SYMHC Classics: Piltdown Man

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday and Happy New Year. The pill down Man that's going to come up in one of our episodes this week, so we thought we would pull out our episode on that scientific fraud for Today's Saturday Classic. Our first Unearthed episodes of the year are also coming in just a bit, and we know we have listeners who are eagerly awaiting them. This episode was originally a standalone Unearthed episode, so we thought it might help tide folks over until the next one's come out in a week or so. This originally came out December, so enjoy and yes, folks have already written into us about how to pronounce the word zoologist. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tray, Steve Wilson and I'm Holly fry So. The Pill down Man one of the world's most infamous instances in scientific fraud, and in August of which is this year, researchers published a paper in Royal Society Open Science that concluded that it was the work of a single hoaxer. So rather than rolling that into our Unearthed episodes, which are just around the corner, we are doing an entire unearthed episode just on this Uh. We're going to talk about the pilt down man, how this hoax played out, and what exactly was unearthed in this newly published paper that inspired us to do this episode. Yeah. So that we've gotten lots of requests for over the years. Yeah, And for me, I've sort of had it on the I'll get to that one day maybe list. And now this is a time when I can be proud of my procrastination because it enabled this cool thing to come out. Well what what is? Uh? Eight. One of the things that's intriguing to me is that I literally wrote this on the list in August, right that it has I have been planning to do this episode right now as of August, and now it seems particularly relevant because it is such a cautionary tale about not just uncritically observing absorbing things that are announced as news. The whole time I was working on this outline, I was like, this is this feels like we just need a reminder. So it makes sense of why the pilt Down hoax even happened in the first place. We actually need to go all the way back to Charles Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species in eighteen fifty nine. The full title of that particular writing is on the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of favored races in the Struggle for Life, and this details Darwin's theories of evolution by natural selection, which are at the foundation of evolutionary biology. When he published this book, Darwin knew that one type of evidence that would really support his theories was in relatively short supply, and that is transitional fossils. These are fossils that have some traits belonging to an older species and some belonging to a more modern species. And transitional fossils are physical evidence of an intermediary evolutionary step that demonstrates how life is changing over time. One famous example of a transitional fossil is archaeopterics. It's got some features that are more like a reptile and others that are more like a bird, and today it's viewed as a transitional fossil between non avian dinosaurs and modern birds. Darwin knew that people would try to discredit his work because at that point in history, not that many transitional fossils had been found. Archaeoptrics, for example, would not even be discuss or until eighteen sixty and a lot of people at that point described it more as the first bird rather than as a transitional fossil. Of course, was after his book had already been published, but Darwin actually anticipated actually these exact source of discoveries. He explained in the Origin of Species that this lack of evidence was probably due to an incomplete geological record and not to an actual absence of the fossils that would prove him. Right after Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species, there was a big focus on finding more transitional fossils. In particular, people were hoping to find the missing link, that single fossil that would conclusively demonstrate a connection between ancient apes and modern humans. Today, we know about lots of transitional fossils that detailed the progression of all kinds of life. We have transitional fossils and the evolutionary family trees of bird is and fish and whales and horses and elephants and on and on. I literally could just randomly name animals. That's the thirty minute podcast episode is just Tracy saying animal works. It starts to sound like the list of what they were eating in Monty Python in the Holy Grail. So in terms of human life, the idea of a single missing link between ancient hominids and modern humans has really vanished under the weight of a lot of individual transitional fossils that add up to a human family tree that's full of forks and branches. It is not a single linear, one lane road that starts on ape and ends on human connected with one magical quote missing link fossil. It's a lot more complicated than that. Yeah, uh in n though the missing link would have been an earth shattering, groundbreaking and career making discovery, and that is what brings us to pilt Down Man And February of nineteen twelve, Sir Arthur Smith, Woodward, keeper of Geology at the British Museum now called the Natural History Museum, got a letter from Charles Dawson. In addition to being a solicitor, Dawson was an amateur archaeologist, and he said he had found something very exciting in some gravel beds and pilt Down, Sussex. According to Dawson's account, he had noticed that a road where he lived had been repaired with some odd flints, and he traced the flints to their source, which turned out to be a shallow gravel bed. While talking to the workers there, he learned that they'd dug up something they described as quote, like a coconut, and that they'd thrown the pieces away. Dawson dug these fragments out of the trash and found that they were part of a skull, and over the next couple of years he'd gone back to the pit and found several other pieces of skull and jawbone before finally writing his letter to Smith Woodward. Uh These skull fragments and jaw bone, he described, looked somewhat human, but not ex actley, and his letter he compared his discovery to a job bone that had been discovered by a workman in a sand pit near Heidelberg, Germany, in nineteen o seven, which had been named Homo heidelberg insis. In Homo heidelberg insis had some features in common with Homo erectus and others in common with modern humans or Homo sapiens. Dawson said his discovery quote would quote rival h heidelberg Insis in solidity. Dawson and Smith Woodward kept quiet about this find at first, as they did some more digging at the pit, and then they presented their findings to a packed meeting of the Geological Society of London on December eighteenth of nineteen twelve. They had an ape like mandible or jaw bone. Two of its molars were in place and had significant wear, and then there were pieces of the brain case of a skull, which seemed a lot more human than the mandible did. They had also found some stone tools and fragments other non human mammal fossils. Their coloring was comparable to that of the gravel bed, and the conclusion was that these fossils were at least five hundred thousand years old. Regarding their presentation, A. C. Hadn't, writing in the journal Science, said quote Mr Dawson gave an account of the finding of the specimens, the nature and geographical and geological position of the gravel bed, and Dr Smith Woodward described the remains in a most excellent manner. Hadn't went on to write, quote, there could be no doubt that this is a discovery of the greatest importance and will give rise to much discussion. It is the nearest approach we have yet reached to a missing link. Probably few will deny that eoanthropist Dawson I is almost, if not quite, as much human as Simian. I'm just gonna say we are guessing on how that is pronounced, because it seems like no one knows. So your aanthropist Dawson I is what they've named their find, and that means Aawson's dawn man, which is not self congratulatory at all. I mean, I know, often scientific names of things are named after the person who found or discovered or put them in a taxonomy or whatever, but like Dawson's dawn man, it just seems particularly back patty. Yeah. Uh. In nineteen thirteen and nineteen fourteen, excavations continued at the gravel pit where these first fossils had reportedly been recovered, and these excavations unearthed some other evidence as well. There was a canine tooth which had some features in common with ape teeth and others in common with modern human teeth. They also found a carved slab of bone that became known as the cricket bat because it was roughly shaped like one. Although Dawson did keep excavating, or at least saying he was excavating the start of World War One meant that it took place on a much smaller scale. He sent a couple of postcards to Smith Woodward saying that he had found some other fossil and other sites not far away from that first fine but otherwise this was really the end of the discoveries that pilt Down. And then Dawson died in nineteen six A lot of scientists were very excited about the pilt Down discoveries. Understandably, not only were they put forth as the missing link that was so important to evolutionary science at the time, but they had also been found in Britain, which meant that the British Isles had played an important part in the evolution of all of humanity. The British Empire was at this point the largest empire and human history, controlling almost one quarter of all of the land on Earth. So the idea that Britain had also been a keystone and human evolution carried this mix of pride and of wealth. Obviously, these people were quite ready to believe that Britain was actually the birthplace of the human uh the human species. So although it was not universally accepted. The pilt Down Man played a major role in scientific thought about human ever evolution for about the next forty years. More than two fifty papers and monographs were published about it, and it was cited in more than seventy publications. So it was a pretty big deal. And it was also completely made up. We're going to talk about after a sponsor break. So after this announcement, many in the scientific community just took Dawson and Smith Woodward's report to the Geological Society of London at face value. The original pieces of these specimens were locked away in storage for safekeeping, but casts of them were made to share with researchers who wanted to do further study. A lot of the early scientific debate about these specimens didn't even consider the basic question of whether they were authentic at all. Instead, it was about things like whether Smith wouldwards interpretation of the skull was correct. He had made a reconstruction of the skull based on nine fragments that had initially been found. The resulting skull had a capacity of about one thousand and seventy six cubic centimeters to other anatomists and anthropologists disagreed about whether Smith Wouldwards reconstruction was accurate. Sir Arthur Keith of Scotland was on one side of this debate, and Sir Grafton Elliott Smith of Australia was on the other. Keith made his own reconstruction, which had a capacity of about fifteen hundred cubic centimeters, or about the same as a modern human skull, which prompted Smith Woodward to revise his original reconstruction. Smith, on the other hand, came to different conclusions, insisting that the original one thousand, seventy six cubic centimeters was a lot more correct. These all had to do with basically how the skull pieces were lined up and what parts of the skull bones people thought they were from. Like you think of your skull as one solid piece, but it's actually several pieces connected by sutures. So the question was whether these fine fragments of skull were being correctly used to make a reconstruction, not whether they were actually from a prehistoric human. There was also a lot of talk about whether the canine tooth that was found later was really part of the same mandible or not, but there was no talk about whether any of these pieces were actually genuine basically a big chunk of the scientific literature surrounding this fine just was credulous and uncritical from the start. And to be fair, many of the technologies that we used to authenticate the age of fossils today were not invented yet and they would not be for more than twenty years. And also a lot of the other fossil evidence today that we know about that shows that hominids developed more humanlike jaws before they developed developed bigger brain cases, those had not been discovered yet either, so they didn't really have things to compare them to. But even so, a lot of people studying this fine simply took for granted from the beginning that it was legitimate and they free their study from there. Like the quote popularized by Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims like I found the missing link in a gravel pit and pilt down require extraordinary evidence, and that just was not present here. This uncritical acceptance that the piltd Down man was real was certainly not completely universal, especially as time passed and people had more opportunities to study it. For example, American zoologist Garrett Smith Miller published quote the Jaw of the piltdown Man in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections in nineteen fifteen, and which he concluded that the skull fragments did come from a real human skull, but that the mandible came from an extinct species of chimpanzee. Writing an American anthropologist, William K. Gregory later published an analysis the molars which concluded, quote, I believe that Mr. Miller is fully justified in holding that the lower molars of the Piltdown jaw are those of a chimpanzee and not of an extinct genus of hominity. As more analysis emerged, there were also people who not only questioned whether this work was quote scientifically justifiable, but also warned that all this buzz and heightened expectations were dangerous. George Grant mcgurdy had published a fairly credulous overview of the pilt Down findings in nineteen fourteen, but by nineteen sixteen he had not only revised his own opinions, but was also alarmed at the state of scientific inquiry around the pilt Down man. In the journal Science, mcgourty outlined a range of doubts, criticisms, and skeptical inquiries that had come in from the United States Britain, France, and Italy, among other places, and he included this warning quote. Has not this dazzling combination blinded the discoverers and indirectly some of their colleagues, even at a distance, because of the high pitch of expectancy to which recent discoveries in the prehistoric field have not, without reason contributed. Under the circumstance, such blindness, if only temporary, would be pardonable and comparatively harmless. But serious danger lurks in the possibility of its persisting long enough to become an obsession and a hindrance to future progress in this particular field. And that's exactly what was happening. In spite of the growing body of skepticism and criticism, the pilt Down man became a widely accepted part of a body of scientific literature. Things started to unravel a little about a decade after the pilt Down discovery. First, in ninety six, it was discovered that these gravel beds where the fossils were found were not old enough to contain five hundred thousand year old fossils whoops uh. Then, starting in the nineteen thirties, paleontologists started finding other hominid fossils in other parts of the world, and they seemed to suggest an evolution of human life that was taking place primarily in Africa and Asia. And as we noted or Leier that the jaws were becoming more human link before the brain cases and not the other way around, it made less and less sense that some critical moment in human evolution had happened on some tiny islands off the northwest coast of Europe, following a totally different pattern from what was being discovered elsewhere. But even so, a sizeable chunk of the scientific community carried on believing that the Piltdown specimens were genuine. A number of chemical and isotopic dating methods started to be developed in the nineteen forties, and in nineteen fifty three, Kenneth Oakley, then head of anthropology at the British Museum, analyzed the pilt Down man's skull fragments through florine dating, and the fragments were definitely much newer than Dawson and Smith Woodward had said, and they were way way too new to be the missing link. The first test suggested that it was only fifty thousand years old, not ten times that Following Oakley's discovery, the British Museum publicly announced that the pilt Down Man was a fraud, and these floorine tests definitely were not perfect. They showed that all the skull pieces were the same age, whereas later analysis would show that in fact they were not, and later on more refined dating methods would also determine that the pieces were only about six hundred years old, certainly not fifty thousand. But in spite of those shortcomings, they were definite proof that the pilt Down Man was not a real hominid fossil. Yeah, as our ability to test things got better over time because we learned, so did our ability to point out just how fake these things really were. Further analysis showed the mandible was really from a juvenile orangutan, and that all these pieces that had been purported to be a person's remains were actually meticulously altered to look genuine. They had been stained to match the material in the gravel beds, but the danes were not made of substances that were local to the area. The moehlers had also been artificially worn down to like natural and then other mammal fossils that were found in the same area were actual genuine fossils, but they were not from species that actually lived in pilt Down. This was not a case of somebody accidentally finding some human bones near on orangutan bone for some reason and then drawing of logical but incorrect conclusion. It was a deliberate hoax. The good news was, with the pilt Down Man out of the way, all of the other fossil evidence that had been discovered in Africa and Asia in the decades since then made a lot more sense. There was no longer any lingering question of, well, if humanity's origins are in this part of the world and evolving this way, traveling in this pattern, what is this other fossil doing way over here following a completely different model. This was incredibly important in terms of the study of human evolution. The pilt Down Man had become such a dominant presence in the field that people were using its existence to totally disregard legitimate fossil findings that strongly suggested human origins in Africa. One of the foundations of scientific progress is the ability to reassess your conclusions when you're faced with new compelling evidence. But the pilt Down man was such a juggernaut that people were disregarding that new evidence instead. This was probably complicated by a conscious or unconscious reluctance among at least some scientists to believe that modern humanity rose in Africa, not in Britain. But the bad news was that a lot of the world had fallen for this hoax. It had impeded progress and perpetuated inaccurate information for decades. On top of that, the revelation that it wasn't real eroded the general public's belief in science. In the words of Earnest A. Houghton of Harvard, writing an American Anthropologists in ninety four, quote, what really worries me is the revelation to a lady that is often hostile to biological science, of calculated dishonesty on the part of someone intimately concerned with a discovery of supposedly great importance to the history of man. It is as shocking is the proof that men in high places of our own government have betrayed their country. Already, the press is flooded with accusations by anti evolutionists that all of the other evidence of man's origin from an ape like ancestry has been deliberately faked by unscrupulous scientists. The fact that the pilt Down fraud is possibly and even probably unique will be very difficult for the public to accept. Before you get too attached to the wise words of Ernest D. Houghton here, I mean they really touched me. I feel like they are applicable even still today. Uh. He also did a lot of work combining race in criminology that is influenced by the eugenics movement, and the lot of that work was pretty definitely racist. So as much as I love these words that he has to say about how damaging it was for this to be revealed as a fraud, there are other factors of his work. So this is not a h an endorsement of him as a scientist by us as podcasters who are not scientists. Uh. Yeah, we can appreciate his insight in that moment without applauding the rest of his body of work, for sure. Uh. And with this finding now unquestionably shown to be fraudulent, the focus then turned to piecing together who had done it and why, And we're going to talk about that after we first pause for a word from one of our sponsors. In the years after the pilt Down Man was shown to be a hoax, many many theories were put forth out the potential culprits. A lot of the attention has been on Dawson himself. After all, he was the one who reported the findings of the first place, and he was instrumental in the announcement and the initial investigations. He may have hoped that such a profound discovery would earn him admission into the Royal Society. A couple of people who either knew or worked with Dawson were citing sided as possibilities as well, including Samuel Woodhead and Pierre Taliard de Charness. The latter was the one who actually found that canine tooth. Even though he played such a huge role, most people did not suspect Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, believing him to have been an unwilling dupe or one of the intended targets, since his reputation would have been ruined if word had gotten out while he was still alive. Sir Arthur Keith, whose paper on the skull reconstruction we talked about earlier, was also suggested as a suspect. One of the most famous suspects at least outside of the world of scientists was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who knew Dawson had an interest in this type of thing and lived nearby. In ninety weird set of criteria to say somebody is a suspect. I mean there were like, apparently there were people who were like, he just wants to destroy the evolutionists, right, that's so seriously circumstantial stuff that's getting piece together. Flimsy circumstantial stuff. Uh. In nineteen sixty six, a trunk found in storage in the British Museum was discovered to contain a number of bones, including some that had been stained in a similar manner to the Piltdown Man. This trunk, marked with the initials M. A. C. H apparently belonged to Martin A. C. Hinton, who also amassed quite a collection of other bones, fossils and specimens. He had been working as a volunteer at the museum in nineteen twelve, and he became its keeper of Zoology in nineteen thirty six. So naturally this brought up lots of theory is about what was going on with what was in this trunk. One of the theories was that these bones were Hinton's trial run, and that he had done this and then planted the fussiles in quotation marks to get revenge on Smith Woodward, who had turned him down when he tried to move his volunteer position back in Nweve into a paid one. However, not all of this quite adds up. I had a hard time pending down exactly why this was later debunked as being who had orchestrated this, But his time at the museum started after the first discovery it pilt down, and he also had expressed some skepticism at the fine being authentic. So another school of thought is that the way these stained bones that looked very similar to the pilt down specimens came to be in his suitcase is that he was trying to replicate the coloring it pilt down to prove that it was a fraud. The paper, published in Royal Society Open Science this year is an attempt to conclusively solve this whole puzzle once and for all. The study involved DNA analysis, dating analysis, spectroscopy, and high precision measurements of the specimens, as well as studying three dimensional representations of them, which is known as virtual anthropology. The DNA analysis confirmed that teeth and the mandible were from an orangutan, probably one born in Borneo, and that all of the orangutan specimens that were part of this hoax probably came from the same individual animal. Attempts to figure out whether there are any missing orangutan specimens and local museum collections have so far been unsuccessful, but it's also possible that somebody could have bought an orangutan skull in an antiquarian shop. A minimum of two, possibly three, different human skulls were used in the production of the skull fragments, and while tests to figure out whether they were all the same age were inconclusive, they were all subjected to the same m O to make them look like fossils that could have come from that gravel bed, and there was dental putty used to hold the teeth in place in the mandible and to hold the gravel and pebble plugs in place, with these materials being similar to the sediment that was at the pilt Down dig site, that this discovery of dentil putty was not new to this research that was just published, like people knew about the dentil putty way before, which like continues to make me question why in n nobody was like this looks glued on, right. I mean, maybe it was just some really really skillful dentil putty use, but I don't know. That's one of the many things that makes me go, how ready were you all to believe that the sing link was from Britain? Because that's the only way all this works, And I think the answer is very ready, extremely ready. The team concludes that given the consistencies in the m O and the limited number of total specimens, the pilt down Man was probably the work of one forger, most likely Charles Dawson, possibly trying to further his own scientific career, which, given that he died in nineteen sixteen at the age of fifty two, just four years after the first announcement, clearly did not quite work out for him. I had a whole conversation about this episode with with my husband in the car over the weekend about how, like, you know, a lot of these different people have been put forth as potential suspects, and a lot of them are are sort of dismissed, and really all of these things are really circumstantial, Like there's just there's even with all of this analysis, there's still a lot of circumstantial evidence and guesswork and stuff like that. But to me, the biggest strike against Charles Dawson is the fact that he did die only four years after this whole thing started, so any like many of these other people who have been pointed out as suspects lived for a whole lot longer, and and that sort of raises the question of, Okay, what were they after that never came to fruition Like Charles Dawson's relatively early death makes it seem like whatever he was after he didn't get and then he was never he wasn't around to either further perpetuate it or be like, you know what, I made that up? Like that's it's yet another piece of circumstantial evidence, uh in in the Charles Dawson column. So all of that, though, may raise the question why spend so much time and effort just trying to get the bottom of who did this? And so, in the words of the papers authors quote, solving the pilt down hoax is still important now. It stands as a cautionary tale to scientists now to see what they want to see, but to remain objective and to subject even their own findings to the strongest scientific scrutiny. That's a piltdown, man. I love that episode. Thank you, Tracy. Oh, you're very welcome. I'm I'm gonna totally admit I had a very good time reading the vastly incorrect papers published in the early nineteen teens about this finding from people who were flat out wrong, and at the same time I was really bad about it, Like uh we I have often when we've done episodes about old medical history or something like that, read you know, the old papers from the time that that were published, and these, you know, people very confidently espousing stuff that's wrong, just really wrong, and that it makes me a lot matter this time because it was wrong and somebody did it on purpose and it stood in the way of scientific progress for decades makes me real mad. Yeah we uh you and I talked about off Mike, the fact that forty years is a really long time when you consider like that is the length of a career for a scientist in some cases, and so there were probably people who were not willingly even party to this sort of blindness. But we're proceeding along on a career path that was basically complete blunder, and they wasted their time and their scientific minds, and yeah, and wasted the greater whole of humanity's ability to learn more about where we came from. And then it's by total coincidence that between the day when I wrote this on the calendar however many month months ago, and now like now, there is such a renewed focus on like the the putting out there of just fake, wrong information that is demonstrably wrong and it being accepted as fact. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your face. Rich Oos