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Piltdown Man - Ep 134
1.6k Plays10 months ago
Time for an old school classic! The year is 1912, the place is England, and the fossil is fake! In today’s episode, I give you the most famous archaeological fake of them all, Piltdown Man.
Transcripts
- For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/pseudo/134
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Transcript
Introduction and Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You are now entering the pseudo-archaeology podcast, a show that uncovers what's fact, what's fake, and what's fun in the crazy world of pseudo-archaeology.
00:00:23
Speaker
Hello and
Introducing Piltdown Man
00:00:24
Speaker
welcome to the pseudo archaeology podcast, episode 134. And tonight we are discussing Piltdown Man, the OG number one, first and foremost archaeological fraud of them all. All right, so.
00:00:46
Speaker
Hey man, it's a new year and I thought I would just go with the old school of old school classics. You know, it's funny. I've been looking at the list of stuff that I've done and the list of stuff that I haven't done.
00:01:02
Speaker
And I realized that I haven't done some of the total classics. Again, I still haven't done Atlantis. Like, what's wrong with me, man? And speaking of kind of old classics, Piltdown Man. Man, everyone's got to know Piltdown Man. I think one of the reasons I might have kind of forgot to do this one
00:01:26
Speaker
is that I talk about this one every semester in my anthropology classes and specifically in biological anthropology, right? This one comes up and I use this as an example in that class because in BioAnthro is where we go over the human fossil records specifically, right? And there's, man, there's all kinds of good stories in there.
00:01:52
Speaker
You know, just thinking about it, I might bring more of those in here. Those things are good, but.
00:01:59
Speaker
There is
Piltdown Man in Anthropology
00:02:00
Speaker
in the midst of all that in the midst of all that good real research, if you're talking about like fossils, they that you guys have probably heard of like Lucy and so on. She's by far the most famous, but the ancient human remains of things like Homo habilis, Homo erectus, right? Australopithecines, all that kind of good stuff, all that real stuff. There's this one big old fake.
00:02:25
Speaker
And that fake is his pilt down. Now, this you know, what's funny, this story is.
00:02:33
Speaker
like 2% different than most of the other stories I'll tell on here. And it's because of the background of this, the background of Piltdown. Piltdown is a full-on fraud, right? What we're gonna find is that the guy who perpetrated the Piltdown man hoax was actively trying to defraud the public, right? He was actively lying in order to get something for himself.
00:03:03
Speaker
Most of the stuff we talk about on this channel isn't it's not that bold, if that makes sense. You know, most of the stuff we talk about here are just kind of unscientific, fraudulent beliefs that really aren't supported by anything. But a group of people start to believe in them because they kind of want to belong to a certain group and they sort of want to virtue signal to this certain group, right? The Graham Hancock.
00:03:32
Speaker
situation comes to mind with that, right? It's, it's 2% different than an overt fraud. And I'm not saying
The Deception of Piltdown
00:03:41
Speaker
Graham Hancock is no fraud because he is a total and 100% fraud, but he's not trying to sell a fake artifact, which is what you have here. Right. And what one of the many things
00:03:58
Speaker
that makes Piltdown Man so famous is that the fraud that was perpetrated on the general public lasted over 40 years. So Piltdown Man comes to light in 1912. See, it's old. You know, this is this is over 100 years ago kind of thing. But.
00:04:20
Speaker
The fact that the fraud lasted so long, like people took this fossil seriously, this fake fossil for over 40 years. And we'll see in the end of this, you know, of course, the reason why they took it seriously is the same reason we take so many false things seriously, because they tell us what we want to hear. You know, and Piltdown Man is a great example of telling
00:04:47
Speaker
the general public and scientists of the time to plenty of scientists fall for this telling you what they want to hear. You know, oh, isn't it great when you find exactly what you're looking for? And I can tell you this. Based on my life in archaeology, you never find exactly what you're looking for. And actually. It's sort of extra cool that you don't, because you usually find
00:05:18
Speaker
kind of something related to sort of what you were looking for, but you find so much more or you find something completely different. And it's even more fascinating than you think. So real archaeology is great. I love what I do, you know, and the finds I've made over my career, they've just been
00:05:37
Speaker
fascinating left turns that I didn't think I was going to make. I've never gone out to find something and been like, oh, right, there it is.
Charles Dawson's Role
00:05:46
Speaker
I mean, if you see stuff like that, it's the first inkling of like, hey, maybe this isn't totally on the level because it's satisfied every want that I have. So. All right. How does this thing go down?
00:06:06
Speaker
In 1912, this guy named Charles Dawson sort of brings this group of fossil bits and stone tool bits forward to the scientific community, right? And it's a bunch of stuff he's found in Sussex, in England, right? In a gravel pit.
00:06:31
Speaker
And just there, right? Knowing what we know now, you're like, uh, ancient human in England. Yes, exactly. An ancient human in England. So right away in all this, aren't we like, uh, okay. Now specifically, what did he find, right?
00:06:57
Speaker
The big showy fossil was a skull, basically, and it was a human looking skull with a really large ape like jaw. Right now, there's other stone tools and that kind of stuff they're found with it, but that's the star of the show. And the skull and the jaw look old because they're kind of browned and they sort of have like the gravel from the area. This is found in a gravel pit.
00:07:27
Speaker
Sticking to it, right? It's got the look. It's got the fossilized look. And so when Charles Dawson kind of shows this to the scientific community, they.
00:07:39
Speaker
Initially, go with it pretty much. Now, it is important to say that even though what we will find is a fraud, even though it lasted over 40 years, that even in the early days, there were people who were highly skeptical of this. So don't think that like every single scientist was just like, oh, yeah, pilt down man. Oh, for sure. One hundred percent. There are some seriously skeptical people, especially outside of England.
00:08:08
Speaker
you know, who who were never 100% on board. They always kind of were looking sort of sideways at this thing. But there was enough acceptance of this where I mean, this was put in the anthropology books at the time, you can still look up and find pages where the pilt down man is reconstructed with his tools and everything, you know, running along in ancient England.
00:08:38
Speaker
Right so it really put a damper on other finds other real finds that are gonna come later cuz they had to deal with this weird pilt down man thing so
00:08:50
Speaker
Anyway, Charles Dawson shows all this stuff off and it's accepted and he is helped by this other guy, Arthur Smith Woodward. And Woodward is like the department head of geology at the British Museum. So he's almost like the dean, you know, he's sort of like the person above him or the department chair.
00:09:13
Speaker
And to get him on board was a big coup for Dawson, right? It's like, all right, got this guy who can help me make this thing real. And along with the stone tools and other bone fragments, too, that were found in this area. Hey, it's a slam dunk. So based on these finds,
00:09:38
Speaker
What do you think that team of Dawson and Woodward is going to do next? They're going to go back and dig for some more. And what do they find in the next few years? Well, stay tuned and I'll tell you.
00:09:57
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the pseudo archaeology podcast episode 134 and we have been talking about the famous pilt down man fraud. And when we last left off Charles Dawson, who is
00:10:12
Speaker
The perpetrator has kind of gotten this other guy, Arthur Smith Woodward, who is kind of the head of geology from the British Museum on his side. And the duo are now going to start to dig for some more fossils, right? We must realize that nobody realizes this is a fraud, right? Everyone thinks this is real, although, of course, there are some people who don't quite believe it. But nobody's thinking it's a fraud. They're just thinking that, oh, something doesn't quite add up.
00:10:40
Speaker
That's a little bit weird so they go and and continue their excavations now originally this comes to light in nineteen twelve but they go back for a couple years ago back in nineteen fifteen and by this time.
00:10:57
Speaker
The find has its own Latin name, right? It's not Piltdown, man. Oh, that's just for the plebes, man. The real name is Eanthropus Doussounai. Right. Oh, man. So they look for more examples of Eanthropus Doussounai. And I know you're going to be shocked at what I'm about to tell you.
00:11:28
Speaker
but they find some more as if by magic. Now, an interesting bit here is it's always Dawson that finds the fossil. So when the pair goes out, and I'm sure other people help from time to time, nobody else finds anything. It's always Dawson who finds the stuff, right?
00:11:52
Speaker
And they find like a second skull referred to as pilt down two. They find some more teeth that seem to be similar to the teeth that were in the jaw of the first one. And they find even more artifacts like stone tools and this kind of thing. They even find like a big elephant bone fossil that's been kind of whittled out into some sort of basic tool.
00:12:20
Speaker
Now, they have this like big group of fossils and associated artifacts, right? And because they went back, even some of the people who were really not too sure about the whole Piltdown thing,
00:12:38
Speaker
Some of them went over to the Piltdown site after that. They were like, well, we were kind of not into it at first, but they found more. And actually a lot of this later stuff was found at a different site two miles away from the first site. Right. So you're like, Oh, if stuff's coming up at two different sites, well, okay, maybe it's real after all. Now,
00:13:05
Speaker
The next year in 1916, Charles Dawson dies and he dies. Man, you guys, I had to look this up because I was like, I bet he died from one of those like 1920s diseases that nobody gets anymore. You know, they usually start with the, you know, like the gout, you know, the plursey. And he did. He died of pernicious anemia.
00:13:36
Speaker
which I think we should call the pernicious anemia. Well, he was all right until his bout with the pernicious anemia. Just as a public service announcement, I'm here to tell you, take your vitamin B12, my friends.
Unveiling the Fraud
00:13:52
Speaker
Now, I even looked up pernicious anemia and it really is one of those things that like nobody dies. You know, it's just one of those things where it's like, you go to your doctor, like, oh, you're kind of low on this, but
00:14:02
Speaker
In a perfect storm situation, it as we see with Charles Dawson, it can kill you. So he dies in 1916. And of course, the excavations for Piltdown and all that stop, they shockingly don't find any more artifacts from Piltdown. No, it just ends after after 1915. But. You know, if if people were looking at this with more of a critical eye,
00:14:31
Speaker
There were a couple things that were really starting to angle towards like, hey, this is a fake. Not only is it a little too perfect in terms of what's being found, oh, it just matches just right. Some of the stone tools that we'll talk about in a minute really seem to well, as we'll see, they're they're almost a cry for help, I think.
00:14:59
Speaker
It's tough to say now in the intervening years. It wasn't figured out until 1953. Right. So it comes online in 1912. And you've got to realize World War I happens right after then. Then you have the roaring 20s. You have the depression era of the 30s. You have World War II that whole time. The scientific community has taken Piltdown Man as reality. Right. You get into the 1950s and
00:15:25
Speaker
Finally, they figured it out for sure in 1953. How did they do it? They use a dating method. They use a dating method called fluorine dating, which is really basic. It's not used so much these days. It's not because it's terrible. It's just because we have better dating methods. Fluorine dating simply, you can analyze bones and the bones will absorb fluorine from the soil.
00:15:54
Speaker
And so the longer the bone has been in the soil, the more fluorine it absorbs. And so they tested these bones for fluorine and they realized that like barely any fluorine in it at all. Meaning for sure these bones were recent, right? So yes, indeed the pilt down man was a fraud. What the main skull was, is it was a human skull.
00:16:16
Speaker
likely less than 100 years old, and an orangutan jaw that might have been several hundred years old, but they were just sort of crudely shoved together and filed down so they fit, right? It really was, is simply a human skull and an orangutan jaw. And of course, if you break it a few times so the pieces don't quite fit together, then anybody else trying to check it out, they can't
00:16:44
Speaker
quite tell for sure yet. And especially if you double down on your lie and angle them away from the truth that they might not try enough to make it look like a modern human, which it is. So that's what it is. And then why did it look older? Cause he died them. Dawson died the actual fossils. And then he used, I believe it's Dennis putty. It's, it's, you know, super sticky putty stuff.
00:17:10
Speaker
in order to kind of shove certain bits together and get the gravel from the actual gravel pit and shove some of that in there, too. Right. So it
Dawson's Motivations and Legacy
00:17:18
Speaker
looks like it's been there for a long time. It looks like the gravel itself is kind of concreted onto the bone. So this is a full on forgery. And what came out as the years went on even past that is that Dawson just like forged all kinds of stuff.
00:17:33
Speaker
He had he had something like 38 forgeries. He plagiarized a bunch of stuff. He just his whole career was a total sham and a lie. And speaking of career, he didn't really have a career. And that's what gets down to. Why did Dawson do this? Right. Why would you do this in the first place? Why would you go through all the trouble? And it's because he wasn't really a scientist. He was like an amateur.
00:18:04
Speaker
And he wanted the scientific community to take him seriously. So he just started making this fake stuff.
00:18:14
Speaker
And then he realized it works really well for him. So he just kept making fake stuff. And so Piltdown, man, wasn't his first fake. It was his like crowning fake achievement. You know, he'd had years of practice, years of dying stuff, right? Years of breaking stuff, sticking it together. Oh, this dentist putty stuff works pretty good, right? He had this whole like mini lab of fakery.
00:18:41
Speaker
He's going to have access from like the the museum, you know, the back, the storage area, the museum. He could find old skulls and stuff and just kind of find some old stone tools laying around, kind of sprinkle them around. That's how you do it. Make a fake.
00:18:57
Speaker
Now, I had hinted earlier about the cry for help. This is a guess by me, you guys. This is a total guess. But it has to do with that elephant bone fossil that was kind of shaped into like this crude, big sort of bat looking tool.
00:19:16
Speaker
if you look at an image of it, it looks hilariously similar to a cricket bat, right? That's the, of course, the British sport of cricket. If it was in the United States, it would look super crazy similar to a baseball bat, right? So it's this elephant bone that has been crudely shaped to look a lot like a cricket bat. Now, and that was found with sort of the,
00:19:43
Speaker
Second coming of the fossils, right? It was found in like 1915. To me, I'm curious if Charles Dawson was feeling the heat too much and tried to make something so outlandish in order to take a dive. And what I mean by that is it reminds me of.
00:20:08
Speaker
I was on a comedy team for a couple of years when I was younger, like in college, right? Right at the end of college. And it was an improv comedy team. And sometimes we would have these shows, we'd have these little scenes, right? These little skits and stuff where it was audience participation. And let's say it was some scene where you had to rhyme words, right? They give you the word fat and you rhyme it with cat and mat and bat and this kind of stuff.
00:20:39
Speaker
If you run out of stuff to rhyme, we would sometimes do what's called take a dive, which would be do something outlandish just to get out. Right now, in reality, I might have been able to kind of rhyme one more word. It's like, oh, bat and mat and fat have all been taken. And I'm trying to think of another word and I go grab it. But that makes the scene suck.
00:21:10
Speaker
If I'm trying to rhyme with the word fat and they come to me and I just go obese. That has its own joke and its own moment, right? And then I take a dive because I'm not being dishonest to the audience, but I'm just doing it to get out cleanly, if that makes sense. The reason why I tell that story.
00:21:35
Speaker
is because I think Charles Dawson is doing the same thing in Forgery World. What he's doing is he's like, I'm going to make this elephant fossil into a cricket bat and make it look so hilarious that the people who are looking into this will think
00:21:57
Speaker
that I've just found something totally fake and will tell me that it must be fake, but I'm not blamed for it. You get what I mean? It's a way to take a dive without the sort of extra step of like, oh, and this was actually faked by Charles Dawson. No, Charles could flip it around and just be like, geez, I'm sorry, I've been I was looking in this area and I found all this stuff and I thought it was real, but I guess not. Yeah, it's a way to get out clean.
00:22:26
Speaker
And some other people have thought that maybe there was a second conspirator and, you know, that goes with this. But it's it's a tough call. I could be wrong on this. I'm reaching out on the ledge a little bit. So. That little story take with a serious grain of salt, but I just find it. I find it super odd because if I'm Charles Dawson and I'm trying to fake you out. I'm not going to take an elephant fossil and make it into a cricket bat.
00:22:56
Speaker
You know what I mean? That's a serious red flag. When we come back, why this worked for so long? Well, all right, welcome on back to the pseudo-archaeology podcast, episode 134, and we are wrapping up our discussion on Piltdown Man.
00:23:15
Speaker
Oh, man, one of my old school favorites. And we'd gone over, you know, the perpetrator, Charles Dawson. We had gone over why he would have done it. It was it was because he wanted fame. You know, he was he was an amateur, but he wanted to be taken seriously. And he actually was able to get into the Royal Society, I think, based on this, right? He would have never been able to do it before. He'd kind of
00:23:43
Speaker
basically not been too successful in his life except with his fraud stirring. So this final swing at making a fake ancient human fossil got him in. But the whole thing didn't last long for him because he had his premature death in 1916. I also wonder
00:24:04
Speaker
if one of the reasons this wasn't so like kind of famous or the interest of the moment is when you look at these dates, this is all happening during World War I, right? And that's sort of this serious dark time. And maybe the papers are picking this up too because it's just something else to talk about besides, hey, all your young men are dying. You know, I wonder about that. I wonder if it's a bit right time, right place.
00:24:33
Speaker
that maybe if it wasn't a war, it wouldn't have gotten as much as much play. But anyway. We do know these days that it was Charles Dawson for sure. It all makes sense. Everything kind of comes together. They had have done more recent DNA testing on some of the the original Piltdown Man fossils. And they realized for sure that some of the bones found in this in the unit like two miles away.
00:25:01
Speaker
are the same as the ones found in the original unit. Like, so that's like, dude, case closed. Obviously, Dawson was doing what's called salting the site, right? Where he was basically going out there at night, you know, dropping in bones that he already had that he himself would then find the next day. Right. So that is the only way where you get a orangutan. Not only are orangutans, you know, not from there,
00:25:32
Speaker
It's the only way you get an orangutan jaw, two pieces of it to be two miles away, right? And both found these little tiny holes where you get it.
Debunking Myths of Human Evolution
00:25:43
Speaker
It's obvious fraud that points straight to Charles Dawson. So there were other
00:25:51
Speaker
I know having taught this for years, there are other little kind of what if mysteries associated with this. You'll hear that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will angle into this from time to time. He's the guy, of course, who wrote Sherlock Holmes, famous person. Interestingly.
00:26:07
Speaker
Conan Doyle was in that area at that time, right? And I believe knew Charles Dawson. I think they would have run in the same groups of people, the sort of high society in that area. I do know that Conan Doyle again cruised around in the area where Piltdown Man was found. I think he golfed nearby like he basically he just
00:26:27
Speaker
He hung out in that area, so it's not completely crazy, but there's just no real evidence that he did had any partner. The only evidence in a way would be motive. Because Conan Doyle didn't like the scientific establishment because he was really into like ghosts and apparitions and that kind of stuff that really funky like.
00:26:50
Speaker
early 20th century funky apparition stuff. You know what I mean? He was way down the rabbit hole in that. And I think that there had been some scientific studies that basically showed what a fool he was. And he didn't like that, of course. So he would have had motive to make the scientific community look bad by perpetrating the Piltdown Man scandal. But it doesn't seem like he was really a part of everything. And it's just fun because he's a big name.
00:27:19
Speaker
But no, man, it was Dawson. It was Charles Dawson. Now, why did this work for so long? It's because up until that time, of course, as we know from the evolutionary history of humans, there's no ancient human fossils in England.
00:27:40
Speaker
It's in the wrong geographic location. As we know these days, we are all ultimately, of course, from Africa, right? Africa is the cradle of human evolution. Absolutely. And 100 percent. Right. So the idea of finding human remains and they were again, this is 1912. They were guessing it was half a million years old. They had no idea, but it just doesn't make any sense. But they wanted it because, hey,
00:28:10
Speaker
England is the civilized place you know what I mean there's a lot of
00:28:16
Speaker
not so covert racism with that, of course, right? Where it's like, oh no, we, the white English people, we're the ones who are the oldest, who have the deepest history, of course, you know? So it works right into that sort of racist mentality of like, oh, we have to be the oldest, we have to have the oldest thing, you know? So it wasn't questioned as much, especially in England. So there's that, of course. Secondarily,
00:28:46
Speaker
It provides the cliche missing link the quote unquote missing link right i have gotten this question my entire career. Hey can you show us the missing link and the answer to that the short answer is there's no such thing and the longer answer is.
00:29:06
Speaker
There are many missing links and I can show you a ton of them, whether it's the Lucy fossil or Homo habilis or Homo erectus or Neanderthals, right? We can pick our poison. The point being that we can trace human prehistory from millions of years ago through these fossil changes of the fossils we found in the fossil record, right? We have a really good record.
Conclusion: Progress in Understanding Evolution
00:29:31
Speaker
Sure, there's one or two areas where we still have questions, but we have good answers for those questions. We're just not 100% on some of them, but we're pretty damn close, if that makes sense. There's questions in the later Australopithecine world and how that goes towards
00:29:54
Speaker
early homo, but those are serious scientific questions in terms of answering the basic questions like where did human beings come from? We just go Africa. Next question. You know, basic, a basic understanding of human evolution is totally there. But in 1912, it wasn't.
00:30:17
Speaker
So they were still thinking of it as, oh, a missing Lincoln intermediary between an ape looking guy and a human looking guy would be somebody with a big brain, but with a basic jaw. Right. And so Charles Dawson played to those cliches. He played to that sort of racist vibe. Right. And he was successful because of it. Now, we know today that
00:30:43
Speaker
that idea of a big brain coming early is exactly wrong. So for early human evolution, it was our legs. It's bipedalism. It's the ability to walk and run and have good movement on two legs. That's the first step for human beings that separates them from the other apes, that makes them something different. It's not the big brain. Big brain comes later, right?
00:31:12
Speaker
We've learned a lot, you know, in the intervening 110 years. We really have. Just kind of putting this together and going over my notes. Again, you know, I've told this story for a long time with my class and just kind of looking over it with a more, just with a focused eye to get this thing ready. I'm like, man.
00:31:35
Speaker
You know, we and by we, I mean like anthropologists, researchers over the last 100 years, we've really done good work.
00:31:44
Speaker
We've really added to our knowledge of ancient humanity. We've really done great. Good for us, you know? And you know what's so funny? The whole Charles Dawson fiasco, the whole Piltdown man silliness, it does remind me of a lot of current stuff like the Graham Hancock world. It does. Just this like fraudster, you know, who just
00:32:08
Speaker
puts out just dumb, long disproven ideas. And what it does, just like with Piltdown Man, it just hobbles our ability to tell facts to the general public. But hey, I think we in the archeology world. The end of the day, doing pretty good. And with that, I'll see you guys next time.
00:32:41
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the pseudo archeology podcast. Please like and subscribe wherever you'd like and subscribe. And if you have questions for me, Dr. Andrew Kinkella, feel free to reach out using the links below or go to my YouTube channel, Kinkella teaches archeology. See you guys next time.
00:33:02
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.