Piltdown man

Piltdown man name given to human remains found during excavations (1908-15) at Piltdown, Sussex, England, by Charles Dawson. The find led to much speculation and argument. Since they were found with remains of mammals of the Lower Pleistocene epoch, they were supposed to belong to a "Piltdown man" who lived 200,000 to 1,000,000 years ago. Many scientists doubted the whole proposition. They were justified when fluorine tests showed in 1950 that the Piltdown fossil was no more than 50,000 years old. X-ray analysis proved that the jaw was from a chimpanzee; further tests demonstrated conclusively that the jaw and tooth were of modern origin.

There has been much speculation concerning who was responsible for the hoax: Dawson; Arthur Smith Woodward, the paleontologist who identified the fossils as hominid remains; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was present during some of the excavations; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived nearby and knew Dawson; and others. In 1996, on the basis of evidence found in a trunk in the British Museum, it was suggested that the zoologist Martin A. C. Hinton planted the remains to embarrass Woodward.

Bibliography: See J. S. Weiner, The Piltdown Forgery (1955); R. W. Millar, The Piltdown Men (1972); F. Spencer, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery (1990).

Piltdown man a fraudulent fossil composed of a human cranium and an ape jaw, allegedly discovered near Piltdown, a village in East Sussex, and presented in 1912 as a genuine hominid of the early Pleistocene, but shown to be a hoax in 1953.

Piltdown man Fossil remains, purported to have been found by Charles Dawson (1864–1916) at Piltdown, Sussex, in 1912, that were named Eoanthropus dawsoni and described as a representative of the true ancestors of modern humans. The skull resembled that of a human but the jaw was apelike. In 1953 dating techniques showed the specimen to be a fraud.