Piltdown Man
Hello, dear people of Incredible India.
It's been almost a month since I last posted here. Today I bring you a story that made me laugh and horrified in equal measure.
Piltdown Man
In the mid-19th century, archaeology was the only science dedicated to searching for remains underground to uncover clues to the past. Those who wielded the pick and shovel to find these remains were academics or amateurs with little or no formal training.
Their goal was to acquire ancient buildings such as palaces, temples, tombs, sculptures, jewelry, and other similar items. They weren't looking for human remains because at that time it was believed that humankind had been created by God.
In 1856, the remains of Homo neanderthalensis were discovered, and in 1869, those of Cro-Magnon man, a younger variant of Homo sapiens, were found. The former was discovered in Germany, and the latter in France.
At that time, a nationalist romanticism was fashionable in Europe, and the aforementioned countries were proud to possess fossils of ancient inhabitants of their lands.
Great Britain, more specifically England, was envious of not having its own hominid fossils. Their nationalism blinded them to the potential forgeries they had before them.
A key to the art of deceiving others is offering them something they desire and need that is genuine. Anthropology, being a relatively new science, had no way of predicting potential deceptions.
In 1912, a curator named Smith Woodward and an amateur archaeologist named Charles Dawson claimed to have discovered a hominid fossil that they declared could be the famous missing link marking the boundary between less evolved primates and humans.
Both men estimated the skull's age at 500,000 years, making it older than the German skull. The entire European scientific community paid tribute to them, and the skull was named Eoanthropus dawsoni, in honor of Charles Dawson, one of its discoverers.
The fame of Piltdown Man and the prestige of its discovery crumbled in 1953 thanks to advances in dating techniques. Using carbon-14 and other chemical methods, Oxford University and the British Museum discovered that the skull was not even a millennium old. Piltdown Man not only had two different ages, but he was also neither entirely male nor entirely human.
The skull and facial bones did belong to a male skull recovered from a medieval cemetery. The jawbone was from a female gorilla, as confirmed by primatologists at Oxford.
The fake fossil had been clumsily assembled, demonstrating the perpetrator's limited anatomical knowledge. The gorilla jawbone was topped with human teeth, and the wear on the molars, which do not wear down in the same way as human teeth, showed signs of use on the wrong side for the species. To simulate age, the entire assembly was coated with a chemical substance that could be easily ruled out by analysis.
When the scandal broke, the curators at the British Museum wanted to find someone to blame. They first looked at Dawson and Woodward, as the discoverer and the curator who presented the fossil as genuine. It is believed that a third person was involved, possibly planting the skull in the area where it was found.
Charles Dawson had died in 1916 of septicemia, and the academics were embarrassed to tarnish the image of a deceased man. Furthermore, there was a record that Dawson had faked other fossils, including a number of prehistoric amphibian skeletons and two Roman slabs with strange inscriptions.
So they went straight to Woodward, who admitted to giving false testimony of authenticity.
For the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of Piltdown Man, a group of renowned archaeologists and anthropologists burned all the documentation on the fake hominid, including the skull itself.