cover of episode S4 Ep30: A Race to the Bottom: Charles Dawson and the Piltdown Man

S4 Ep30: A Race to the Bottom: Charles Dawson and the Piltdown Man

2024/12/12
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Daisy Egan: 本期节目讲述了查尔斯·道森伪造皮尔唐人化石的故事。道森为了追求名利,不择手段地伪造了人类进化史上的重要化石证据,试图以此进入伦敦皇家学会等科学界精英圈子,并以此来证明欧洲人在进化上的优越性。他的行为最终被揭露,成为科学史上最大的骗局之一。节目中详细介绍了道森的生平、动机、伪造过程以及最终被揭穿的过程,并探讨了这一事件对科学研究的影响。节目还提及了其他一些与道森相关的伪造事件,以及后来的科学发现如何证明达尔文关于人类起源于非洲的理论是正确的。 Daisy Egan: 皮尔唐人事件的揭露过程,以及氟测试、氮测试等科学方法在揭露真相中的作用。节目中还提到了其他一些与皮尔唐人相关的争议和讨论,例如关于下颌骨和头骨的匹配性、犬齿的缺失以及化石发现地点等问题。此外,节目还探讨了皮尔唐人事件对科学研究的警示意义,以及这一事件如何促进了科学方法的改进和完善。

Deep Dive

Key Insights

Why did Charles Dawson create the Piltdown Man hoax?

Dawson aimed to gain entry into the prestigious Royal Society of London by making a significant discovery that would elevate his status in the scientific community. He sought fame and recognition, believing that a groundbreaking find would secure his place among elite paleontologists.

What was the significance of the Piltdown Man discovery in 1912?

The Piltdown Man was presented as the missing link between humans and apes, suggesting that humans evolved in Europe rather than Africa. This discovery was celebrated as proof that Europeans were at the pinnacle of human evolution, aligning with ethnocentric beliefs of the time.

How did the Piltdown Man hoax remain undetected for 40 years?

Despite initial skepticism, the hoax was supported by influential figures like Sir Arthur Keith and Arthur Smith Woodward. The lack of advanced dating techniques and the ethnocentric bias of the time allowed the fraudulent discovery to be accepted as genuine for decades.

What evidence ultimately exposed the Piltdown Man as a hoax in 1953?

Tests revealed that the skull and jaw were of different ages, with the skull being only 5,000 years old. The teeth showed signs of artificial filing, and the coloring on the bones was superficial, indicating they had been stained to appear ancient. Additionally, the fauna surrounding the bones did not match English species.

What impact did the Piltdown Man hoax have on scientific research?

The hoax wasted significant time and resources as scientists attempted to fit Piltdown Man into the human evolutionary timeline. It also exposed the limitations of early dating techniques, which later became crucial tools in authenticating fossils.

How did Charles Dawson's background influence his actions?

Dawson, a country barrister with no formal anthropological training, lacked the academic credentials of his peers. His ambition and desire for recognition drove him to fabricate discoveries, including the Piltdown Man, in an attempt to gain acceptance into elite scientific circles.

What role did ethnocentric beliefs play in the acceptance of the Piltdown Man?

The discovery was embraced because it supported the idea that Europeans were the pinnacle of human evolution, contradicting Darwin's theory that humans originated in Africa. This ethnocentric bias allowed the hoax to be accepted without thorough scrutiny.

What were the key inconsistencies in the Piltdown Man fossils?

The skull and jaw were of different ages, the teeth showed signs of artificial filing, and the coloring on the bones was superficial. Additionally, the fauna surrounding the bones did not match English species, indicating the fossils were likely imported from elsewhere.

How did the Piltdown Man hoax affect Charles Dawson's legacy?

After the hoax was exposed, Dawson's reputation was destroyed. His law firm removed his name, and the museum he founded no longer acknowledges his contributions. The town of Piltdown also avoids referencing the hoax, despite its historical significance.

What evidence suggests that Charles Dawson may have been involved in multiple hoaxes?

Archaeologist Miles Russell argues that over 30 of Dawson's discoveries were likely fakes, including a Roman iron piece, a Chinese bowl, and a Neolithic stone axe. Russell also claims that Dawson plagiarized at least one of his treatises.

Chapters
This chapter introduces Charles Dawson and his ambition to gain recognition in the scientific community. It details his discovery of the Piltdown Man, a supposed missing link in human evolution, and the immediate acclaim he received.
  • Charles Dawson's ambition to join the Royal Society of London
  • Discovery of the Piltdown Man fossil
  • Initial acceptance of Piltdown Man as a significant find
  • The implications of Piltdown Man for the understanding of human evolution

Shownotes Transcript

Translations:
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How far would you go for notoriety? What if you could get your name in the history books with just a couple of sly tricks? Would it matter to you if your fame became infamy after you died and your tricks were exposed?

Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan. I have a sort of passing interest in human evolution and anthropology. I'm a fan of science. I once wrote and performed a monologue as an Australopithecus woman who was gossiping about her neighbor Lucy, who thought she was all that just because she could walk on two legs. Obviously, the science behind that is thin, at best, but I'm no anthropologist. I don't know any better. Charles Dawson, on the other hand, should have. ♪

Charles Dawson had a few things in common with Charles Darwin, beyond the obvious similarity in name. Most notably, he, like Darwin, was an Englishman interested in human evolution. Unlike Darwin, however, Dawson was a mere dabbler when it came to paleontology.

Dawson and Darwin were both from good, moneyed English families, but Darwin didn't really have to work to make a living. Dawson did. But he had done much in his life beyond being a solid country barrister. He'd capitalized on his curiosity early by putting his nose to the grindstone and finding some very solid artifacts and fossils. Where Darwin had gobs of academic learning and training in his field, Dawson had no university degree and no anthropological training at all.

What he lacked in formal education, however, Dawson made up for in ambition and drive. He was determined to make a name for himself. Lucky for Europeans who cared about this kind of thing, Dawson's quest for fame would significantly raise their place on the evolutionary ladder. Except that the ladder they thought they were placed upon was indeed shoddily built and ready to collapse at any moment.

Charles Dawson knew that the only way he was going to gain entry to the oldest and most revered scientific academy, the Royal Society of London, was to make a discovery so large they could not exclude him.

It was 1912, and the search for humanity's origins hadn't been around but for maybe 50 years, since Charles Darwin had published his theories in 1859 in On the Origin of Species, and Dawson was hot on Darwin's trail. He was a frequent contributor of important fossil finds to the Natural History Museum in London, and was already a fellow of the Geological Society and the Society of Antiquaries. But,

if he wanted in with the exclusive tiers of the scientific community, he knew he'd need more than trinkets. He had to find something that startled the masses and which drew the admiration of the learned scholars who knew him but were never otherwise going to consider him an equal. And here it was, in his hands, the key to that exclusive club. ♪

In his hands was a most extraordinary thing, a cranium of a human. Surely human because of its size and capacity to hold a decent-sized human brain, and a jawbone of something that was more ape-like, though the few teeth still implanted in that mandible bore the distinctive marks of an omnivorous human diet. All the bones were darkened, yes, but that was to be expected of ancient bones left in the soil for hundreds of thousands of years.

And they had been found deeply embedded in English soil. Ancient humans right there in England. Could it get better? This was, he knew, the missing link that had been hypothesized about since Darwin had put forth his theory that humans evolved from apes. Darwin only theorized. Dawson had the hard evidence. And not only that, but here was proof that Darwin was wrong.

Darwin had postulated in 1871 that humans arose out of Africa. The big finds of pre-hominins had not been found in Africa yet, but Darwin knew they would be. He believed that gorillas and chimpanzees were humankind's closest living relatives, and that humans had differentiated themselves when they learned to make and use weapons and tools.

By the time Dawson made his discovery in the English countryside, the oldest evidence of humans had been found not in Africa, but in Indonesia. The so-called Java Man, found in 1891, was the first fossil ever found of a species now known as Homo erectus. He was thought to have lived between 700,000 to maybe even a million years ago.

But Java Man did not have the brain size necessary for complex thinking, and he might belong to a branch of humans that didn't progress much because of that. The cranium Dawson had found, on the other hand, was definitely large enough to hold a human-sized brain. Because the mandible was more ape-like, Dawson argued, it showed clearly that Piltdown Man, as the fossil would come to be called, was evidence of the missing link between humans and apes.

In February 1912, before Dawson officially came a-knockin' on the door of the British paleontology elites, he sat down in his East Sussex home and wrote a letter to one of his friends in the higher circle, a man named Arthur Smith Woodward, whose lofty job title was Keeper of the British Museum's Paleontology Department.

The letter read, quote, I've come across a very old Pliestine bed overlying the Hastings bed between Uckfield and Crowborough, which I think is going to be interesting. I suppose it is the oldest known flint gravel in the Weald, end quote. Small aside, the word Weald refers to a geographic name for a region in southeast England.

The letter went on to rather casually mention that he was in possession of two pieces of skull which would rival what was then the oldest known human fossil. He later told Smith Woodward the skull had been confused for a coconut at first, in the river gravel on the River Ouse in the village of Pilpdown in East Sussex, before diggers handed it over to him. That was in 1908, he said.

He'd just not been confident enough to show it to anyone. But now he wanted Smith Woodward's thoughts. Smith Woodward could not get away to see for himself, but was obviously intrigued. In late March, Dawson sent Smith Woodward additional items he'd recently retrieved from the riverbed, one of which was a tooth from a very old hippo

Smith Woodward told Dawson to keep this whole thing under wraps until he could get there. Dawson barely tried, showing his finds off to another pal, Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Frenchman dabbling paleontologist who would later become a rather famous philosopher.

He then set about searching for more fossils at the same site and found the mandible very near where the men had found the skull pieces. The parts seemed to fit, and he imagined he'd found something worth talking about. Deschardins also believed Dawson was onto something, and Dawson wanted to know if Smith-Woodward agreed.

Smith Woodward could hardly believe it. In fact, he made arrangements to spend the summer hunting for more fragments with Dawson. The two were joined by the Jesuit priest. In June of that year, 1912, Dawson disinterred the lower portion of a jaw. The priest found an elephant molar on the same day. On subsequent days, they found more pieces of the skull and a hypothesis began to take shape.

Smith Woodward could simply not wait for the December meeting of the Geological Society of London. He and Dawson agreed he should be the one to tell the Society of the Find, as it would have the degree of credibility that had so far not been conferred on Dawson.

On December 20th, 1812, Smith Woodward told the society, and thus the world, news that was going to change everything they knew about how humans evolved and where. The skull and the jaw were, Smith Woodward maintained, from the same prehistoric man, a previously unknown and now long-extinct species of hominin that henceforth would be called Eanthropus docinii in honor of the guy who found them.

Colloquially, he'd be called simply Piltdown Man, named for the neighborhood in which he was found. In a 2016 essay for Science Digest titled The Triumph of the Dawsonian Method, Stephen K. Donovan wrote, "...it presented British paleoanthropology with just what it wanted, a large-brained, Pliocene, missing link."

This skull would prove that humans, as we know them today, evolved in Europe, which landed very nicely with the crowd who wanted to believe that white people were the pinnacle of evolution. As sure as 1 plus 1 equals 2, this skull and this jaw would show the world that the first humans to have brains were white men of the British realm. And all the old dusty white men with their mutton chops and ascots all had a celebratory brandy and a circle jerk and felt good about themselves.

Dawson was hailed a hero. It was said that paleontology would never be the same again. Indeed, that would turn out to be quite the understatement.

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There were, of course, detractors. There were some anatomists who were not immediately convinced. They simply could not make out how the jaw fit into the skull. The hinge on which the jaw operates was missing from the skeletal remains found at the site and thus no help to explain the mechanics of it all. It's important to know a biology fact here and I'm going to try to make it as simple as I can, but you should know me trying to explain this kind of thing borders on the ridiculous. But I'll try.

Human jaws can work up and down and sideways, back and forth. Try it. See?

Ape jaws can only move up and down. This is important because the development of the jaw provided an immediate survival advantage by allowing organisms to actively bite and chew a wider variety of foods. So this jaw evolution accommodated a more human-like diet which included meat, a change that required a rotary chewing action akin to modern humans. And the human-like diet had an effect on the teeth. It grinds them down.

In Piltdown Man's jaw, the two attached molar teeth had indeed been ground down. Okay, so back to the detractors who, without the rest, or at least more, of the specimen, couldn't

couldn't quite piece together how the mandible and cranium Dawson found fit together. But discussion and disagreement among paleontologists was nothing new. There had been a lot of controversy around Java Man about a decade before. Some still thought he was some kind of gibbon. And only a year before Dawson's team found what they thought was a coconut, German workmen had accidentally unearthed Heidelberg Man,

Heidelbergensis, who was later examined and identified by a German scientist. The specimen found there had a jaw that was intact. He was also surrounded by evidence that he hunted large animals, had tamed fire, and built shelters. Heidelbergensis was placed as the most recent common ancestor between humans and Neanderthals and considered to have lived during the Middle Pliistine era and was thus about 400,000 years old.

Dawson's find was placed as older than that in the early Pliistine, and thus about 500,000 years old based on the depth of the find and the composition of the earth in which it was found. Hiltdown Man had been in the oldest Pliistine level at about 50,000 feet.

The land he was found on, by the way, belonged to a private estate known as Barkham Manor. Dawson was the Manor family's lawyer, so naturally they let him dig any time he wanted on what was private land. What are you confused about? I often let my lawyer dig up my backyard. Anyway, before we move on to the official questions surrounding Dawson's find, I have one. Why did the Peltdown workmen originally think the skull was an ancient coconut shell?

Apparently, they were so convinced it was just old vegetal junk, they smashed it before Dawson even got a chance to look at it. A coconut in England? In the Ice Age?

I promise you, strangers, I looked in a lot of places to see if anyone could explain this. I mean, for starters, it was one of a few stories that were told about how Dawson got ahold of the first piece of skull. But people latched onto it, and still, as far as I can tell, no one anywhere or at any time seems to have bothered to ask about a coconut falling from an ancient coconut palm in England while glaciers covered the whole of the island, carving out lakes and such.

Not that it matters much, but it did throw me off for a half of a day. Goddess bless ADHD. Back to business. Some skeptics found it a shame the canine teeth had not been found, as they would have to be a certain size and proportion for any of this to make any sense at all. You know, for the damn thing to be able to even chew.

They went so far as to create a cast of what they thought the teeth would look like. And wouldn't you know, the next time Dawson went out digging with his French Jesuit friend, the friend found a canine tooth. And it looked just exactly like the cast. Apparently, most people were like, wow, instead of what I think would have been a more appropriate response, which would have been, come on, dude, really?

There was one holdout. His name was Sir Arthur Keith, a leading figure in the study of fossils. But Sir Arthur's doubt was short-lived when, in 1913, Dawson reported to Smith Woodward the astounding news that he'd found more pieces from a human skull, an occipital and parietal bone, together with a molar tooth, this time about two miles away from the original specimen. This was

was proof that the Piltdown Man had not traveled alone. That's when Sir Arthur joined the party and dug in defending Piltdown Man vigorously ever after. It's curious that Dawson either did not have the time or the inclination to tell anyone, not even Smith Woodward, the exact location of his corroborating discovery. Apparently he was just like, trust me, and they did.

The days of Dawson pining for the spotlight were done. He was now a bona fide inner circle guy. And this after years of trying to make entry. As mentioned earlier, the skull and mandible were not the first pieces Dawson claimed to have found. He'd given many pieces to museums in hopes, it seems, of being taken seriously as a member of the paleontological elite.

In 1886, he gave the British Museum a Chinese bronze bowl that he found in Kent. Its design was one very common from the dynasty that ruled 2,000 years ago. It had been found in a site that was known for yielding medieval relics.

In 1891, the year Darwin published his masterpiece on evolution, Dawson told his highly-placed friend Smith Woodward that he'd found evidence of a, quote, new European crustaceous monster, end quote, based on a single fossil tooth. Smith Woodward named the new species Plagiolax daceni, and the scientific world awaited more proof.

It took 10 years, but they got their further proof when in 1911, Dawson and a group of other dabblers found more teeth of the Pagiolax. In 1893, he gave the much-heralded British Museum a Roman cast-iron statuette that he said he found while working in East Sussex, proving the existence of Rome in Britain. This was pretty big.

The Romans were heretofore not known to be capable of casting iron as they could not generate the high temperatures necessary. Dawson also had time to find not one, not two, but three new species of dinosaur. One was later named after him. That would be the Iguanodon d'Auseni. He also unearthed a hafted Neolithic stone axe and a well-preserved ancient timber boat.

He also found what he thought was evidence of a sea serpent in the English Channel, a kind of Nessie on vacay, and found a bizarre goldfish-slash-carp hybrid. Turned out it was just a toad. But still, this guy was like an ancient artifacts magnet.

In 1907, just a year before his really big find, he showed some bricks to his cohorts at the Society of Antiquaries that he claimed to have found in Pevensey Castle in Sussex. The brick, he said, proved that the castle was built around 400 AD. And now he'd found the one thing that would and could and did advance imperialism.

The media embraced it. In 1913, a British article was reprinted in the Virginia Times-Dispatch. It drew some pretty stupid evolutionary conclusions as well as some heinous implications. The headline read, quote, This man lived 400,000 years ago, end quote. The article stated, quote, In that time, the chief task of those that followed the primeval man had to push in the jaw and push out the forehead. End quote.

I don't know, man. The only thing weaker than this claim was Hitler's jawline.

Anyway, Dawson may have also been looking for some family respect. He was the oldest of three sons, and in 1909, just before he got the ball really rolling on his really big find, his younger brother Trevor was knighted for some kind of derring-do while employed by the British Navy, as well as for helping to develop the Vickers machine gun in his role as head of an armaments firm.

Trevor even introduced Charles to the king, which I'm sure was exciting, but also possibly a little embarrassing for Charles. Why should he need his little brother to make intros with royalty? He should have the cred.

Then Piltdown showed up. The family was again heralded as serious up-and-comers, and Charles especially was metaphorically lifted onto the shoulders of British high society. But then in 1916, quite unexpectedly, Charles died. Short-lived was his moment of glory. Nevertheless, in death, he was still lauded. The

Kay Donovan wrote, quote, End quote.

Similarly, Smith-Woodward paid tribute to him as, quote, one of those restless people of inquiring mind who take a curious interest in everything around them. To a capacity for taking pains with endless patience, he added a sharpness of sight that never overlooked anything of importance. He was in constant communication with a wide circle of professional scientific men who helped him make the best of his material, end quote.

Never mind that disagreements still raged in various scientific circles over the possibility of Piltdown being all he was cracked up to be. Some newspapers reported that fisticuffs broke out at various meetings over the matter. Others later disputed that. Despite detractors, for 40 years, it was generally accepted by the world's leading experts on the subject that Piltdown Man belonged to the human family tree evermore.

World War I and World War II quieted the paleontological fervor in Europe, as wars are wont to do, I suppose. All that surviving makes digging around for bones slightly less urgent. But still, some important paleontology was being done in China and in other places that worked well alongside Charles Darwin's theory of the human species coming out of Africa into Asia, then into Europe.

These findings did not seem to support the Piltdown scenario. Newly found skulls were still small, though the jaws were advancing. The teeth were especially becoming almost modern in appearance. Maybe, some wondered, trying hard to make Piltdown work in the chain, evolution took two separate paths. That seemed to sit well enough with some.

In 1950, Britain's National History Museum opened a portion of the hallowed gravel terrace where Dawson said he'd found the original skull, jaw, animal bones, and tools. They designated the site as a geological reserve and a national monument. Dawson would have been proud. But Dawson's reputation, just like the skull his diggers thought was a coconut shell, would soon be smashed to pieces. ♪

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For free, go to ChumbaCasino.com to collect your free welcome bonus. Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW Group. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus. Terms and conditions apply. In the 1950s, three men who had never bought what Dawson, Smith Woodward, Sir Arthur Keith, and the vast majority of the British scientific community was selling, decided it was time to show what they'd been doing for a few years.

On November 21st, 1953, esteemed scholar Joseph Weiner, the British Museum's Kenneth Oakley, and anatomist, surgeon, and primatologist Wilford Legros Clark came forward with some alarming and well-presented facts.

In a 1980 lecture at the Leakey Foundation, the three men explained their process. Oakley had done a fluorine test on the bones, a kind of rudimentary form of chemical dating. The older the fossil, the more time it has to pick up fluorine content from the water in the ground in which it sits. In this case, you would expect both the skull and jaw to have the same very considerable amount, considering they were supposedly from the same animal. They did not.

The fluorine in the specimens was really low. The brain was much younger than Dawson had claimed, by about 495,000 years. In other words, it was only 5,000 years old. And the jaw did not match the brain in fluorine content. Yikes.

A friend from the United States, a guy from Berkeley, asked the English scientists if he could see the place where Peltdown 2 had been unearthed. This was the second skull Dawson said he'd found a couple miles away from the first.

Everyone spent a long time trying to decode the records and still no one could pinpoint where the second specimen had supposedly come from. Weiner said he pondered Oakley's initial finding and the Piltdown 2 dilemma and realized that what he was looking at was out-and-out fraud. But obviously they would want a boatload of evidence to make this outrageous claim, so they continued testing the samples.

Weiner had a look at the teeth Dawson found through a high-powered lens and found that Piltdown's molars were worn down evenly. Despite the fact that the teeth would have erupted at different times in the mouth, the wear was the same. And the pattern of wear was inconsistent with how teeth, working every day on real food, lose their dentine and enamel. They cusp and bowl. They do not wear straight across.

but the edges of Piltdown's teeth were sharp, not beveled. Weiner could see the scratch marks were made by a file, which is to say the teeth had been artificially filed down with a tool, intentionally.

Then came the nitrogen test. In this case, the older the bone, the less nitrogen it should have. When tests on both the jaw and the skull were done, the mandible contained more. Ultimately, it was found that the cranium was a little older than the jaw, the molars, and the canine teeth. None of the age tests on the items matched. And while testing, something funny happened. They'd

They discovered that the coloring on the mandible was superficial. It could be wiped off with acid.

They determined that ammonium sulfate and a brown pigment known as Van Dyke brown had been used to color the bones in order to match the iron content visible in the truly ancient rock all of them had supposedly been found in. The fauna that allegedly surrounded Piltdown wasn't of proper English stock either. The hippo tooth came from Malta. The elephant teeth turned out to be imbued with an astonishing amount of radioactivity.

That meant those teeth could only have come from one place in the world, Tunisia. ♪

These three investigators knew that by 1910, you could buy such bones anywhere. Dawson's knowledge of the field would have given him plenty of opportunity to obtain the specimens he had apparently planted for himself and others to find. Or perhaps Dawson had some unwitting accomplice in some museum who gave him bones for some purported reason, and they ended up stained and buried only to be found when others were watching.

Dr. Weiner also did a little Sherlock Holmes-ing, trying to track down any people who might have known Dawson or might have information about what exactly happened in East Sussex in the early 1910s. He wandered around, he said, telling everyone in the general vicinity of where Dawson lived and where the first Piltdown man was found, quote, I'm interested in the Piltdown business, end quote.

Soon enough, he found one Mr. Pollard, an old man who told him that a friend of his by the name of Harry Morris told Pollard that it was a fraud very early on. He said Dawson had given him flint and Morris figured out it had been stained artificially. He said Morris wrote it all down. ♪

Morris died in 1923 and left Pollard his box of flints. Weiner asked to see the flint. Pollard told him he had exchanged them with Fred Wood, who lived down in Ditchley for a box of eggs, probably during wartime rationing. So Weiner visited Ditchley, and sure enough, in one of the drawers, the flint was there with a note, quote, "...stained by C. Dawson with intent to defraud."

I challenge the authorities to test the implement which the imposter Dawson said was found in the pit. Truth will out." He wrote on the same note he overheard in conversation that the canine tooth found in the riverbed was imported from France, and that he had told somebody at the British Museum all of this, but nobody ever contacted him. Weiner wondered aloud if maybe they didn't want to know. Did any of it matter?

Weiner was emphatic about that. Quote, "...it mattered a lot for 40 years," end quote, "...because a lot of work was done and a lot of time and resources were wasted."

Does it matter now? Yes, he said, quite a bit. Quote, End quote. End quote.

It's also been noted that a lot of the tests done to prove that Piltdown Man was a fake have proved useful countless times over in verifying real specimens, dating them, and placing them in a proper timeline. When carbon dating came along, it was determined once and for all that Piltdown was not 500,000 years old, but was indeed 5,000 years old. Eanthropus dasani is now considered the most notable forgery in 20th century science.

James A. Douglas, professor of geology at Oxford University from 1937 to 1950, made a tape recording in which he disclosed new and even more disturbing evidence. He said he believed the hoax had been perpetrated by his world-famous predecessor at Oxford, Professor W.J. Salas, quote, end quote.

Douglas said that Solace had assisted in a previous hoax in which someone gave Smith Woodward a purportedly prehistoric drawing of a horse on a piece of bone. It fooled the man and might have given Solace the idea to take it further.

In his 2003 book Piltdown Man: The Secret Life of Charles Dawson, Miles Russell, himself an archaeologist, provides evidence that Piltdown was not a one-off. Instead, he makes a case that more than 30 of Dawson's so-called discoveries were fakes. The Roman iron piece, the Chinese bowl, an ancient wooden boat, an axe, a horseshoe, a hammer, the flints, all of it.

Russell also maintains that at least one of Dawson's treatises, on his own work as well as on the history of Hastings Castle, were works of plagiarism. Womp womp.

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Arthur Keith was knighted in 1921. Arthur Smith Woodward was knighted in 1924 and spent the last two decades of his life combing the original Piltdown site and those adjacent to it, looking for more evidence to support his theory. He didn't find any.

It would be 50 years later when Lewis and Mary Leakey would make their stupendous finds at Odle v. Gorge in Tanzania, where they found skeletal remains of the first early human species, Homo habilis, who lived 1.9 million years ago. The oldest known human fossil was found in a cave in South Africa in 1924.

It was 2.5 million years old and was of a hominin species known as Australopithecus africanus. It was not widely accepted until the middle of the 20th century because most experts believed humans evolved outside of Africa. Like, you know, in England. ♪

In 1974, Donald Johansson, working in East Africa in Ethiopia, found 47 bones belonging to the same female who walked upright more than 3 million years ago. She had a mix of human-like and ape-like traits. We call her Lucy. A year later, Johansson and his crew found 17 more individuals who may have formed a first family of sorts that lived together there at the same site in Ethiopia.

The whole skull-jaw evolution is now much clearer with the kind of intensive DNA work that can be done on the now existing remains of pre- and early humans.

That is, brain size evolved before jaw size primarily because of a genetic mutation that weakened jaw muscles, allowing for more space in the skull to accommodate a larger brain. This mutation occurred about 2.4 million years ago, coinciding with the significant increase in human brain size compared to other primates. The gene, for you nitpickers out there, is MYH16.

Still unclear, I googled and found that weaker jaw muscles exert less pressure on the skull, allowing for greater cranial expansion. And that meant increased cognitive abilities, allowing for more complex behaviors and tool usage, which are likely crucial for human survival. Making us the fittest, I guess. At some things, anyway.

The so-called fossilized finds of Piltdown now rest somewhere deep inside the Natural History Museum of London, tucked away in its archives. They occasionally are exhibited when, say, fakes are the order of the day or for anniversaries of dumb shit.

But the exposure of the fraud seemed to have a chilling effect on everything attached to Charles Dawson's name. His law firm, which still bears his name, makes no mention of the founder since his disgrace. The museum he founded does not acknowledge his efforts on his behalf.

The town of Piltdown doesn't make an effort to capitalize on the fraud, not even in joking. No Piltdown man masks or coffee mugs are on sale. Weird when you consider all the economies propped up by Nessie and the Salem witch trials.

In 2016, Ghent University professor and archaeologist Isabelle de Groot completed an eight-year study of the Piltdown skull and concluded that only one man had the means, motive, and opportunity to pull off the hoax. The study used complicated DNA work and cross-referenced dates and locales and, well, opportunities.

Sometime along the line, someone took a look at the fossil specimens that had been left behind in Dawson's lab when he died. His wife, Helene, likely unaware of her husband's forgeries, sent those specimens to the British Museum, which didn't do much with them except file them away. Those ended up carbon dated, not old. They were rubbed with alcohol. They had been artificially stained. Dawson was the only person present when all the specimens were collected.

And after his death, no further remains were ever discovered at the Piltdown One site. Not that people didn't try. The much-valued statue that was erected in 1938 to commemorate the place where Piltdown Man had emerged from the earth to change history was taken down.

Charles Darwin had now been proven right repeatedly. With advanced gene sequencing and continuing work on human migration, coupled with numerous finds in numerous locales, Darwin's theory holds. The cradle of civilization is solidly established to be in sub-Saharan Africa, and the ethnocentric idea of European racial superiority has been proven to be serial academic deceit.

Sorry, Steve Bannon. Turns out you, like the rest of us European-descended folk, are mere carbon copies.

Next time on Strange and Unexplained, when three-year-old British-born Dorothy Eadie got a bump on the noggin, it seemed to unlock some incredibly specific details about a faraway place in a faraway time that would have been nearly impossible for her to have learned in her young life. Where on earth did Dorothy Eadie's knowledge of ancient Egypt come from?

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