The Great Piltdown Hoax' 



By William L. Straus, Jr. 



Laboratory of Physical Anthropology 

 The Johns Hopkins University 



[With 2 plates] 



When Drs. J. S. Weiner, K. P. Oakley, and W. E. Le Gros Clark 

 [1] ^ recently announced that careful study had proved the famous 

 Piltdown skull to be compounded of both recent and fossil bones, so 

 that it is in part a deliberate fraud, one of the greatest of all anthro- 

 pological controversies came to an end. Ever since its discovery, the 

 skull of "Piltdown man" — termed by its enthusiastic supporters the 

 "dawn man" and the "earliest Englishman" — has been a veritable 

 bone of contention. To place this astounding and inexplicable hoax 

 in its proper setting, some account of the facts surrounding the dis- 

 covery of the skull and of the ensuing controversy seems in order. 



Charles Dawson was a lawyer and an amateur antiquarian who 

 lived in Lewes, Sussex. One day, in 1908, while walking along a 

 farm road close to nearby Piltdown Common, he noticed that the 

 road had been repaired with peculiar brown flints unusual to that 

 region. These flints he subsequently learned had come from a gravel 

 pit (that turned out to be of Pleistocene age) in a neighboring farm. 

 Inquiring there for fossils, he enlisted the interest of the workmen, 

 one of whom, some time later, handed Dawson a piece of an unusually 

 thick human parietal bone. Continuing his search of the gravel pit, 

 Dawson found, in the autumn of 1911, another and larger piece of the 

 same skull, belonging to the frontal region. His discoveries aroused 

 the interest of Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, the eminent paleon- 

 tologist of the British Museum. Together, during the following 

 spring (1912), the two men made a systematic search of the undis- 

 turbed gravel pit and the surrounding spoil heaps; their labors re- 

 sulted in the discovery of additional pieces of bone, comprising — 

 together with the fragments earlier recovered by Dawson — the larger 



* Reprinted by permission from Science, vol. 119, No. 3087, Feb. 26, 1954. 



* Numbers in brackets Indicate references at end of text. 



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