A field guide to Charles Dawson's discredited sites implicated in the Piltdown hoax

Abstract

Charles Dawson, FSA, FGS (1864–1916), was discoverer and presumed forger of Piltdown Man and the less well-known Barcombe Mills Man in East Sussex. Although the fossils were either fakes or salted from elsewhere, Dawson's geology was accurate apart from his over-estimate of the height of the Piltdown terrace above the River Ouse, leading to it being correlated with the 100ft (30m) terrace of the River Thames. This was corrected by Francis Hereward Edmunds, MA, FGS (1893–1960), who recognised it as a 50ft terrace, but this determination was largely ignored until the detection of the forgery in 1953. Subsequently, Piltdown has been the subject of palaeoanthropological speculation ad nauseum – essentially, who dunnit? – but the historical interest taken in the geology has been minimal. A field guide to Dawson's false hominin sites follows the valley of the River Ouse and its terraces. The so-called Piltdown Man II site near Sheffield Park was probably at Netherhall Farm. The type locality of Piltdown Man, Eoanthropus dawsoni, is marked by a memorial stone, but is on private property. The third site, on a hill above Barcombe Mills railway station (closed) and erroneously called Piltdown Man III in the literature, is a younger terrace and produced remains not considered to be E. dawsoni. The total length of the walk is about 16.4km on flat to gently undulating topography in a Quaternary landscape carved by the River Ouse.