Piltdown Skull

Piltdown man was fragments of a skull and jaw bone claimed to have been found by Charles Dawson in 1912 in England. For forty years afterwards, it was controversially claimed to be the remains of a missing link between man and a common ancestor of man and apes and … even better he was British.

In 1953 however, it was revealed to be a fake. Sawed down teeth on an ape’s jaw combined with a Medieval human skull, both chemically treated to give the appearance of a very old fossil.

Creationists latched on to this story as evidence that there is corruption in the scientific community regarding evolution and that all of the other proto-human fossils that have been found are also fakes.

 

 

But what really happened with Pilty?

Piltdown man was a controversy almost as soon as it left the gate. It was rarely available for scientific scrutiny. Instead it was locked away and guarded like the Royal Jewels. Brits were proud of Pilty because he appeared to show that Briton was at least in part, the cradle of humanity.

By the time it was revealed to be a hoax in 1953, it was already regarded as not fitting in with the fossil hominids that had been found elsewhere by then. Contrary to the scientific corruption argument from Creationists, it was the scientific community itself that exposed it as a hoax.

How do we know that the other hominid finds such as Lucy aren’t Piltys? Scientists now have much more sophisticated dating and other processes for evaluating fossils. Instead of being locked away, hominid fossils are ruthlessly scrutinized by experts. Had Pilty’s teeth just been properly examined under a microscope, it would have been exposed as a hoax very early on.