighbone and two molar teeth on the banks of the Solo River in eastern Java. He named his discovery Pithecanthropus erectus, meaning ‘upright ape-man’, believing it to be the ‘missing link’. Yet doubts were soon expressed concerning the geological age and mutual relations of the finds. Some scientists considered the skullcap to belong to a giant gibbon! It would be some 40 years before further discoveries in China and Java would confirm Java Man as an early primitive human, now reclassified as Homo erectus.
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1907
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Heidelberg Man (Homo heidelbergensis)
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In 1907 Daniel Hartmann discovered a fossil human jaw in a sandpit at Mauer in south-west Germany. The jaw was passed to Dr Otto Schoetensack of the University of Heidelberg who named it Homo heidelbergensis after the university. There was no doubt that the jaw, which lacked a modern chin, belonged to a primitive human far older than Neanderthal Man. The discovery of the Heidelberg jaw was received with great interest in England and Charles Dawson, a noted amateur archaeologist and geologist, set out to find England’s answer to Heidelberg Man. The stage was set for Piltdown Man to make his debut.
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1908
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The Piltdown discovery
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Charles Dawson was steward of Barkham Manor, near Piltdown, and it was while attending a manorial court that he noticed workmen digging gravel for road-mending beside the driveway to the house. The gravel was not shown on the Geological Survey map of the time, and the deposit appeared to be the remnant of an old river-bed. He asked the workmen to keep a look out for any interesting fossils, and it was during one of his periodic visits, in about 1908, that the first Piltdown skull fragment was handed to him. According to Dawson, it was not until the autumn of 1911 that further fragments of the skull were recovered.
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14 February, 1912
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How’s that for Heidelberg?
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On 14 February 1912 Dawson wrote to the Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum, Arthur Smith Woodward, and mentioned a portion of a human skull that he had found in a gravel pit at Barkham Manor, near Piltdown in Sussex. Dawson said that it would ‘rival H. heidelbergensis in solidity.’ On 24 May 1912, Woodward received the Piltdown finds from Dawson‘s hands with the words ‘How’s that for Heidelberg?’
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June, 1912
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Further discoveries
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On 2 June, Smith Woodward, Dawson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and avid fossil collector, arrived at Barkham Manor to begin excavation of the gravel. They were assisted by a labourer, probably ‘Venus’ Hargreaves. Dawson discovered another fragment of the skull, while Teilhard de Chardin found a flint implement and part of a molar tooth of a primitive elephant identified at the time as Stegodon.
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June, 1912
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Ape-like lower jaw
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Dawson and Smith Woodward continued digging through June, July and August (Teilhard returned to France in early July). Three further skull fragments were discovered and more significantly a portion of an ape-like lower jaw. During the remainder of the season further flint implements, teeth of beaver, a mastodon (an extinct relative of the elephant) and a horse, along with a fragment of red deer antler were recovered.
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21 November, 1912
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The earliest man?
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Rumours of the discovery were beginning to circulate widely and on 21 November 1912 the Manchester Guardian ran a story headed ‘The earliest man? Remarkable discovery in Sussex: a skull millions of years old’. The paper boldly asserted that ‘there seems to be no doubt whatever of its genuineness, and more than a possibility of its being the oldest remnant of a human frame yet discovered on this planet’.
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18 December, 1912
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The unveiling of Dawson’s Dawn Man
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The official unveiling of the Piltdown finds took place on 18 December at a meeting ofthe Geological Society of London, in Burlington House, before a packed and expectantaudience. Dawson began by describing the geology of the Piltdown site and the circumstances of the discovery. He concluded that the human and associated finds were of early Pleistocene date (over 2 million years old). Smith Woodward then described the human (and animal) bones in some detail. The cranium, though exceptionally thick, resembled that of a modern human; yet the ape-like jaw made it necessary to regard the Piltdown find as a new type of hominid, which he named Eoanthropus dawsoni (Dawson’s Dawn Man).
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18 December, 1912
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First restoration of the Piltdown skull
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Grafton Elliot Smith, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Manchester, to whom Smith Woodward had submitted a cranial cast for detailed examination, considered Piltdown man to possess ‘the most primitive and most simian [i.e. ape-like] human brain so far recorded.’ Displayed at the meeting was a plaster replica of Woodward’s conjectural restoration of the Piltdown skull, which had been prepared by Frank Barlow, a senior preparator at the Natural History Museum.
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18 December, 1912
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By far the most important discovery ever made in England
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In the discussion that followed, Arthur Keith stated that the discovery of these human remains were ‘by far the most important ever made in England, and of equal, if not of greater consequence than any other discovery yet made, either at home or abroad’. On the other hand David Waterston, an anatomist at King’s College London, believed the jaw to be in all respects identical to that of a chimpanzee, and thus incompatible with the essentially human cranium.
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1913
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Canine tooth
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The most significant find in the summer of 1913 was made by Teilhard de Chardin, who had returned to England in early August. On 30 August, Dawson, Smith Woodward and Teilhard de Chardin were making an intensive search for the missing teeth of the lower jaw when Teilhard de Chardin found an ape-like canine tooth, which proved to be of crucial importance in supporting Woodward’s conjectural restoration of Eoanthropus.
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3 July, 1913
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Discovery at Barcombe Mills
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In a letter to Smith Woodward, dated 3 July 1913, Dawson claimed to have ‘picked up the frontal part of a human skull this evening on a ploughed field covered with flint gravel’. He would only say that the location was a long way from Piltdown, but he thought that the skull, although not thick, might be a descendant of Eoanthropus. The unnamed location is believed to be a hill above Barcombe Mills railway station, about six kilometres south of Barkham Manor. Nothing more would be heard of this ‘find’ until 1949!
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1914
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Anyone for cricket?
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The 1914 season of excavations at Barkham Manor yielded no further human remains, but did result in one sensational discovery. Woodward had been watching a workman (probably Venus Hargreaves), who was using a pick, when he saw some splinters of bone scattered by a blow. He stopped the workman and soon uncovered a heavy blade of bone that had been carved and ‘looked rather like the end of a cricket-bat’. Dawson then succeeded in recovering another portion of the club-like implement.
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June, 1914
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A unique discovery!
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It was clear that this strange implement had been carved out of the leg bone of an elephant. Nothing quite like it had ever been found before. Its context, however, was a little curious, for it was discovered beneath the hedge which bounds the gravel pit at about a foot below the surface in dark vegetable soil. The pale-yellow clay adhering firmly to its surface indicated that it h ad come from the bottom of the gravel and must have been thrown against the hedge by one of the workmen; ‘with the other useless debris when they were digging gravel from the adjacent hole,’ as Dawson put it.
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9 January, 1915
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Dawson the ‘Wizard’ produces ‘Piltdown II’
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On 9 January 1915,Dawson wrote to Smith Woodward; ‘I believe weare in luck again! I have got a fragment of the left side of a frontal bone with portion of the orbit and root of nose... the general thickness seems to me to correspond to the right parietal of Eoanthropus’.Dawson omitted to mention the location of his find, noting only that it came from a ploughed field (Smith Woodward appears however to have been aware of the general location).
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30 July, 1915
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Molar tooth discovery
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On 30 July 1915, Dawson wrote again to say that he had discovered a molar tooth of Eoanthropus from the same new locality. Shortly afterwards it appears that an unnamed friend found ‘part of the lower molar of an indeterminable species of rhinoceros, as highly mineralized as the specimens previously found at Piltdown itself’, as Smith Woodward later recounted. Yet the exact location of what came to be called Piltdown II (the Barcombe Mills material having been discounted) was never fully revealed to Smith Woodward, although he understood it to be at Netherhall Farm, between Sheffield Park and Fletching, about two kilometres north- west of Barkham Manor.
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10 August, 1916
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Charles Dawson, 1864-1916
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On 10 August 1916, Charles Dawson died of septicaemia. He was 52 years of age.
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1917
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Woodward announces Piltdown II
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Piltdown II (usually referred to as the Sheffield Park find) was revealed to the world at a Geological Society of London meeting on 28 February 1917. The existence of a second Eoanthropus consisting of ape- like molar associated with thick human skull fragments, all stained dark brown, provided conclusive evidence of the integrity of Piltdown I. It was enough to silence many of the critics.
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1917–1952
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A chapter closes
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After Charles Dawson‘s death in 1916 there were no more finds at Piltdown. Smith Woodward continued to make regular visits to Barkham Manor and carried out further excavations, helped at times by Grafton Elliot Smith among others. Shortly after his retirement from the Natural History Museum he moved to Hayward‘s Heath in Sussex, from which he could more readily make visits to the site. Yet despite years of searching, the Piltdown gravels stubbornly refused to yield anything of significance.
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1920–1935
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New finds from Asia
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During the 1920s and 1930s important finds of early hominids began to emerge from Africa and Asia. The discovery in China of ‘Peking Man’ (Sinanthropus pekinensis), along with further finds from Java, led anthropologists to recognise the validity of Dubois’ Java Man. Indeed, the essential similarities between these two hominids subsequently led to both being reclassified under Homo erectus. Both Smith Woodward and Elliot Smith believed that the new finds supported their interpretation of Eoanthropus. Smith Woodward suggested in 1935 that Sinanthropus and Eathropus had perhaps coexisted as eastern and western varieties of Dawn Man. Not everyone agreed however.
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1935–1936
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Swanscombe
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The status of Piltdown Man was also brought into question with the discoveries in 1935 and 1936 of early human cranial remains in association with stone tools at Swanscombe in north- west Kent. The discoveries were made by Alvan T. Marston, a London dentist, who had for two years past been searching the old ‘100 foot terrace’ deposits of the River Thames for Palaeolithic flint implements and fossil mammals. Arthur Keith professed the Swanscombe fragments to be those of early modern man (Homo sapiens), while Elliot Smith judged the new skull to be more primitive than Piltdown. The Swanscombe individual, who was probably a young woman, is now considered to be of Neanderthal affinity (Homo neanderthalensis).
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1936
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Piltdown further undermined
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There was another more serious problem raised by the Swanscombe finds. In 1925 Francis H. Edmunds of the Geological Survey was sent out to map the terrace deposits around Piltdown that had been omitted from earlier editions of the official geological map of the area. Edmunds was able to demonstrate that the Piltdown gravel closely correlated with the Thames ‘50-foot terrace’ and is thus younger than the Swanscombe terrace deposits. It appeared therefore that an ape- like Eoanthropus had coexisted with modern man! Clearly something was amiss. Alvan Marston became convinced that the ape-like Piltdown jaw could not possibly have belonged with the essentially human Piltdown cranium, but must be a chance association.
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1938
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A memorial to Piltdown
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Early in the 1920s a wooden memorial was erected on the site where the first Eoanthropus dawsoni had been found, and in 1938 Smith Woodward arranged for this to be replaced by a more permanent sandstone monolith. It was unveiled by Arthur Keith on 23 July 1938 and carries the following inscription: ‘Here in the old river gravel, Mr Charles Dawson, FSA, found the fossil skull of Piltdown Man 1912–1913. The discovery was described by Mr Charles Dawson and Sir Arthur Smith Woodward in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 1913–15.’
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1949
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Fluorine testing
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In 1949 Kenneth P. Oakley of the Natural History Museum used a fluorine test to determine whether the Piltdown jaw and cranium were contemporaneous. Fossil bones and teeth accumulate fluorine over the course of time by absorption from circulating groundwater. By analysing the amount of fluorine contained in a sample of material it is possible to determine the relative ages of fossils. The test had already been used successfully on the Swanscombe finds. The Piltdown jaw and skull fragments yielded similar values of fluorine values and thus appeared to be contemporaneous. However, these values were much lower than those obtained from the Swanscombe individual, implying that Piltdown Man was of more recent geological age than originally thought.
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1949
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Piltdown IIII
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In the spring of 1949 Dr Robert Broom, a South African palaeontologist, visited the Natural History Museum in order to re-examine the remains of the two skulls attributed to Piltdown Man. He found that the Museum possessed parts of a third fossil skull together with a molar tooth found by Charles Dawson in July 1913 near Barcombe Mills. Smith Woodward had evidently attached no importance to this find and only acquired it after Dawson’s death. Broom published a short notice, though he gave no detailed assessment of this previously unremarked material, but in a handwritten report submitted to the Natural History Museum he concluded that the remains probably represented a third individual of Eoanthropus dawsoni.
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3 December, 1951 — 19 May, 1952
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Britain’s first geological National Nature Reserve
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The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949 saw the creation of agovernment body, the Nature Conservancy, a forerunner of Natural England. Its aim was to identify and protect Britain’s most important fauna, flora, geological and physiographical features. The PiltdownSkull Site at Barkham Manor was one of the first sites to be considered for acquisition and listingas a National Nature Reserve (NNR). The site was acquired by the Nature Conservancy on 3 December 1951, and formally declared a NNR on 19 May 1952. Although just beaten in the race to become the nation’s first NNR by a site in Scotland, Piltdown would soon earn notoriety as the first NNR to be revoked!
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1953
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Doubts about authenticity
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In 1953 Joseph S. Weiner, Professor of Physical Anthropology at Oxford University, was able to examine the original Piltdown remains. He had developed doubts about their authenticity and the more he looked at them the more the doubts grew. Weiner discovered that the Natural History Museum had no record of the exact spot where the remains of Piltdown II had been found. These location details had been used to support the authenticity of the original Piltdown finds; this lack of provenance was of great importance.
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1953
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A forgery uncovered
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Weiner became convinced that the teeth in the jaw had been filed down and thisindicated deliberate fraud. He obtained some chimpanzee teeth which he filed down and stained artificially in order to replicate the Piltdown molars. After discussing it with Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, Professor of Anatomy at Oxford, it was decided to contact Kenneth Oakley at the Natural History Museum and inform him about theirsuspicions. Oakley checkedthe teeth and was ‘utterly convinced’ that they had been artificially abraded. Further examination revealed that the canine tooth had been stained using a mixture which included Vandyke brown paint.
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21 November, 1953
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‘The Biggest Scientific Hoax of the Century’
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An announcement of the scientific team’s startling revelations appeared in The Times of 21 November 1953 under the headline ‘Elaborate Hoax’, and was quickly picked up by the popular press. A London evening newspaper, The Star, presented the story as ‘The Biggest Scientific Hoax of the Century’. No attempt was made at this stage to identify the perpetrator, but newspaper reports quickly homed in on Charles Dawson.
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21 November, 1953–28 November, 1953
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Arthur Keith accepts the truth
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On the day of the press release, Oakley and Weiner visited Arthur Keith, who was now well into his eighties. On being appraised oftheir findings, Keith replied ‘You may be right, Weiner, and I must accept it, but it willtake me a little while to adjust to it.’ On 28 November Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wroteto Oakley from New York congratulating himon his solution of the Piltdown problem:‘Anatomically speaking, “Eoanthropus” was a kind of monster... Therefore I am fundamentally pleased by your conclusions,in spite of the fact that, sentimentally speaking,it spoils one of my brightest and earliest palaeontological memories.’
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1954–1955
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Confirmation of the fraud
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Over a period of several months the Piltdown remains were subjected to further tests. A full presentation of the scientific results was made at a meeting of the Geological Society on 30June 1954. The Piltdown jaw and canine were confirmed as being from a modern ape,probably a young female orang-utan. The exceptionalthickness of the skull(essentially that of a modernhuman) might be explainedas a pathological condition,although such thickened craniaare met with in some modern populations.
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30 June, 1954
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Foreign source for mammalian fossils
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The mammalian fossil bones and teeth were found to have been derived from a variety of sources. A comparative analysis of the radioactivity of the bones and teeth from Piltdown and elsewhere (undertaken by S. H. U. Bowie and C. F. Davidson of the Geological Survey Atomic Energy Division) demonstrated that some of the material must have been obtained from a foreign source. Thus, it was determined that the Stegodon teeth had most likely come from a site in Tunisia, while one of the hippopotamus teeth closely matched examples from Malta. All of this material had been artificially stained.
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30 June, 1954
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Cricket bat carved with metal blade
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The ‘cricket bat’ had been carved using a metal blade and after it had been already fossilised. The newly cut surfaces had been stained with an iron solution and then varnished to reproduce, as nearly as possible, the appearance of the remainder of the roughly fashioned bone.
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1955
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‘Further Contributions to the Solution of the Piltdown Problem’
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All of the new evidence was presented in a concluding report from the Natural History Museum entitled ‘Further Contributions to the Solution of the Piltdown Problem”, issued 21 January 1955. The report concluded that ‘Not one of the Piltdown finds genuinely came from Piltdown.’ Within months of these latest revelations the last surviving principal protagonists in the Piltdown affair were dead. Arthur Keith died on 7 January, followed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on 10 April.
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1955
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‘A most elaborate and carefully prepared hoax’
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Those who had believed in the authenticity of Piltdown Man had been victims of ‘a most elaborate and carefully prepared hoax’.; The question remained: who had carried out such an audacious fraud?
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