The Piltdown Man Hoax: whodunnit?

It would be a good case for Holmes and Watson: Who was the clever rascal that masterminded the Piltdown Man hoax? And could it possibly have been their creator, Arthur Conan Doyle?

Massive scientific news hit the headlines in December 1912: at a meeting of the Geological Society in London, eminent geologist Arthur Smith Woodward and amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson announced that they had found skull and bone fragments, in a gravel pit near the Sussex village of Piltdown, that irrefutably proved the existence of the ‘missing link’ between apes and humans. Most exciting were a thick-skulled humanoid brain case, and a simian jaw with uncharacteristically flat molars.

Eminent scientists accepted the evidence, which changed the way palaeontologists viewed the evolution of Homo Sapiens. ‘Dawn Man’, it was announced, had roamed the globe millions of years ago. The country was proud: the British could trace their ancestry further back than any other nation in the world. Hurrah!

Dawson, now acting alone, moved his excavation to a second site, where he found more evidence of ‘Dawn Man’, but there was a more than a whiff of suspicion about the findings, and serious doubts soon started emerging. However, it wasn’t until 1953 that scientists Kenneth Oakley and LE Parsons, using modern X-Ray and microscope technology, revealed to the world that the jaw fragment was that of a near contemporary orangutang whose molars had been stained and filed down. The cranium was, on the other hand, that of a medieval human. This was no ‘missing link’: it was an elaborate fraud. What’s more it had set evolutionary theory back 40 years.

By this time Dawson and Woodward were long dead, but a number of other suspects were thrown into the mix, as the world wondered: who was responsible for the hoax? Arthur Conan Doyle, a keen fossil hunter who lived near Piltdown and had visited the site, was among them. As were French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and retired doctor Edgar Willet, who had both been present during the excavations. Fingers were also pointed at eminent chemist John Hewitt, jeweller William Lewis Abbott, and librarian William Butterfield.

But only one man was present at the Piltown gravel pit when all the discoveries were made, and only one man was present at the second site. What’s more, Lewes resident Charles Dawson, a solicitor by trade, who died in 1916, had ‘previous’. He has since been linked to 38 different palaeontological and archaeological frauds, including a new species of dinosaur found in Bexhill, Roman bricks with fake inscriptions in Pevensey, and a toad he claimed to have found encased in flint in a quarry near Lewes (which you can still see in the Booth Museum in Hove). It appears that Dawson had hoodwinked his associates into joining him on the find, including poor Woodward, who went on excavating the two sites for over a decade after the solicitor’s death, without finding another piece of evidence.

Charles Dawson died a hero, but he will go down in history as the biggest scientific fraudster in history. Arthur Conan Doyle, without any shadow of doubt, is innocent of any malpractice. Elementary, my dear Watson? Case closed.

Alex Leith