1912, a well-known doctor and amateur paleoanthropologist
named Charles Dawson came out with the assertion that he had
found a jawbone and a cranial fragment in a pit in Piltdown,
England. Even though the jawbone was more ape-like, the teeth
and the skull were like a man's. These specimens were labelled
the "Piltdown man." Alleged to be 500,000 years old, they
were displayed as an absolute proof of human evolution in
several museums. For more than 40 years, many scientific articles
were written on "Piltdown man," many interpretations and drawings
were made, and the fossil was presented as important evidence
for human evolution. No fewer than 500 doctoral theses were
written on the subject.232 While visiting
the British Museum in 1921, leading American paleontologist
Henry Fairfield Osborn said "We have to be reminded over and
over again that Nature is full of paradoxes" and proclaimed
Piltdown "a discovery of transcendant importance to the prehistory
In 1949, Kenneth Oakley, from the British Museum's
Paleontology Department, attempted to use "fluorine testing,"
a new test used for determining the date of fossils. A trial
was made on the fossil of Piltdown man. The result was astonishing.
During the test, it was realized that the jawbone of Piltdown
man did not contain any fluorine. This indicated that it had
remained buried no more than a few years. The skull, which
contained only a small amount of fluorine, showed that it
was only a few thousand years old.
It was determined that the
teeth in the jawbone, belonging to an orangutan, had been
worn down artificially and that the "primitive" tools discovered
with the fossils were simple imitations that had been sharpened
with steel implements. In the detailed analysis completed
by Joseph Weiner, this forgery was revealed to the public
in 1953. The skull belonged to a 500-year-old man,
and the jaw bone belonged to a recently deceased ape!
The teeth had been specially arranged in a particular way
and added to the jaw, and the molar surfaces were filed in
order to resemble those of a man. Then all these pieces were
stained with potassium dichromate to give them an old appearance.
These stains began to disappear when dipped in acid. Sir Wilfred
Le Gros Clark, who was in the team that uncovered the forgery,
could not hide his astonishment at this situation, and said:
"The evidences of artificial abrasion immediately sprang to
the eye. Indeed so obvious did they seem it may well be asked-how
was it that they had escaped notice before?"234
In the wake of all this, "Piltdown man" was hurriedly removed
from the British Museum where it had been displayed for more
than 40 years.
||For 40 years, Piltdown man was accepted
as the greatest evidence for human evolution. Evolutionist
fossil experts claimed to have found a lot of transitional
features in the skull. It only emerged later that the
fossil was a fake.
232 Malcolm Muggeridge,
The End of Christendom, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1980,
233 Stephen Jay Gould, "Smith Woodward's
Folly," New Scientist, 5 April 1979, p. 44.
234 Stephen Jay Gould, "Smith Woodward's
Folly," New Scientist, 5 April 1979, p. 43. (emphasis