Piltdown Man Forgery From our Museums Correspondent The startling discovery that one of the most famous of anthropological speci- mens, the Piltdown skull, is in important parts-and therefore in general effect- a forgery has been made as a result of investigations just completed in the Department of Geology at the British Museum (Natural History) and in. the Department of Anatomy of the University of Oxford. The full details of these investigations are being published by Dr. J. S. Weiner, Dr. K. P. Oakley, and Professor W. E. Le Gros Clark in the new number of the geological series of the museumn's Bulletin, to be issued to-day. NOT GENUINE FOSSILS Briefly, the conclusion of these scientists is that, though the fragments of the cranium are genuine remains of primitive man, the large piece of mandible and the separate canine tooth " are actually those of a modem ape (chimpanzee or orang) deliberately faked to simulate fossil specimens." That the jaw and tooth were those of an ape has been maintained before now by several distinguished anthropologists, but they have always assumed them to be genuine fossils, and have merely thought that, though found in association with the cranium frag- ments, they had wrongly been presumed to belong to the same creature. Never until now has it been suspected that they represent a dueliberate attempt to mislead. The various pieces of the Piltdown skull were submitted in 1949 to the test for fluorine content to ascertain their age. It was then clear that neither the cranium nor the mandible was of the Lower Pleistocene period, as they had been widely held to be. The test was Not, however, at that time developed to the point of accuracy necessary to distinguish, with the limited material available in this case aupper Pleistocene from later bones, and there was therefore nothing to show that all the remains were not of that period. NEW TESTS Now the fluorine test is more advanced, and he Piltdown remains have been retested, with the result that it is clear that whereas the cranium is Upper Pleistocene (say, about 50,000 years old) the mandible and canine tooth are moden. Another test, that of nitro- gen content (which recent American experi- ments have shown to decrease with time at a more or less uniform rate), has produced the same resulk. lt therefore became evident that the jaw- hone and canine tooth, since they were not those of any recent type of man, must be those of an immature ape (whether chimpanzee or orang is not determinable in immaturity) and could not therefore represent any animal native in contemporary England. The jaw and tooth must, in other words, have been brought to Piltdown through some recent agency. This is not all: it has also been established that the jawbone had been stained with bichromate of potash and iron. This, the writers of the article say, " seems to be explicable onlY as a necessary part of the deliberate matching of the jaw of a modem ape with the mineralized cranial fragments." They also find that the molar teeth of the mandible, and also the isolated canine tooth, have been artificially pared down. "NO PARALLEL" The writers add: " From the evidence which we have obtained, it is clear that the distin- guished palaeontologists and archaeologists who took part in the excavations at Piltdown were victims of a most elaborate and care- fully prepared hoax. Let it be said, however, in exoneration of those who have assumed the Piltdown fragments to belong to a single individual, or who, having examined the original specimens, either regarded the mandible and canine as those of a fossil ape or else assumed (tacitly or explicitly) that the problem was not capable of solution on the available evidence, that the faking of the mandible and canine is so extraordinarily skil- ful, and the perpetration of the hoax appears to have been so entirely unscrupulous and inexplicable, as to find no parallel in the history of palacontological discovery." The further point is made that the exposure of thils fraud " clarifies very considerably the problem of human evolution." For Piltdown Man (Eoanthiro pus), as he has bitherto appeared to be was a curiously aberrant form, entirely out ot conformity both in characte; and time with the evidence of human evolution from other parts of the world. The authors of the article do not identify The isolated canine tooth and large fragment of jawbone of the Piltdoivn skull. the perpetrator of this fraud-but " Who did it ? " is a question many will ask. The dis- covery of the " Piltdown skull " was due to Charles Dawson, a solicitor who lived at Hast- ings and who was an amateur collector of fossils. He died, highly regarded by scientists, in 1916, aged 52. At some, now uncertain, date workmen, whom Dawson had asked to keep a look out for fossils while working in a gravel pit at Piltdown, in Sussex, found what they called a " coco-nut," broke it with their pick, and subsequently gave him a piece, the rest having been thrown away. This he recog- nized as part of a very thick human skull, and by careful search he eventually found four more pieces. These finds he took in 1912 to Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, of the British Museum (Natural History). an authority of international reputation and unassailable integrity. TRIBUTE TO RESEARCH Woodward was greatly interested and joined Dawson in the further examination of the Pilt- down site, which he visited many times. Some more fragments of the cranium were found; then, in Woodward's words " on a warm even- ing after an afternoon's vain search, Mr. Dawson was exploring some untouched gravel at the bottom of the pit when we both saw half of the human lower jaw fly out in front of the pick-shaped end of the hammer which he was using." This was the jawbone now shown to be that of a modern ape. In the same way in the next year, an eminent French scholar, Father P. Teilhard de Chardin, then a young priest studying at Hastings, was induced to examine some rain- washed gravel where he found the canine tooth-now also sbown to be that of a modern ape. Thus two witnesses of the highest character either found, or helped to find, the bones now known to be spurious, and it is hard to resist the conclusion that the jaw and tooth had been put there, by some third person, in order that they might be so un- impeachably discovered. If that third person were to prove to be Charles Dawson, it would be but one more instance of desire for fame (since money was certainly not here the object) leading a scholar into dishonesty. That the deception-whoever carried it out-has, though cunning and long successful, at last been revealed is a tribute to the persistence and skill of modern palaeontological research. PILTDOWN MAN FORGERY JAW AND TOOTH OF MODERN APE "ELABORATE HOAX"