Speaker 1: Happy Saturday and Happy New Year. The pill down Man
Speaker 1: that's going to come up in one of our episodes
Speaker 1: this week, so we thought we would pull out our
Speaker 1: episode on that scientific fraud for Today's Saturday Classic. Our
Speaker 1: first Unearthed episodes of the year are also coming in
Speaker 1: just a bit, and we know we have listeners who
Speaker 1: are eagerly awaiting them. This episode was originally a standalone
Speaker 1: Unearthed episode, so we thought it might help tide folks
Speaker 1: over until the next one's come out in a week
Speaker 1: or so. This originally came out December, so enjoy and yes,
Speaker 1: folks have already written into us about how to pronounce
Speaker 1: the word zoologist. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class,
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to
Speaker 1: the podcast. I'm Tray, Steve Wilson and I'm Holly fry So.
Speaker 1: The Pill down Man one of the world's most infamous
Speaker 1: instances in scientific fraud, and in August of which is
Speaker 1: this year, researchers published a paper in Royal Society Open
Speaker 1: Science that concluded that it was the work of a
Speaker 1: single hoaxer. So rather than rolling that into our Unearthed episodes,
Speaker 1: which are just around the corner, we are doing an
Speaker 1: entire unearthed episode just on this Uh. We're going to
Speaker 1: talk 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 this 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? Eight. One of the things
Speaker 1: that's intriguing to me is that I literally wrote this
Speaker 1: on the list in August, right that it has I
Speaker 1: have been planning to do this episode right now as
Speaker 1: of August, and now it seems particularly relevant because it
Speaker 1: is such a cautionary tale about not just uncritically observing
Speaker 1: absorbing things that are announced as news. The whole time
Speaker 1: I was working on this outline, I was like, this
Speaker 1: is this feels like we just need a reminder. So
Speaker 1: it makes sense of why the pilt Down hoax even
Speaker 1: happened in the first place. We actually need to go
Speaker 1: all the way back to Charles Darwin's publication of On
Speaker 1: the Origin of Species in eighteen fifty nine. The full
Speaker 1: title of that particular writing is on the Origin of
Speaker 1: Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of
Speaker 1: favored races in the Struggle for Life, and this details
Speaker 1: Darwin's theories of evolution by natural selection, which are at
Speaker 1: the foundation of evolutionary biology. When he published this book,
Speaker 1: Darwin knew that one type of evidence that would really
Speaker 1: support his theories was in relatively short supply, and that
Speaker 1: is transitional fossils. These are fossils that have some traits
Speaker 1: belonging to an older species and some belonging to a
Speaker 1: more modern species. And transitional fossils are physical evidence of
Speaker 1: an intermediary evolutionary step that demonstrates how life is changing
Speaker 1: over time. One famous example of a transitional fossil is archaeopterics.
Speaker 1: It's got some features that are more like a reptile
Speaker 1: and others that are more like a bird, and today
Speaker 1: it's viewed as a transitional fossil between non avian dinosaurs
Speaker 1: and modern birds. Darwin knew that people would try to
Speaker 1: discredit his work because at that point in history, not
Speaker 1: that many transitional fossils had been found. Archaeoptrics, for example,
Speaker 1: would not even be discuss or until eighteen sixty and
Speaker 1: a lot of people at that point described it more
Speaker 1: as the first bird rather than as a transitional fossil.
Speaker 1: Of course, was after his book had already been published,
Speaker 1: but Darwin actually anticipated actually these exact source of discoveries.
Speaker 1: He explained in the Origin of Species that this lack
Speaker 1: of evidence was probably due to an incomplete geological record
Speaker 1: and not to an actual absence of the fossils that
Speaker 1: would prove him. Right after Darwin's publication of On the
Speaker 1: Origin of Species, there was a big focus on finding
Speaker 1: more transitional fossils. In particular, people were hoping to find
Speaker 1: the missing link, that single fossil that would conclusively demonstrate
Speaker 1: a connection between ancient apes and modern humans. Today, we
Speaker 1: know about lots of transitional fossils that detailed the progression
Speaker 1: of all kinds of life. We have transitional fossils and
Speaker 1: the evolutionary family trees of bird is and fish and
Speaker 1: whales and horses and elephants and on and on. I
Speaker 1: literally could just randomly name animals. That's the thirty minute
Speaker 1: podcast episode is just Tracy saying animal works. It starts
Speaker 1: to sound like the list of what they were eating
Speaker 1: in Monty Python in the Holy Grail. So in terms
Speaker 1: of human life, the idea of a single missing link
Speaker 1: between ancient hominids and modern humans has really vanished under
Speaker 1: the weight of a lot of individual transitional fossils that
Speaker 1: add up to a human family tree that's full of
Speaker 1: forks and branches. It is not a single linear, one
Speaker 1: lane road that starts on ape and ends on human
Speaker 1: connected with one magical quote missing link fossil. It's a
Speaker 1: lot more complicated than that. Yeah, uh in n though
Speaker 1: the missing link would have been an earth shattering, groundbreaking
Speaker 1: and career making discovery, and that is what brings us
Speaker 1: to pilt Down Man And February of nineteen twelve, Sir
Speaker 1: Arthur Smith, Woodward, keeper of Geology at the British Museum
Speaker 1: now called the Natural History Museum, got a letter from
Speaker 1: Charles Dawson. In addition to being a solicitor, Dawson was
Speaker 1: an amateur archaeologist, and he said he had found something
Speaker 1: 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 to
Speaker 1: the workers there, he learned that they'd dug up something
Speaker 1: they described as quote, like a coconut, and that they'd
Speaker 1: thrown the pieces away. Dawson dug these fragments out of
Speaker 1: the 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 jawbone 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 ex actley, and his letter he
Speaker 1: compared his discovery to a job bone that had been
Speaker 1: discovered by a workman in a sand pit near Heidelberg, Germany,
Speaker 1: in nineteen o 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 jaw bone. Two of its molars
Speaker 1: were in place and had significant wear, and then there
Speaker 1: were pieces of the brain case of a skull, which
Speaker 1: seemed a lot more human than the mandible did. They
Speaker 1: had also found some stone tools and fragments 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 eoanthropist 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 aanthropist
Speaker 1: Dawson I is what they've named their find, and that
Speaker 1: means Aawson'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 fossil and other sites not far
Speaker 1: away from that first fine but otherwise this was really
Speaker 1: the end of the discoveries that pilt Down. And then
Speaker 1: Dawson died in nineteen six 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 keystone and human
Speaker 1: 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 uh 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: ever evolution for about the next forty years. More than
Speaker 1: two fifty papers and monographs were published about it, and
Speaker 1: it was cited in more than seventy publications. So it
Speaker 1: was a pretty big deal. And it was also completely
Speaker 1: made up. We're going to talk about after a sponsor break.
Speaker 1: So after this announcement, many in the scientific community just
Speaker 1: took Dawson and Smith Woodward's report to the Geological Society
Speaker 1: of London at face value. The original pieces of these
Speaker 1: specimens were locked away in storage for safekeeping, but casts
Speaker 1: of them were made to share with researchers who wanted
Speaker 1: to do further study. A lot of the early scientific
Speaker 1: debate about these specimens didn't even consider the basic question
Speaker 1: of whether they were authentic at all. Instead, it was
Speaker 1: about things like whether Smith wouldwards interpretation of the skull
Speaker 1: was correct. He had made a reconstruction of the skull
Speaker 1: based on nine fragments that had initially been found. The
Speaker 1: resulting skull had a capacity of about one thousand and
Speaker 1: seventy six cubic centimeters to other anatomists and anthropologists disagreed
Speaker 1: about whether Smith Wouldwards reconstruction was accurate. Sir Arthur Keith
Speaker 1: of Scotland was on one side of this debate, and
Speaker 1: 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
Speaker 1: up and what parts of the skull bones people thought
Speaker 1: they were from. Like you think of your skull as
Speaker 1: one solid piece, but it's actually several pieces connected by sutures.
Speaker 1: So the question was whether these fine 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. But even so, a lot of people
Speaker 1: studying this fine simply took for granted from the beginning
Speaker 1: that it was legitimate and they free their study from there.
Speaker 1: Like the quote popularized by Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims like
Speaker 1: I found the missing link in a gravel pit and
Speaker 1: pilt down require extraordinary evidence, and that just was not
Speaker 1: present here. This uncritical acceptance that the piltd Down man
Speaker 1: was real was certainly not completely universal, especially as time
Speaker 1: passed and people had more opportunities to study it. For example,
Speaker 1: American zoologist Garrett Smith Miller published quote the Jaw of
Speaker 1: the piltdown Man in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections in nineteen fifteen,
Speaker 1: and which he concluded that the skull fragments did come
Speaker 1: from a real human skull, but that the mandible came
Speaker 1: from an extinct species of chimpanzee. Writing an American anthropologist,
Speaker 1: William K. Gregory later published an analysis the molars which concluded, quote,
Speaker 1: I believe that Mr. Miller is fully justified in holding
Speaker 1: that the lower molars of the Piltdown jaw are those
Speaker 1: of a chimpanzee and not of an extinct genus of hominity.
Speaker 1: As more analysis emerged, there were also people who not
Speaker 1: only questioned whether this work was quote scientifically justifiable, but
Speaker 1: also warned that all this buzz and heightened expectations were dangerous.
Speaker 1: George Grant mcgurdy had published a fairly credulous overview of
Speaker 1: the pilt Down findings in nineteen fourteen, but by nineteen
Speaker 1: sixteen he had not only revised his own opinions, but
Speaker 1: was also alarmed at the state of scientific inquiry around
Speaker 1: the pilt Down man. In the journal Science, mcgourty outlined
Speaker 1: a range of doubts, criticisms, and skeptical inquiries that had
Speaker 1: come in from the United States Britain, France, and Italy,
Speaker 1: among other places, and he included this warning quote. Has
Speaker 1: not this dazzling combination blinded the discoverers and indirectly some
Speaker 1: of their colleagues, even at a distance, because of the
Speaker 1: high pitch of expectancy to which recent discoveries in the
Speaker 1: prehistoric field have not, without reason contributed. Under the circumstance,
Speaker 1: such blindness, if only temporary, would be pardonable and 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 ninety six, it was discovered that these gravel beds
Speaker 1: where the fossils were found were not old enough to
Speaker 1: contain five hundred thousand year old fossils whoops uh. Then,
Speaker 1: starting in the nineteen thirties, paleontologists started finding other hominid
Speaker 1: fossils in other parts of the world, and they seemed
Speaker 1: to suggest an evolution of human life that was taking
Speaker 1: place primarily in Africa and Asia. And as we noted
Speaker 1: or Leier that the jaws were becoming more human link
Speaker 1: before the brain cases and not the other way around,
Speaker 1: it made less and less sense that some critical moment
Speaker 1: in human evolution had happened on some tiny islands off
Speaker 1: the northwest coast of Europe, following a totally different pattern
Speaker 1: from what was being discovered elsewhere. But even so, a
Speaker 1: sizeable chunk of the scientific community carried on believing that
Speaker 1: the Piltdown specimens were genuine. A number of chemical and
Speaker 1: isotopic dating methods started to be developed in the nineteen forties,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen fifty three, Kenneth Oakley, then head of
Speaker 1: anthropology at the British Museum, analyzed the pilt Down man's
Speaker 1: skull fragments through florine dating, and the fragments were definitely
Speaker 1: much newer than Dawson and Smith Woodward had said, and
Speaker 1: they 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 floorine 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 danes
Speaker 1: were not made of substances that were local to the area.
Speaker 1: The moehlers 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. This
Speaker 1: was not a case of somebody accidentally finding some human
Speaker 1: bones near on orangutan bone for some reason and then
Speaker 1: drawing of logical but incorrect conclusion. It was a deliberate hoax.
Speaker 1: The good news was, with the pilt Down Man out
Speaker 1: of the way, all of the other fossil evidence that
Speaker 1: had been discovered in Africa and Asia in the decades
Speaker 1: since then made a lot more sense. There was no
Speaker 1: longer any lingering question of, well, if humanity's origins are
Speaker 1: in this part of the world and evolving this way,
Speaker 1: traveling in this pattern, what is this other fossil doing
Speaker 1: way over here following a completely different model. This was
Speaker 1: incredibly important in terms of the study of human evolution.
Speaker 1: The pilt Down Man had become such a dominant presence
Speaker 1: in the field that people were using its existence to
Speaker 1: totally disregard legitimate fossil findings that strongly suggested human origins
Speaker 1: in Africa. One of the foundations of scientific progress is
Speaker 1: the ability to reassess your conclusions when you're faced with
Speaker 1: new compelling evidence. But the pilt Down man was such
Speaker 1: a juggernaut that people were disregarding that new evidence instead.
Speaker 1: This was probably complicated by a conscious or unconscious reluctance
Speaker 1: among at least some scientists to believe that modern humanity
Speaker 1: rose in Africa, not in Britain. But the bad news
Speaker 1: was that a lot of the world had fallen for
Speaker 1: this hoax. It had impeded progress and perpetuated inaccurate information
Speaker 1: for decades. On top of that, the revelation that it
Speaker 1: wasn't real eroded the general public's belief in science. In
Speaker 1: the words of Earnest A. Houghton of Harvard, writing an
Speaker 1: American Anthropologists in ninety four, quote, what really worries me
Speaker 1: is the revelation to a lady that is often hostile
Speaker 1: to biological science, of calculated dishonesty on the part of
Speaker 1: someone intimately concerned with a discovery of supposedly great importance
Speaker 1: to the history of man. It is as shocking is
Speaker 1: the proof that men in high places of our own
Speaker 1: government have betrayed their country. Already, the press is flooded
Speaker 1: with accusations by anti evolutionists that all of the other
Speaker 1: evidence of man's origin from an ape like ancestry has
Speaker 1: been deliberately faked by unscrupulous scientists. The fact that the
Speaker 1: pilt Down fraud is possibly and even probably unique will
Speaker 1: be very difficult for the public to accept. Before you
Speaker 1: get too attached to the wise words of Ernest D.
Speaker 1: Houghton here, I mean they really touched me. I feel
Speaker 1: like they are applicable even still today. Uh. He also
Speaker 1: did a lot of work combining race in criminology that
Speaker 1: is influenced by the eugenics movement, and the lot of
Speaker 1: that work was pretty definitely racist. So as much as
Speaker 1: I love these words that he has to say about
Speaker 1: how damaging it was for this to be revealed as
Speaker 1: a fraud, there are other factors of his work. So
Speaker 1: this is not a h an endorsement of him as
Speaker 1: a scientist 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 pause for a word from one of
Speaker 1: our sponsors. In the years after the pilt Down Man
Speaker 1: was shown to be a hoax, many many theories were
Speaker 1: put forth out the potential culprits. A lot of the
Speaker 1: attention has been on Dawson himself. After all, he was
Speaker 1: the one who reported the findings of the first place,
Speaker 1: and 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 citing
Speaker 1: sided as possibilities as well, including Samuel Woodhead and Pierre
Speaker 1: Taliard de Charness. The latter was the one who actually
Speaker 1: found that canine tooth. Even though he played such a
Speaker 1: huge role, most people did not suspect Sir Arthur Smith Woodward,
Speaker 1: believing him to have been an unwilling dupe or one
Speaker 1: of the intended targets, since his reputation would have been
Speaker 1: ruined if word had gotten out while he was still alive.
Speaker 1: Sir Arthur Keith, whose paper on the skull reconstruction we
Speaker 1: talked about earlier, was also suggested as a suspect. One
Speaker 1: of the most famous suspects at least outside of the
Speaker 1: world of scientists was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who knew
Speaker 1: Dawson had an interest in this type of thing and
Speaker 1: lived nearby. In ninety weird set of criteria to say
Speaker 1: somebody is a suspect. I mean there were like, apparently
Speaker 1: there were people who were like, he just wants to
Speaker 1: destroy the evolutionists, right, that's so seriously circumstantial stuff that's
Speaker 1: getting piece together. Flimsy circumstantial stuff. Uh. In nineteen sixty six,
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: theory is about what was going on with what was
Speaker 1: in this trunk. One of the theories was that these
Speaker 1: bones were Hinton's trial run, and that he had done
Speaker 1: this and then planted the fussiles in quotation marks to
Speaker 1: get revenge on Smith Woodward, who had turned him down
Speaker 1: when he tried to move his volunteer position back in
Speaker 1: Nweve 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 it pilt down, and he also had
Speaker 1: expressed some skepticism at the fine being authentic. So another
Speaker 1: school of thought 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 in 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 sing 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 Like Charles Dawson's relatively
Speaker 1: early death makes it seem like whatever he was after
Speaker 1: he didn't get and then he was never he wasn't
Speaker 1: around to either further perpetuate it or be like, you
Speaker 1: know what, I made that up? Like that's it's yet
Speaker 1: another piece of circumstantial evidence, uh in in the Charles
Speaker 1: Dawson column. So all of that, though, may raise the
Speaker 1: question why spend so much time and effort just trying
Speaker 1: 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 now 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
Speaker 1: decades makes me real mad. Yeah we uh you and
Speaker 1: I talked about off Mike, the fact that forty years
Speaker 1: is a really long time when you consider like that
Speaker 1: is the length of a career for a scientist in
Speaker 1: some cases, and so there were probably people who were
Speaker 1: not willingly even party to this sort of blindness. But
Speaker 1: we're proceeding along on a career path that was basically
Speaker 1: complete blunder, and they wasted their time and their scientific minds,
Speaker 1: and yeah, and wasted the greater whole of humanity's ability
Speaker 1: to learn more about where we came from. And then
Speaker 1: it's by total coincidence that between the day when I
Speaker 1: wrote this on the calendar however many month months ago,
Speaker 1: and now like now, there is such a renewed focus
Speaker 1: on like the the putting out there of just fake,
Speaker 1: wrong information that is demonstrably wrong and it being accepted
Speaker 1: as fact. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.
Speaker 1: Since this episode is out of the archive, if you
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