Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tray, Steve Wilson, and I'm Holly Frying. So the
Speaker 1: Piltdown Man one of the world's most infamous instances in
Speaker 1: scientific fraud, and in August of which is this year,
Speaker 1: researchers published a paper in Royal Society Open Science that
Speaker 1: concluded that it was the work of a single hoaxer.
Speaker 1: So rather than rolling that into our Unearthed episodes, which
Speaker 1: are just around the corner, we are doing an entire
Speaker 1: Unearthed episode just on this. Uh. We're going to talk
Speaker 1: about the pilt Down Man, how this hoax played out,
Speaker 1: and what exactly was unearthed in this newly published paper
Speaker 1: that inspired us to do the episode. Yeah. So that
Speaker 1: we've gotten lots of requests for over the years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And for me, I've sort of had it on the
Speaker 1: I'll get to that one day maybe list. And now
Speaker 1: this is a time when I can be proud of
Speaker 1: my procrastination because it enabled this cool thing to come out.
Speaker 1: Well what what is? Uh? One of the things that's
Speaker 1: intriguing to me is that I literally wrote this on
Speaker 1: the list in August right that it has. I have
Speaker 1: been planning to do this episode right now as of August,
Speaker 1: and now it seems particularly relevant because it is such
Speaker 1: a cautionary tale about not just uncritically observing absorbing things
Speaker 1: that are announced as news. The whole time I was
Speaker 1: working on this outline, I was like, this is this
Speaker 1: feels like we just need a reminder so it makes
Speaker 1: sense of why the pilt down hoax even happened in
Speaker 1: the first place. We actually need to go all the
Speaker 1: way back to Charles Darwin's publication of On the Origin
Speaker 1: of Species in eighteen fifty nine. The full title of
Speaker 1: that particular writing is on the Origin of Species by
Speaker 1: Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of favored races
Speaker 1: in the Struggle for Life, and this details Darwin's theories
Speaker 1: of evolution by natural selection, which are at the foundation
Speaker 1: of evolutionary biology. When he published this book, Darwin knew
Speaker 1: that one type of evidence that would really support his
Speaker 1: theories was in relatively short supply, and that is transitional fossils.
Speaker 1: These are fossils that have some traits belonging to an
Speaker 1: older species and some belonging to a more modern species.
Speaker 1: And transitional fossils are physical evidence of an intermediary evolutionary
Speaker 1: step that demonstrates how life is changing over time. One
Speaker 1: famous example of a transitional fossil is archaeopterics. It's got
Speaker 1: some features that are more like a reptile and others
Speaker 1: that are more like a bird, and today it's viewed
Speaker 1: as a transitional fossil between non avian dinosaurs and modern birds.
Speaker 1: Darwin knew that people would try to discredit his work
Speaker 1: because at that point in history, not that many transitional
Speaker 1: fossils had been found. Archaeotrics, for example, would not even
Speaker 1: be discovered until eighteen sixty, and a lot of people
Speaker 1: at that point described it more as the first bird
Speaker 1: rather than as a transitional fossil. Six of course, was
Speaker 1: after his book had already been published, but Darwin actually
Speaker 1: anticipated actually these exact source of discoveries. He explained in
Speaker 1: the Origin of Species that this lack of evidence was
Speaker 1: probably due to an incomplete geological record and not to
Speaker 1: an actual absence of the fossils that would prove him Right.
Speaker 1: After Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species, there
Speaker 1: was a big focus on finding more transitional fossils. In particular,
Speaker 1: people were hoping to find the missing link, that single
Speaker 1: fossil that would conclusively demonstrate a connection between ancient apes
Speaker 1: and modern humans. Today, we know about lots of transitional
Speaker 1: fossils that detailed the progression of all kinds of life.
Speaker 1: We have transitional fossils and the evolutionary family trees of
Speaker 1: birds and fish and whales and horses and elephants and
Speaker 1: on and on. I literally could just randomly name animals.
Speaker 1: That's the thirty minute podcast episode is just Tracy saying
Speaker 1: animal words. It starts to sound like the list of
Speaker 1: what they were eating in Monty Python in the Holy Grail.
Speaker 1: So in terms of human life, the idea of a
Speaker 1: single missing link between ancient hominids and modern humans has
Speaker 1: really vanished under the weight of a lot of individual
Speaker 1: transitional fossils that add up to a human family tree
Speaker 1: that's full of forks and branches. It is not a
Speaker 1: single linear, one lane road that starts on a and
Speaker 1: ends on human connected with one magical quote missing link fossil.
Speaker 1: It's a lot more complicated than that. Yeah. Uh. In
Speaker 1: nineteen twelves, though, the missing link would have been an
Speaker 1: earth shattering, groundbreaking and career making discovery, and that is
Speaker 1: what brings us to pilt Down Man. In February of
Speaker 1: nineteen twelve, Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of geology at
Speaker 1: the British Museum now called the Natural History Museum, got
Speaker 1: a letter from Charles Dawson. In addition to being a solicitor,
Speaker 1: Dawson was an amateur archaeologist, and he said he had
Speaker 1: found something very exciting in some gravel beds and pilt Down, Sussex.
Speaker 1: According to Dawson's account, he had noticed that a road
Speaker 1: where he lived had been repaired with some odd flints,
Speaker 1: and he traced the flints to their source, which turned
Speaker 1: out to be a shallow gravel bed. While talking the
Speaker 1: workers there, he learned that they dug up something they
Speaker 1: described as quote like a coconut, and that they'd thrown
Speaker 1: the pieces away. Dawson dug these fragments out of the
Speaker 1: trash and found that they were part of a skull,
Speaker 1: and over the next couple of years he'd gone back
Speaker 1: to the pit and found several other pieces of skull
Speaker 1: and jaw bone before finally writing his letter to Smith Woodward.
Speaker 1: Uh these skull fragments and jaw bone, he described, looked
Speaker 1: somewhat human, but not exactly, and his letter he compared
Speaker 1: his discovery to a jaw bone that had been discovered
Speaker 1: by a workman in a sand pit near Heidelberg, Germany,
Speaker 1: in nineteen oh seven, which had been named Homo heidelberg insis.
Speaker 1: In Homo heidelberg insis had some features in common with
Speaker 1: Homo erectus and others in common with modern humans or
Speaker 1: Homo sapiens. Dawson said his discovery quote would quote rival
Speaker 1: h heidelberg Insis in solidity. Dawson and Smith Woodward kept
Speaker 1: quiet about this find at first as they did some
Speaker 1: more digging at the pit, and then they presented their
Speaker 1: findings to a packed meeting of the Geological Society of
Speaker 1: London on December eighteenth of nineteen twelve. They had an
Speaker 1: ape like mandible or jawbone. Two of its molars were
Speaker 1: in place and had significant wear, and then there were
Speaker 1: pieces of the brain case of a skull, which seemed
Speaker 1: a lot more human than the mandible did. They had
Speaker 1: also found some stone tools and fragments of other non
Speaker 1: human mammal fossils. Their coloring was comparable to that of
Speaker 1: the gravel bed, and the conclusion was that these fossils
Speaker 1: were at least five hundred thousand years old. Regarding their presentation, A. C. Hadn't,
Speaker 1: writing in the journal Science, said quote Mr Dawson gave
Speaker 1: an account of the finding of the specimens, the nature
Speaker 1: and geographical and geological position of the gravel bed, and
Speaker 1: Dr Smith Woodward described the remains in a most excellent manner.
Speaker 1: Hadn't went on to write, quote, there could be no
Speaker 1: doubt that this is a discovery of the greatest importance
Speaker 1: and will give rise to much discussion. It is the
Speaker 1: nearest approach we have yet reached to a missing link.
Speaker 1: Probably few will deny that EU Anthropist Dawson I is almost,
Speaker 1: if not quite, as much human as Simian. I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna say we are guessing on how that is pronounced,
Speaker 1: because it seems like no one knows. So your Anthropist
Speaker 1: Dawson I is what they've named their find, and that
Speaker 1: means Dawson's dawn Man, which is not self congratulatory at all.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know, often scientific names of things are
Speaker 1: named after the person who found or discovered or put
Speaker 1: them in a taxonomy or whatever, but like Dawson's dawn Man,
Speaker 1: it just seems particularly back Patty Yeah uh in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirteen and nineteen fourteen, excavations continued at the gravel pit
Speaker 1: where these first fossils had reportedly been recovered, and these
Speaker 1: excavations unearthed some other evidence as well. There was a
Speaker 1: canine tooth which had some features in common with ape
Speaker 1: teeth and others in common with modern human teeth. They
Speaker 1: also found a carved slab of bone that became known
Speaker 1: as the cricket bat because it was roughly shaped like one.
Speaker 1: Although Dawson did keep excavating, or at least saying he
Speaker 1: was excavating, the start of World War One meant that
Speaker 1: it took place on a much smaller scale. He sent
Speaker 1: a couple of postcards to Smith Woodward saying that he
Speaker 1: had found some other fossils and other sites not far
Speaker 1: away from that first find, but otherwise this was really
Speaker 1: the end of the discoveries that pilt Down, and then
Speaker 1: Dawson died in nineteen sixteen. A lot of scientists were
Speaker 1: very excited about the pilt Down discoveries. Understandably, not only
Speaker 1: were they put forth as the missing link that was
Speaker 1: so important to evolutionary science at the time, but they
Speaker 1: had also been found in Britain, which meant that the
Speaker 1: British Isles had played an important part in the evolution
Speaker 1: of all of humanity. The British Empire was at this
Speaker 1: point the largest empire and human history, controlling almost one
Speaker 1: quarter of all of the land on Earth. So the
Speaker 1: idea that Britain had also been a key stone and
Speaker 1: human evolution carried this mix of pride and of wealth. Obviously,
Speaker 1: these people were quite ready to believe that Britain was
Speaker 1: actually the birthplace of the human at the human species.
Speaker 1: So although it was not universally accepted, the pilt Down
Speaker 1: Man played a major role in scientific thought about human
Speaker 1: evolution for about the next forty years. More than two
Speaker 1: d and fifty papers and monographs were published about it,
Speaker 1: and it was cited in more than seventy publications. So
Speaker 1: it was a pretty big deal. And it was also
Speaker 1: completely made up. We're going to talk about after a
Speaker 1: sponsor break. So after this announcement, many in the scientific
Speaker 1: community just took Dawson and Smith Woodward's report to the
Speaker 1: Geological Society of London at face value. The original pieces
Speaker 1: of these specimens were locked away in storage for safekeeping,
Speaker 1: but casts of them were made to share with researchers
Speaker 1: who wanted to do further stuff. A A lot of
Speaker 1: the early scientific debate about these specimens didn't even consider
Speaker 1: the basic question of whether they were authentic at all. Instead,
Speaker 1: it was about things like whether smith Wouldwards interpretation of
Speaker 1: the skull was correct. He had made a reconstruction of
Speaker 1: the skull based on nine fragments that had initially been found.
Speaker 1: The resulting skull had a capacity of about one thousand
Speaker 1: and seventy six cubic centimeters to other anatomists and anthropologists
Speaker 1: disagreed about whether Smith Wouldwards reconstruction was accurate. Sir Arthur
Speaker 1: Keith of Scotland was on one side of this debate,
Speaker 1: and Sir Grafton Elliott Smith of Australia was on the other.
Speaker 1: Keith made his own reconstruction, which had a capacity of
Speaker 1: about fifteen hundred cubic centimeters, or about the same as
Speaker 1: a modern human skull, which prompted Smith Woodward to revise
Speaker 1: his original reconstruction. Smith, on the other hand, came to
Speaker 1: different conclusions, insisting that the original one thousand, seventy six
Speaker 1: cubic centimeters was a lot more correct. These all had
Speaker 1: to do with basically how the skull pieces were lined up.
Speaker 1: And what parts of the skull bones people thought they
Speaker 1: were from. Like you think of your skull as one
Speaker 1: solid piece, but it's actually several pieces connected by sutures.
Speaker 1: So the question was whether these nine fragments of skull
Speaker 1: were being correctly used to make a reconstruction, not whether
Speaker 1: they were actually from a prehistoric human. There was also
Speaker 1: a lot of talk about whether the canine tooth that
Speaker 1: was found later was really part of the same mandible
Speaker 1: or not, but there was no talk about whether any
Speaker 1: of these pieces were actually genuine. Basically, a big chunk
Speaker 1: of the scientific literature surrounding this fine just was credulous
Speaker 1: and uncritical from the start. And to be fair, many
Speaker 1: of the technologies that we used to authenticate the age
Speaker 1: of fossils today were not invented yet and they would
Speaker 1: not be for more than twenty years. And also a
Speaker 1: lot of the other fossil evidence today that we know
Speaker 1: about that shows that hominids developed more humanlike jaws before
Speaker 1: they developed developed bigger brain cases, those had not been
Speaker 1: discovered yet either, so they didn't really have things to
Speaker 1: compare them to you. But even so, a lot of
Speaker 1: people studying this fine simply took for granted from the
Speaker 1: beginning that it was legitimate, and they framed their study
Speaker 1: from there, Like the quote popularized by Carl Sagan, Extraordinary
Speaker 1: claims like I found the missing link in a gravel
Speaker 1: pit and pilt down require extraordinary evidence, and that just
Speaker 1: was not present here. This uncritical acceptance that the piltd
Speaker 1: Down Man was real was certainly not completely universal, especially
Speaker 1: as time passed and people had more opportunities to study it.
Speaker 1: For example, American zoologist Garrett Smith Miller published quote the
Speaker 1: Jaw of the Piltdown Man in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifteen, and which he concluded that the skull fragments
Speaker 1: did come from a real human skull, but that the
Speaker 1: mandible came from an extinct species of chimpanzee. Writing an
Speaker 1: American anthropologist, William K. Gregory later published an analysis the
Speaker 1: molars which concluded quote, I believe that Mr. Miller is
Speaker 1: fully justified in holding that the lower molars of the
Speaker 1: pilt down jaw are those of a chimpanzee and not
Speaker 1: of an extinct genus of hominity. As more analysis emerged,
Speaker 1: there were also people who not only questioned whether this
Speaker 1: work was quote scientifically justifiable, but also warned that all
Speaker 1: this buzz and heightened expectations were dangerous. George Grant mcgurdy
Speaker 1: had published a fairly credulous overview of the pilt Down
Speaker 1: findings in nineteen fourteen, but by nineteen sixteen he had
Speaker 1: not only revised his own opinions, but was also alarmed
Speaker 1: at the state of scientific inquiry around the pilt Down Man.
Speaker 1: In the journal Science, mcgourty outlined a range of doubts, criticisms,
Speaker 1: and skeptical inquiries that had come in from the United States, Britain, France,
Speaker 1: and Italy, among other places, and he included this warning quote.
Speaker 1: Has not this dazzling combination blinded the discoverers and indirectly
Speaker 1: some of their colleagues, even at a distance, because of
Speaker 1: the high pitch of expectancy to which recent discoveries in
Speaker 1: the prehistoric field have not, without reason contributed. Under the circumstances,
Speaker 1: such blindness, if only temporary, would be pardonable in comparatively harmless,
Speaker 1: but serious danger lurks in the possibility of its persisting
Speaker 1: long enough to become an obsession and a hindrance to
Speaker 1: future progress in this particular field, and that's exactly what
Speaker 1: was happening. In spite of the growing body of skepticism
Speaker 1: and criticism, the pilt Down man became a widely accepted
Speaker 1: part of a body of scientific literature. Things started to
Speaker 1: unravel a little about a decade after the pilt Down discovery. First,
Speaker 1: in it was discovered that these gravel beds where the
Speaker 1: fossils were found were not old enough to contain five
Speaker 1: hundred thousand year old fossils. Whoops uh. Then, starting in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties, paleontologists started finding other hominid fossils in
Speaker 1: other parts of the world, and they seemed to suggest
Speaker 1: an evolution of human life that was taking place primarily
Speaker 1: in Africa and Asia. And as we noted earlier that
Speaker 1: the jaws were becoming more human like before the brain
Speaker 1: cases and not the other way around, it made less
Speaker 1: and less sense that some critical moment in human evolution
Speaker 1: had happened on some tiny islands off the northwest coast
Speaker 1: of Europe, following a totally different pattern from what was
Speaker 1: being discovered elsewhere. But even so, a sizeable chunk of
Speaker 1: the scientific community carried on believing that the pilt Down
Speaker 1: specimens were genuine. A number of chemical and Isotopic dating
Speaker 1: methods started to be developed in the nineteen forties, and
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty three, Kenneth Oakley, then head of anthropology
Speaker 1: at the British Museum, analyze the pilt Down Man's skull
Speaker 1: fragments through fluorine dating, and the fragments were definitely much
Speaker 1: newer than Dawson and Smith Woodward had said, and they
Speaker 1: were way way too new to be the missing link.
Speaker 1: The first test suggested that it was only fifty thousand
Speaker 1: years old, not ten times that. Following Oakley's discovery, the
Speaker 1: British Museum publicly announced that the pilt Down Man was
Speaker 1: a fraud. And these flooring tests definitely were not perfect.
Speaker 1: They showed that all the skull pieces were the same age,
Speaker 1: whereas later analysis would show that in fact they were not,
Speaker 1: and later on more refined dating methods would also determine
Speaker 1: that the pieces were only about six hundred years old,
Speaker 1: certainly not fifty thousand. But in spite of those shortcomings,
Speaker 1: they were definite proof that the pilt Down Man was
Speaker 1: not a real hominid fossil. Yeah. As our ability to
Speaker 1: test things got better over time because we learned, so
Speaker 1: did our ability to point out just how fake these
Speaker 1: things really were. Further analysis showed the mandible was really
Speaker 1: from a juvenile orangutan, and that all these pieces that
Speaker 1: had been purported to be a person's remains were actually
Speaker 1: meticulously altered to look genuine. They had been stained to
Speaker 1: match the material in the gravel beds, but the stains
Speaker 1: were not made of substances that were local to the area.
Speaker 1: The molars had also been artificially worn down to like
Speaker 1: natural and then other mammal fossils that were found in
Speaker 1: the same area were actual genuine fossils, but they were
Speaker 1: not from species that actually lived in pilt Down. So
Speaker 1: this was not a case of somebody accidentally finding some
Speaker 1: human bones near on a rangutan bone for some reason
Speaker 1: and then drawing of logical but incorrect conclusion. It was
Speaker 1: a deliberate hoax. The good news was, with the pilt
Speaker 1: Down man out of the way, all of the other
Speaker 1: fossil evidence that had been discovered in Africa and Asia
Speaker 1: in the decades since then made a lot more sense.
Speaker 1: There was no longer any lingering question of, well, if
Speaker 1: humanity's origins are in this part of the world and
Speaker 1: evolving this way, traveling in this pattern, what is this
Speaker 1: other fossil doing way over here following a completely different model.
Speaker 1: This was incredibly important in terms of the study of
Speaker 1: human evolution. The pilt Down Man had become such a
Speaker 1: dominant presence in the field that people were using its
Speaker 1: existence to totally disregard legitimate fossil findings that strongly suggested
Speaker 1: human origins in Africa. One of the foundations of scientific
Speaker 1: progress is the ability to reassess your conclusions when you're
Speaker 1: faced with new, compelling evidence. But the pilt Down Man
Speaker 1: was such a juggernaut that people were disregarding that new
Speaker 1: evidence instead. This was probably complicated by a conscious or
Speaker 1: unconscious reluctance among at least some scientists to believe that
Speaker 1: modern humanity rose in Africa, not in Britain. But the
Speaker 1: bad news was that a lot of the world had
Speaker 1: fallen for this hoax. It had impeded progress and perpetuated
Speaker 1: inaccurate information for decades. On top of that, the revelation
Speaker 1: that it wasn't real eroded the general public's belief in science.
Speaker 1: In the words of Ernest A. Houghton of Harvard, writing
Speaker 1: an American Anthropologists in ninety four, quote, what really worries
Speaker 1: me is the revelation to a lady that is often
Speaker 1: hostile to biological science, of calculated dishonesty on the part
Speaker 1: of someone intimately concerned with a discovery of supposedly great
Speaker 1: importance to the history of man. It is as shocking
Speaker 1: is the proof that men in high places of our
Speaker 1: own government have betrayed their country. Already, the press is
Speaker 1: flooded with accusations by anti evolutionists that all of the
Speaker 1: other evidence of man's origin from an ape like ancestry
Speaker 1: has been deliberately faked by unscrupulous scientists. The fact that
Speaker 1: the pilt down fraud is possibly and even probably unique,
Speaker 1: will be very difficult for the public to accept. Before
Speaker 1: you get too attached to the wise words of Ernest here,
Speaker 1: I mean they really touched me. I feel like they
Speaker 1: are applicable even still today. Uh. He also did a
Speaker 1: lot of work combining race in criminology that was influenced
Speaker 1: by the eugenics movement, and the a lot of that
Speaker 1: work was pretty definitely racist. So as much as I
Speaker 1: love these words that he has to say about how
Speaker 1: damaging it was for this to be revealed as a fraud,
Speaker 1: there are other factors of his work. So this is
Speaker 1: not a uh an endorsement of him as a scientist
Speaker 1: by us as podcasters who are not scientists. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can appreciate his insight in that moment without applauding
Speaker 1: the rest of his body of work, for sure. Uh.
Speaker 1: And with this finding now unquestionably shown to be fraudulent,
Speaker 1: the focus then turned to piecing together who had done
Speaker 1: it and why, And we're going to talk about that
Speaker 1: after we first paused for a word from one of
Speaker 1: our sponsors. In the years after the Piltdown Man was
Speaker 1: shown to be a hoax, many many theories were put
Speaker 1: forth about the potential culprits. A lot of the attention
Speaker 1: has been on Dawson himself. After all, he was the
Speaker 1: one who reported the findings of the first place, and
Speaker 1: he was instrumental in the announcement and the initial investigations.
Speaker 1: He may have hoped that such a profound discovery would
Speaker 1: earn him admission into the Royal Society. A couple of
Speaker 1: people who either knew or worked with Dawson were siting
Speaker 1: side of his possibilities as well, including Samuel Woodhead and
Speaker 1: Pierre Taliard de Chardins. The latter was the one who
Speaker 1: actually found that canine tooth. Even though he played such
Speaker 1: a huge role, most people did not suspect Sir Arthur
Speaker 1: Smith Woodward, believing him to have been an unwilling dupe
Speaker 1: or one of the intended targets to His reputation would
Speaker 1: have been ruined if word had gotten out while he
Speaker 1: was still alive. Sir Arthur Keith, whose paper on the
Speaker 1: skull reconstruction we talked about earlier, was also suggested as
Speaker 1: a suspect. One of the most famous suspects, at least
Speaker 1: outside of the world of scientists, was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
Speaker 1: who knew Dawson had an interest in this type of
Speaker 1: thing and lived nearby. In nine weird set of criteria
Speaker 1: to say somebody is a suspect, I mean there were like,
Speaker 1: apparently there were people who were like, he just wants
Speaker 1: to destroy the evolutionists, right, that's some seriously circumstantial stuff
Speaker 1: that's getting piece together. Flimsy circumstantial stuff. Uh in n s.
Speaker 1: A trunk found in storage in the British Museum was
Speaker 1: discovered to contain a number of bones, including some that
Speaker 1: had been stained in a similar manner to the piltdown Man.
Speaker 1: This trunk marked with the initials M. A. C. H
Speaker 1: apparently belonged to Martin A. C. Hinton, who also amassed
Speaker 1: quite a collection of other bones, fossils, and specimens. He
Speaker 1: had been working as a volunteer at the museum in
Speaker 1: nineteen twelve, and he became its keeper of Zoology in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty six. So naturally this brought up lots of
Speaker 1: theories about what was going on with what was in
Speaker 1: this trunk. One of the theories was that these bones
Speaker 1: were Hinton's trial run, and that he had done this
Speaker 1: and then planted the fossils in quotation marks to get
Speaker 1: revenge on Smith Woodward, who had turned him down when
Speaker 1: he tried to move his volunteer position back in nineteen
Speaker 1: twelve into a paid one. However, not all of this
Speaker 1: quite adds up. I had a hard time pending down
Speaker 1: exactly why this was later debunked as being who had
Speaker 1: orchestrated this, But his time at the museum started after
Speaker 1: the first discovery at pilt Down, and he also had
Speaker 1: expressed some skepticism at the fine being authentic. So another
Speaker 1: school of ought is that the way these stained bones
Speaker 1: that looked very similar to the pilt Down specimens came
Speaker 1: to be in his suitcase is that he was trying
Speaker 1: to replicate the coloring it pilt down to prove that
Speaker 1: it was a fraud. The paper, published in Royal Society
Speaker 1: Open Science this year, is an attempt to conclusively solve
Speaker 1: this whole puzzle once and for all. The study involved
Speaker 1: DNA analysis, dating analysis, spectroscopy, and high precision measurements of
Speaker 1: the specimens, as well as studying three dimensional representations of them,
Speaker 1: which is known as virtual anthropology. The DNA analysis confirmed
Speaker 1: that teeth and the mandible were from an orangutan, probably
Speaker 1: one born in Borneo, and that all of the orangutan
Speaker 1: specimens that were part of this hoax probably came from
Speaker 1: the same individual animal. Attempts to figure out whether there
Speaker 1: are any missing orangutan specimens and local museum collections have
Speaker 1: so far been unsuccessful, but it's also possible that somebody
Speaker 1: could have bought an orangutan skull in an antiquarian shop.
Speaker 1: A minimum of two, possibly three different human skulls were
Speaker 1: used in the production of the skull fragments, and while
Speaker 1: tests to figure out whether they were all the same
Speaker 1: age were inconclusive, they were all subjected to the same
Speaker 1: m O to make them look like fossils that could
Speaker 1: have come from that gravel bed, and there was dental
Speaker 1: putty used to hold the teeth in place and the
Speaker 1: mandible and to hold the gravel and pebble plugs in place,
Speaker 1: with these materials being similar to the sediment that was
Speaker 1: at the pilt Down dig site, that this discovery of
Speaker 1: dentil putty was not new to this research that was
Speaker 1: just published, like people knew about the dentil putty way before,
Speaker 1: which like continues to make me question why in n
Speaker 1: nobody was like this looks glued on, right. I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe it was just some really really skillful dentil putty use,
Speaker 1: but I don't know. That's one of the many things
Speaker 1: that makes me go, how ready were you all to
Speaker 1: believe that the missing link was from Britain? Because that's
Speaker 1: the only way all this works. And I think the
Speaker 1: answer is very ready, extremely ready. The team concludes that,
Speaker 1: given the consistencies in the m O and the limited
Speaker 1: number of total specimens, the pilt Down Man was probably
Speaker 1: the work of one forger, most likely Charles Dawson, possibly
Speaker 1: trying to further his own scientific career, which given that
Speaker 1: he died in nineteen sixteen, at the age of fifty two,
Speaker 1: just four years after the first announcement clearly did not
Speaker 1: quite work out for him. I had a whole conversation
Speaker 1: about this episode with with my husband in the car
Speaker 1: over the weekend about how, like, you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of these different people have been put forth as potential suspects,
Speaker 1: and a lot of them are are sort of dismissed,
Speaker 1: and really all of these things are really circumstantial, Like
Speaker 1: there's just there's even with all of this analysis, there's
Speaker 1: still a lot of circumstantial evidence and guesswork and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. But to me, the biggest strike against Charles
Speaker 1: Dawson is the fact that he did die only four
Speaker 1: years after this whole thing started, so any like many
Speaker 1: of these other people who have been pointed out as
Speaker 1: suspects lived for a whole lot longer, and and that
Speaker 1: sort of raises the question of, Okay, what were they
Speaker 1: after that never came to fruition? Right, Like Charles Dawson's
Speaker 1: relatively early death makes it seem like whatever he was
Speaker 1: after he didn't get and then he was never he
Speaker 1: wasn't around to either further perpetuate it or be like,
Speaker 1: you know what I made that up like that's it's
Speaker 1: yet another piece of circumstantial evidence, uh in in the
Speaker 1: Charles Dawson column. So all of that, though, may raise
Speaker 1: the question why spend so much time and effort just
Speaker 1: trying to get the bottom of who did this? And so,
Speaker 1: in the words of the papers authors quote, solving the
Speaker 1: pilt down hoax is still important now. It stands as
Speaker 1: a cautionary tale to scientists not to see what they
Speaker 1: want to see, but to remain objective and to subject
Speaker 1: even their own findings to the strongest scientific scrutiny. That's
Speaker 1: a piltdown, man. I love that episode. Thank you, Tracy. Oh,
Speaker 1: you're very welcome. I'm I'm gonna totally admit I had
Speaker 1: a very good time reading the vastly incorrect papers published
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen teens about this finding from people
Speaker 1: who were flat out wrong, and at the same time
Speaker 1: I was really bad about it, Like uh we I
Speaker 1: have often when we've done episodes about old medical history
Speaker 1: or something like that, read you know, the old papers
Speaker 1: from the time that that were published, and these, you know,
Speaker 1: people very confidently espousing stuff that's wrong, just really wrong,
Speaker 1: and that it makes me a lot matter this time
Speaker 1: because it was wrong, and somebody did it on purpose
Speaker 1: and it stood in the way of scientific progress for decades.
Speaker 1: Makes me real mad. Yeah, we uh you and I
Speaker 1: talked about off Mike, the fact that forty years is
Speaker 1: a really long time when you consider like that is
Speaker 1: the length of a career for a scientist in some cases.
Speaker 1: And so there were probably people who were not willingly
Speaker 1: even party to this sort of blindness. But we're proceeding
Speaker 1: along on a career path that was basically complete blunder,
Speaker 1: and they wasted their time and their scientific minds and yeah,
Speaker 1: and wasted the greater whole of humanity's ability to learn
Speaker 1: more about where we came from. And then it's by
Speaker 1: total coincidence that between the day when I wrote this
Speaker 1: on the calendar however many month months ago, and now
Speaker 1: like now, there is such a renewed focus on like
Speaker 1: the the putting out there of just fake wrong information
Speaker 1: that is demonstrably wrong and it being accepted as fact. Ah,
Speaker 1: do you have listener mail? I do, And it's also
Speaker 1: about science. It is from Sarah. Here's what she says.
Speaker 1: Sarah says, Dear Holly and Tracy, longtime listener, first time caller.
Speaker 1: I love your podcast, But yesterday was downright spooky. I'm
Speaker 1: a graduate student at the University of Washington, and I
Speaker 1: was in my dungeon I mean sub basement lab, happily
Speaker 1: listening to my backlog podcasts when your podcast about the
Speaker 1: Orphans tsunami began. The reason this is spooky is that
Speaker 1: I was collecting data about a landslide I think was
Speaker 1: triggered by the earthquake. Right now, I am doing a
Speaker 1: green size analysis of my slide and comparing it to
Speaker 1: the devastated landslide that killed fifty people I have. I
Speaker 1: have attached some pictures of my sieves and oven and
Speaker 1: the field work back ho and my mentor where it
Speaker 1: samples were collected. I continued with my work, which involved
Speaker 1: running some errands well low and Behold, just as I'm
Speaker 1: getting into the car to take my radio carbon samples
Speaker 1: to the lab, you talk about radio carbon dating. I
Speaker 1: would like to respectfully request that you, lovely ladies, please
Speaker 1: remove the cameras you have following me around. This connection
Speaker 1: between landslides and earthquakes makes sense when you think about it.
Speaker 1: The shaking cause by an earthquake can destabilize otherwise safe slopes,
Speaker 1: high topography, can also amp amplify and earthquakes waves, creating
Speaker 1: an even stronger shaking north Widge north Ridge earthquake at
Speaker 1: six point seven on the moment magnitude, we don't use
Speaker 1: rictor anymore cause and estimated fifty thousand uh. It's the earthquakes,
Speaker 1: but I think it might mean landslides. Here in the
Speaker 1: Pacific Northwest, we are especially landslide prone at glaciers occupied
Speaker 1: the area until very recently geologically, and glaciers tend to
Speaker 1: leave very steep slopes because of the immense weight and
Speaker 1: pressure inherent in a mile thick layer of ice. The
Speaker 1: glaciers Impuget Sound especially contribute to our risk and because
Speaker 1: of the large amount of loose sediment deposited, Combining loose
Speaker 1: glacial sediment over steep in slopes and earthquakes could be
Speaker 1: a recipe for disaster. You also mentioned in the episode
Speaker 1: the silt deposits and tide flats that helped us identify
Speaker 1: the tsunami events this summer. I had the good fortune
Speaker 1: to get to examine some of these deposits with one
Speaker 1: of the main authorities I believe he wrote the book
Speaker 1: you mentioned in the podcast. Even with a group of
Speaker 1: twenty trained geologists, and we cut into the tide flat deposits.
Speaker 1: The tiny silt deposits were hard to see. I've attached
Speaker 1: a picture. Then she describes what's in the picture. These
Speaker 1: deposits are only centimeters thick in some places and not
Speaker 1: well distributed. Digging a whole meter away from the original
Speaker 1: had very different thicknesses and layering. The silt, which comes
Speaker 1: from a few kilometers out to see, is carried in
Speaker 1: suspense and by the tsunami wave and deposited inland as
Speaker 1: the wave loses energy. The tide flats are a great
Speaker 1: place to look for this deposit because they are well preserved.
Speaker 1: Storms can create similar deposits as well. I understand if
Speaker 1: you can distinguish storms from tsunammies because storm deposits are thicker,
Speaker 1: because storms into last days. For us, adunamist into the
Speaker 1: last hours. Don't quote me on that, which I just did.
Speaker 1: And then she goes on to write about some uh,
Speaker 1: some territory we've covered in other listener male about the
Speaker 1: um the threat of earthquake in Seattle, and she thanks
Speaker 1: us and gives us some episode suggestions. Thank you so much, Sarah.
Speaker 1: I love when we hear from scientists about our scientific
Speaker 1: episodes with more science information, because that's awesome. Uh. If
Speaker 1: you would like to write to us about this or
Speaker 1: any other podcast where history podcasts at how stuffworks dot com.
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Speaker 1: to find all kinds of information about anything your heart
Speaker 1: desires just about. And then you can come to our website,
Speaker 1: which is missing history dot com, where we will put
Speaker 1: for example, we linked to the original paper that was
Speaker 1: published that inspired this episode, so you can do all
Speaker 1: that in a whole lot more at how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com or miss in history dot com for more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
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