Among skeptics of the theory of evolution the notion that humans and apes descended from a common ancestor has always stumbled a bit over the “missing link.” If humans and apes are related then surely there ought to be evidence of that common ancestor, the missing link. And, when did the split take place, evolving into humans on one path and chimpanzees on the other?
Missing Link Found in Southern England
At BBC History Kate Bartlett has written about the sensational news of the discovery of the missing link. In 1910, a labourer was digging in a gravel pit near the village of Piltdown in Sussex. He found a piece of what looked like a human skull which he handed over to Charles Dawson a local amateur archeologist.
Dawson started digging in the area and unearthed some other fragments and a jawbone. Sir Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum was called in and primitive tools and the bones of extinct animals also turned up.
Bartlett writes that on December 18, 1912, “at a meeting of the Geological Society in London, fragments of a fossil skull and jawbone were unveiled to the world. These fragments were quickly attributed to ‘the earliest Englishman - Piltdown Man,’ although the find was officially named Eoanthropus dawsoni (Dawson’s Dawn Man) after its discoverer, Charles Dawson.”
More Interesting Finds at Piltdown
The experts decided that this creature with a skull and, therefore, a brain of similar size to Homo sapiens but the jawbone of an ape must be the “missing link.” There were skeptics who said the jawbone and skull were from different species, but their cautious words were drowned out by the popular excitement.
Over the next few years, Dawson and Woodward found teeth that were bigger than those of humans. Then, fragments of another Piltdown-type skull turned up a couple of miles away. That sealed the deal, and Piltdown Man was officially declared to be a common ancestor of humans and apes.
Piltdown Man Exposed as a Hoax
In the late 1940s, scientists developed ways of dating fossils. The Piltdown bones got a closer scrutiny than they had ever been given before. The skull was found to be only 500 years old and the jawbone was that of an orangutan whose teeth had been filed down to disguise their origin.
In an article, "Piltdown Man: Case Closed" posted on the Bournemouth University website, the breaking of the news in November 1953 that the whole episode was a hoax is reported: “Not just any hoax mind, the London Star declared it to be 'The Biggest Scientific Hoax of the Century.' There never had been a ‘missing link’ preserved in the gravels of Piltdown; the whole discovery had been part of an elaborate and complex archaeological forgery."
Who Pulled off the Piltdown Deception?
Sadly, the perpetrator of the fraud has never been unmasked. The strongest suspicion has fallen on the men who profited most from the discovery, Charles Dawson and Sir Arthur Smith Woodward. They are now dead and there is no record of any deathbed confessions.
Dr. A.J. Monty White at the website answersingenesis.com is one of many who put forward the name of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He lived seven miles from Piltdown,” writes White, “and would have had opportunity to place the bones and artifacts at the sites...It could be argued that he left clues in his book The Lost World where one of his characters argues that a bone can be as easily faked as a photograph.”
See also: Fossilized Human Ancestor Found
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