Piltdown case: Further questions

J Francis Thackeray

doi:10.17159/sajs.2016/a0170

Abstract

About 60 years ago, a South African anatomist, Joseph Weiner, published a book entitled The Piltdown Forgery, exposing a hoax that had been perpetrated about 100 years ago at the site of Piltdown in Sussex, England. The announcement of 'Piltdown Man' - classified as Eoanthropus dawsoni and believed to be a hominid apparently associated with Pleistocene fauna - had been made by Smith Woodward of the British Museum (Natural History) at Burlington House in London on 18 December 1912. However, it turned out that the 'hominid' was a fabrication in which a subfossil human cranium and a modern orangutan jaw (both stained brown) were placed together in a gravel pit, thereby confusing palaeontologists. In the process, Raymond Dart's announcement of the 'Taung Child' (Australopithecus africanus) from South Africa was disregarded by many (including the anatomist Sir Arthur Keith) who questioned Dart's claim that this small-brained fossil represented a genuine Pleistocene hominid.

Highlights

Is it closed? Several people other than Dawson have been questioned, because they were perhaps directly implicated or knew about the forgery
Together with his colleagues Kenneth Oakley (Keeper of Palaeontology at the British Museum) and Sir Wilfred Le Gros Clark, recognised the forgery. They concluded that Charles Dawson was the prime suspect responsible for the forgery
As shown by Thackeray[3], Robert Essex, Louis Leakey, Stephen Jay Gould and Thackeray himself have all been suspicious of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit palaeontologist who was known to have been a ‘joker’, and who was based at Ore Place, a theological seminary near Hastings in Sussex, within 50 km of Piltdown where Teilhard de Chardin contributed to excavations in 1912 and again in 1913 when he found the orangutan canine

Summary

Introduction

Is it closed? Several people other than Dawson have been questioned, because they were perhaps directly implicated or knew about the forgery. As shown by Thackeray[3], Robert Essex, Louis Leakey, Stephen Jay Gould and Thackeray himself have all been suspicious of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit palaeontologist who was known to have been a ‘joker’, and who was based at Ore Place, a theological seminary near Hastings in Sussex, within 50 km of Piltdown where Teilhard de Chardin contributed to excavations in 1912 (when he found a fossil elephant molar) and again in 1913 when he found the orangutan canine (assumed to be a hominid associated with the human cranium).

Results

Conclusion