Piltdown Man

One of the worst, and funniest, mistakes in the history of science involves the case of Piltdown Man.

Group of men examining the skull of Piltdown man.
Painting by John Cooke, 1915. Used with permission under Creative Commons.

In 1912 the skull and jaw of a hominin were discovered in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England. The skull was old, but looked modern due to it's large size. The jaw, however, was brutish and primitive. Piltdown Man led scientists to believe that large brains developed before bipedalism. This idea caused many other bipedal hominin fossils to be classified as apes due to small skull size, when these fossils actually did belong to hominins.

By the 1930s more and more bipedal hominin fossils with small skulls were discovered making Piltdown Man seem like an unusual case.

Finally, in 1953 Piltdown Man was found to be a fraud! The skull came from a modern human, which explained the unusually large size, and the jaw was from an orangutan. The bones were stained to make them look older, and the jaw attachment was filed down so it was not obvious that the bones weren't even from the same species.

Another bone found in the same pit as Piltdown Man was carved in the shape of a cricket bat. The person who put the bones there probably thought this would give the joke away since no animal has cricket bat bones. But no, this bat-shaped fossil was thought to be real too!

The identity of the hoaxer remains a mystery, but a man named Martin Hinton is the main suspect. He was an expert on rodent fossils who worked at the Natural History Museum. He had the technical knowledge to carry out the joke, and he also had a grudge against his boss, Arthur Smith-Woodword, who became one of the main supporters of Plitdown man.

I found out about Piltdown Man in the book The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution by Henry Gee, and I just had to do a blog post about it. The case of Piltdown man illustrates how important it is to question and evaluate scientific discoveries before accepting them. It is hilarious how a joke like that went on for 41 years.