The Piltdown Chicken

Early in 1912, Charles Dawson, an amateur archaeologist, and Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum, joined forces to follow what they termed "evidence of the evolutionary 'missing link' between apes and humans".

The findings during excavations at Piltdown, England included a piece of a thick human-like skull in Pleistocene gravel beds, a jawbone with two teeth, and a variety of animal fossils and primitive stone tools.

Believing the skull fragments and jawbone to be from the same individual, Smith Woodward made a reconstruction. It suggested an early human with a large brain, indicating a level of intelligence that set it clearly apart from the apes. The jawbone, ape-like but with human-looking teeth, linked the skull with its supposed evolutionary ancestors. So, they decided that the evidence added up to an early human relative who lived about 500,000 years ago.

In the 40 years since the original 1912 announcement of Piltdown Man, increasing numbers of ancient human fossils have been discovered, most notably from Africa, China, and Indonesia, but also from Asia and Europe. However, none of these discoveries showed the large brain and ape-like jaw of Piltdown Man. Instead, they suggested that the jaw and teeth became human-like before the evolution of a large brain.

As the discrepancies became too many to ignore and as new dating technology emerged, investigations on the Piltdown fossils recommenced.

At the Natural History Museum in the late 1940s, Kenneth Oakley ran a series of fluorine tests that made use of fluorine's tendency to accumulate in calcium-containing organic matter such as bones and teeth. Oakley discovered that the fossils were probably less than 50,000 years old, not nearly old enough to be from a species with such ape-like features.

Further research proved that the skull and jaw fragments actually came from two different species, a human and an ape, probably an orangutan. Scratches on the surface of the teeth, visible under the microscope, revealed that the teeth had been filed down to make them look human. Also, it discovered that most of the finds from the Piltdown site had been artificially stained to match the local gravel.

In November 1953, Piltdown Man hit the headlines again, this time to be revealed as a hoax. The so-called "missing link" between humans and apes now became a sensation as a sophisticated and infamous scientific fraud. But who did it, and why? Many people have been suspected but no one really knows the answer.