WEBVTT - SYMHC Classics: Piltdown Man 0:00:02.400 --> 0:00:06.040 Happy Saturday and Happy New Year. The pill down Man 0:00:06.160 --> 0:00:08.039 that's going to come up in one of our episodes 0:00:08.160 --> 0:00:10.080 this week, so we thought we would pull out our 0:00:10.119 --> 0:00:14.720 episode on that scientific fraud for Today's Saturday Classic. Our 0:00:14.840 --> 0:00:17.599 first Unearthed episodes of the year are also coming in 0:00:17.680 --> 0:00:19.600 just a bit, and we know we have listeners who 0:00:19.640 --> 0:00:24.120 are eagerly awaiting them. This episode was originally a standalone 0:00:24.200 --> 0:00:26.960 Unearthed episode, so we thought it might help tide folks 0:00:27.000 --> 0:00:29.200 over until the next one's come out in a week 0:00:29.320 --> 0:00:34.480 or so. This originally came out December, so enjoy and yes, 0:00:35.120 --> 0:00:37.760 folks have already written into us about how to pronounce 0:00:37.760 --> 0:00:44.000 the word zoologist. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, 0:00:44.280 --> 0:00:54.960 a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to 0:00:55.000 --> 0:00:59.560 the podcast. I'm Tray, Steve Wilson and I'm Holly fry So. 0:00:59.640 --> 0:01:04.360 The Pill down Man one of the world's most infamous 0:01:04.400 --> 0:01:09.440 instances in scientific fraud, and in August of which is 0:01:09.480 --> 0:01:13.920 this year, researchers published a paper in Royal Society Open 0:01:13.959 --> 0:01:16.560 Science that concluded that it was the work of a 0:01:16.640 --> 0:01:22.720 single hoaxer. So rather than rolling that into our Unearthed episodes, 0:01:22.959 --> 0:01:25.360 which are just around the corner, we are doing an 0:01:25.560 --> 0:01:30.280 entire unearthed episode just on this Uh. We're going to 0:01:30.319 --> 0:01:35.160 talk about the pilt down man, how this hoax played out, 0:01:35.200 --> 0:01:38.360 and what exactly was unearthed in this newly published paper 0:01:38.480 --> 0:01:41.880 that inspired us to do this episode. Yeah. So that 0:01:42.000 --> 0:01:45.240 we've gotten lots of requests for over the years. Yeah, 0:01:45.280 --> 0:01:46.920 And for me, I've sort of had it on the 0:01:47.240 --> 0:01:50.160 I'll get to that one day maybe list. And now 0:01:50.240 --> 0:01:51.920 this is a time when I can be proud of 0:01:51.960 --> 0:01:55.320 my procrastination because it enabled this cool thing to come out. 0:01:56.040 --> 0:02:00.480 Well what what is? Uh? Eight. One of the things 0:02:00.480 --> 0:02:02.840 that's intriguing to me is that I literally wrote this 0:02:02.960 --> 0:02:06.720 on the list in August, right that it has I 0:02:06.760 --> 0:02:09.280 have been planning to do this episode right now as 0:02:09.320 --> 0:02:15.920 of August, and now it seems particularly relevant because it 0:02:16.080 --> 0:02:21.360 is such a cautionary tale about not just uncritically observing 0:02:21.480 --> 0:02:27.959 absorbing things that are announced as news. The whole time 0:02:28.000 --> 0:02:29.840 I was working on this outline, I was like, this 0:02:29.919 --> 0:02:34.840 is this feels like we just need a reminder. So 0:02:35.000 --> 0:02:37.480 it makes sense of why the pilt Down hoax even 0:02:37.520 --> 0:02:39.760 happened in the first place. We actually need to go 0:02:39.840 --> 0:02:43.120 all the way back to Charles Darwin's publication of On 0:02:43.200 --> 0:02:46.880 the Origin of Species in eighteen fifty nine. The full 0:02:46.919 --> 0:02:49.760 title of that particular writing is on the Origin of 0:02:49.800 --> 0:02:53.800 Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of 0:02:53.840 --> 0:02:57.840 favored races in the Struggle for Life, and this details 0:02:57.919 --> 0:03:01.120 Darwin's theories of evolution by natural selection, which are at 0:03:01.120 --> 0:03:06.160 the foundation of evolutionary biology. When he published this book, 0:03:06.400 --> 0:03:09.280 Darwin knew that one type of evidence that would really 0:03:09.280 --> 0:03:12.480 support his theories was in relatively short supply, and that 0:03:12.639 --> 0:03:16.800 is transitional fossils. These are fossils that have some traits 0:03:16.840 --> 0:03:19.920 belonging to an older species and some belonging to a 0:03:20.120 --> 0:03:24.720 more modern species. And transitional fossils are physical evidence of 0:03:24.760 --> 0:03:30.240 an intermediary evolutionary step that demonstrates how life is changing 0:03:30.320 --> 0:03:35.880 over time. One famous example of a transitional fossil is archaeopterics. 0:03:36.320 --> 0:03:39.040 It's got some features that are more like a reptile 0:03:39.160 --> 0:03:41.840 and others that are more like a bird, and today 0:03:41.920 --> 0:03:45.560 it's viewed as a transitional fossil between non avian dinosaurs 0:03:45.640 --> 0:03:49.840 and modern birds. Darwin knew that people would try to 0:03:50.000 --> 0:03:53.640 discredit his work because at that point in history, not 0:03:53.880 --> 0:03:58.880 that many transitional fossils had been found. Archaeoptrics, for example, 0:03:58.880 --> 0:04:01.560 would not even be discuss or until eighteen sixty and 0:04:01.720 --> 0:04:05.040 a lot of people at that point described it more 0:04:05.080 --> 0:04:08.720 as the first bird rather than as a transitional fossil. 0:04:09.920 --> 0:04:12.480 Of course, was after his book had already been published, 0:04:12.720 --> 0:04:17.600 but Darwin actually anticipated actually these exact source of discoveries. 0:04:18.040 --> 0:04:21.440 He explained in the Origin of Species that this lack 0:04:21.480 --> 0:04:25.520 of evidence was probably due to an incomplete geological record 0:04:25.680 --> 0:04:29.320 and not to an actual absence of the fossils that 0:04:29.360 --> 0:04:33.840 would prove him. Right after Darwin's publication of On the 0:04:33.839 --> 0:04:37.160 Origin of Species, there was a big focus on finding 0:04:37.160 --> 0:04:41.200 more transitional fossils. In particular, people were hoping to find 0:04:41.360 --> 0:04:45.479 the missing link, that single fossil that would conclusively demonstrate 0:04:45.520 --> 0:04:50.320 a connection between ancient apes and modern humans. Today, we 0:04:50.400 --> 0:04:54.400 know about lots of transitional fossils that detailed the progression 0:04:54.520 --> 0:04:58.080 of all kinds of life. We have transitional fossils and 0:04:58.120 --> 0:05:00.640 the evolutionary family trees of bird is and fish and 0:05:00.720 --> 0:05:03.720 whales and horses and elephants and on and on. I 0:05:03.800 --> 0:05:09.480 literally could just randomly name animals. That's the thirty minute 0:05:09.560 --> 0:05:13.920 podcast episode is just Tracy saying animal works. It starts 0:05:13.960 --> 0:05:16.000 to sound like the list of what they were eating 0:05:16.120 --> 0:05:19.920 in Monty Python in the Holy Grail. So in terms 0:05:19.920 --> 0:05:23.560 of human life, the idea of a single missing link 0:05:23.680 --> 0:05:27.720 between ancient hominids and modern humans has really vanished under 0:05:27.720 --> 0:05:31.279 the weight of a lot of individual transitional fossils that 0:05:31.320 --> 0:05:34.000 add up to a human family tree that's full of 0:05:34.040 --> 0:05:38.680 forks and branches. It is not a single linear, one 0:05:38.800 --> 0:05:41.839 lane road that starts on ape and ends on human 0:05:42.040 --> 0:05:46.800 connected with one magical quote missing link fossil. It's a 0:05:46.839 --> 0:05:50.680 lot more complicated than that. Yeah, uh in n though 0:05:50.680 --> 0:05:54.200 the missing link would have been an earth shattering, groundbreaking 0:05:54.279 --> 0:05:57.840 and career making discovery, and that is what brings us 0:05:57.839 --> 0:06:01.880 to pilt Down Man And February of nineteen twelve, Sir 0:06:02.000 --> 0:06:05.560 Arthur Smith, Woodward, keeper of Geology at the British Museum 0:06:05.680 --> 0:06:08.280 now called the Natural History Museum, got a letter from 0:06:08.360 --> 0:06:12.440 Charles Dawson. In addition to being a solicitor, Dawson was 0:06:12.480 --> 0:06:15.360 an amateur archaeologist, and he said he had found something 0:06:15.480 --> 0:06:19.039 very exciting in some gravel beds and pilt Down, Sussex. 0:06:19.960 --> 0:06:23.200 According to Dawson's account, he had noticed that a road 0:06:23.240 --> 0:06:26.480 where he lived had been repaired with some odd flints, 0:06:26.600 --> 0:06:29.120 and he traced the flints to their source, which turned 0:06:29.120 --> 0:06:32.400 out to be a shallow gravel bed. While talking to 0:06:32.400 --> 0:06:34.479 the workers there, he learned that they'd dug up something 0:06:34.520 --> 0:06:37.919 they described as quote, like a coconut, and that they'd 0:06:37.960 --> 0:06:42.080 thrown the pieces away. Dawson dug these fragments out of 0:06:42.080 --> 0:06:44.560 the trash and found that they were part of a skull, 0:06:45.200 --> 0:06:47.479 and over the next couple of years he'd gone back 0:06:47.520 --> 0:06:50.200 to the pit and found several other pieces of skull 0:06:50.279 --> 0:06:54.080 and jawbone before finally writing his letter to Smith Woodward. 0:06:55.360 --> 0:06:58.320 Uh These skull fragments and jaw bone, he described, looked 0:06:58.440 --> 0:07:02.000 somewhat human, but not ex actley, and his letter he 0:07:02.080 --> 0:07:04.840 compared his discovery to a job bone that had been 0:07:04.839 --> 0:07:07.919 discovered by a workman in a sand pit near Heidelberg, Germany, 0:07:07.920 --> 0:07:12.360 in nineteen o seven, which had been named Homo heidelberg insis. 0:07:12.400 --> 0:07:17.440 In Homo heidelberg insis had some features in common with 0:07:17.520 --> 0:07:20.560 Homo erectus and others in common with modern humans or 0:07:20.600 --> 0:07:25.200 Homo sapiens. Dawson said his discovery quote would quote rival 0:07:25.480 --> 0:07:31.080 h heidelberg Insis in solidity. Dawson and Smith Woodward kept 0:07:31.200 --> 0:07:33.760 quiet about this find at first, as they did some 0:07:33.840 --> 0:07:36.920 more digging at the pit, and then they presented their 0:07:36.960 --> 0:07:40.160 findings to a packed meeting of the Geological Society of 0:07:40.240 --> 0:07:44.360 London on December eighteenth of nineteen twelve. They had an 0:07:44.360 --> 0:07:48.000 ape like mandible or jaw bone. Two of its molars 0:07:48.080 --> 0:07:51.440 were in place and had significant wear, and then there 0:07:51.440 --> 0:07:54.160 were pieces of the brain case of a skull, which 0:07:54.160 --> 0:07:57.480 seemed a lot more human than the mandible did. They 0:07:57.480 --> 0:08:00.840 had also found some stone tools and fragments other non 0:08:00.960 --> 0:08:05.080 human mammal fossils. Their coloring was comparable to that of 0:08:05.120 --> 0:08:08.000 the gravel bed, and the conclusion was that these fossils 0:08:08.000 --> 0:08:14.120 were at least five hundred thousand years old. Regarding their presentation, A. C. Hadn't, 0:08:14.160 --> 0:08:17.200 writing in the journal Science, said quote Mr Dawson gave 0:08:17.240 --> 0:08:19.720 an account of the finding of the specimens, the nature 0:08:19.800 --> 0:08:23.640 and geographical and geological position of the gravel bed, and 0:08:23.760 --> 0:08:27.920 Dr Smith Woodward described the remains in a most excellent manner. 0:08:28.920 --> 0:08:31.400 Hadn't went on to write, quote, there could be no 0:08:31.480 --> 0:08:34.320 doubt that this is a discovery of the greatest importance 0:08:34.360 --> 0:08:37.280 and will give rise to much discussion. It is the 0:08:37.320 --> 0:08:40.040 nearest approach we have yet reached to a missing link. 0:08:40.440 --> 0:08:44.560 Probably few will deny that eoanthropist Dawson I is almost, 0:08:44.640 --> 0:08:48.160 if not quite, as much human as Simian. I'm just 0:08:48.160 --> 0:08:50.240 gonna say we are guessing on how that is pronounced, 0:08:50.240 --> 0:08:56.160 because it seems like no one knows. So your aanthropist 0:08:56.240 --> 0:08:59.240 Dawson I is what they've named their find, and that 0:08:59.320 --> 0:09:05.520 means Aawson's dawn man, which is not self congratulatory at all. 0:09:05.559 --> 0:09:08.280 I mean, I know, often scientific names of things are 0:09:08.360 --> 0:09:12.720 named after the person who found or discovered or put 0:09:12.760 --> 0:09:15.480 them in a taxonomy or whatever, but like Dawson's dawn man, 0:09:17.360 --> 0:09:21.360 it just seems particularly back patty. Yeah. Uh. In nineteen 0:09:21.360 --> 0:09:25.120 thirteen and nineteen fourteen, excavations continued at the gravel pit 0:09:25.200 --> 0:09:29.280 where these first fossils had reportedly been recovered, and these 0:09:29.360 --> 0:09:33.680 excavations unearthed some other evidence as well. There was a 0:09:33.800 --> 0:09:36.680 canine tooth which had some features in common with ape 0:09:36.679 --> 0:09:40.240 teeth and others in common with modern human teeth. They 0:09:40.280 --> 0:09:43.320 also found a carved slab of bone that became known 0:09:43.320 --> 0:09:46.040 as the cricket bat because it was roughly shaped like one. 0:09:47.520 --> 0:09:50.440 Although Dawson did keep excavating, or at least saying he 0:09:50.480 --> 0:09:53.000 was excavating the start of World War One meant that 0:09:53.080 --> 0:09:56.120 it took place on a much smaller scale. He sent 0:09:56.160 --> 0:09:58.559 a couple of postcards to Smith Woodward saying that he 0:09:58.600 --> 0:10:01.440 had found some other fossil and other sites not far 0:10:01.480 --> 0:10:04.559 away from that first fine but otherwise this was really 0:10:04.559 --> 0:10:07.080 the end of the discoveries that pilt Down. And then 0:10:07.160 --> 0:10:11.640 Dawson died in nineteen six A lot of scientists were 0:10:12.040 --> 0:10:16.839 very excited about the pilt Down discoveries. Understandably, not only 0:10:16.840 --> 0:10:19.000 were they put forth as the missing link that was 0:10:19.120 --> 0:10:22.320 so important to evolutionary science at the time, but they 0:10:22.320 --> 0:10:25.000 had also been found in Britain, which meant that the 0:10:25.000 --> 0:10:27.960 British Isles had played an important part in the evolution 0:10:28.080 --> 0:10:31.640 of all of humanity. The British Empire was at this 0:10:31.720 --> 0:10:35.520 point the largest empire and human history, controlling almost one 0:10:35.600 --> 0:10:38.320 quarter of all of the land on Earth. So the 0:10:38.400 --> 0:10:41.200 idea that Britain had also been a keystone and human 0:10:41.200 --> 0:10:45.199 evolution carried this mix of pride and of wealth. Obviously, 0:10:45.880 --> 0:10:48.800 these people were quite ready to believe that Britain was 0:10:48.840 --> 0:10:52.400 actually the birthplace of the human uh the human species. 0:10:52.440 --> 0:10:57.960 So although it was not universally accepted. The pilt Down 0:10:57.960 --> 0:11:01.480 Man played a major role in scientific thought about human 0:11:01.480 --> 0:11:05.719 ever evolution for about the next forty years. More than 0:11:05.760 --> 0:11:08.920 two fifty papers and monographs were published about it, and 0:11:08.920 --> 0:11:11.520 it was cited in more than seventy publications. So it 0:11:11.600 --> 0:11:13.760 was a pretty big deal. And it was also completely 0:11:13.800 --> 0:11:18.360 made up. We're going to talk about after a sponsor break. 0:11:25.480 --> 0:11:28.680 So after this announcement, many in the scientific community just 0:11:28.720 --> 0:11:31.840 took Dawson and Smith Woodward's report to the Geological Society 0:11:31.880 --> 0:11:35.160 of London at face value. The original pieces of these 0:11:35.200 --> 0:11:38.720 specimens were locked away in storage for safekeeping, but casts 0:11:38.800 --> 0:11:41.800 of them were made to share with researchers who wanted 0:11:41.840 --> 0:11:45.960 to do further study. A lot of the early scientific 0:11:46.000 --> 0:11:49.480 debate about these specimens didn't even consider the basic question 0:11:49.520 --> 0:11:52.680 of whether they were authentic at all. Instead, it was 0:11:52.720 --> 0:11:55.920 about things like whether Smith wouldwards interpretation of the skull 0:11:56.040 --> 0:11:59.120 was correct. He had made a reconstruction of the skull 0:11:59.200 --> 0:12:02.520 based on nine fragments that had initially been found. The 0:12:02.600 --> 0:12:05.920 resulting skull had a capacity of about one thousand and 0:12:06.000 --> 0:12:11.719 seventy six cubic centimeters to other anatomists and anthropologists disagreed 0:12:11.800 --> 0:12:16.400 about whether Smith Wouldwards reconstruction was accurate. Sir Arthur Keith 0:12:16.440 --> 0:12:18.520 of Scotland was on one side of this debate, and 0:12:18.559 --> 0:12:21.320 Sir Grafton Elliott Smith of Australia was on the other. 0:12:21.880 --> 0:12:24.839 Keith made his own reconstruction, which had a capacity of 0:12:24.880 --> 0:12:28.000 about fifteen hundred cubic centimeters, or about the same as 0:12:28.000 --> 0:12:31.640 a modern human skull, which prompted Smith Woodward to revise 0:12:31.760 --> 0:12:35.480 his original reconstruction. Smith, on the other hand, came to 0:12:35.600 --> 0:12:39.640 different conclusions, insisting that the original one thousand, seventy six 0:12:39.679 --> 0:12:42.360 cubic centimeters was a lot more correct. These all had 0:12:42.400 --> 0:12:44.839 to do with basically how the skull pieces were lined 0:12:44.920 --> 0:12:49.600 up and what parts of the skull bones people thought 0:12:49.679 --> 0:12:52.960 they were from. Like you think of your skull as 0:12:53.040 --> 0:12:57.960 one solid piece, but it's actually several pieces connected by sutures. 0:12:58.000 --> 0:13:01.280 So the question was whether these fine fragments of skull 0:13:01.440 --> 0:13:05.319 were being correctly used to make a reconstruction, not whether 0:13:05.360 --> 0:13:09.040 they were actually from a prehistoric human. There was also 0:13:09.080 --> 0:13:11.199 a lot of talk about whether the canine tooth that 0:13:11.280 --> 0:13:13.720 was found later was really part of the same mandible 0:13:13.840 --> 0:13:17.240 or not, but there was no talk about whether any 0:13:17.280 --> 0:13:21.760 of these pieces were actually genuine basically a big chunk 0:13:21.800 --> 0:13:25.559 of the scientific literature surrounding this fine just was credulous 0:13:25.600 --> 0:13:29.040 and uncritical from the start. And to be fair, many 0:13:29.160 --> 0:13:31.840 of the technologies that we used to authenticate the age 0:13:31.840 --> 0:13:34.760 of fossils today were not invented yet and they would 0:13:34.800 --> 0:13:37.440 not be for more than twenty years. And also a 0:13:37.559 --> 0:13:40.440 lot of the other fossil evidence today that we know 0:13:40.520 --> 0:13:45.040 about that shows that hominids developed more humanlike jaws before 0:13:45.320 --> 0:13:48.920 they developed developed bigger brain cases, those had not been 0:13:48.960 --> 0:13:51.720 discovered yet either, so they didn't really have things to 0:13:51.760 --> 0:13:55.400 compare them to. But even so, a lot of people 0:13:55.480 --> 0:13:58.360 studying this fine simply took for granted from the beginning 0:13:58.400 --> 0:14:01.400 that it was legitimate and they free their study from there. 0:14:02.240 --> 0:14:05.920 Like the quote popularized by Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims like 0:14:06.080 --> 0:14:08.160 I found the missing link in a gravel pit and 0:14:08.240 --> 0:14:12.560 pilt down require extraordinary evidence, and that just was not 0:14:12.679 --> 0:14:17.400 present here. This uncritical acceptance that the piltd Down man 0:14:17.480 --> 0:14:21.680 was real was certainly not completely universal, especially as time 0:14:21.760 --> 0:14:25.640 passed and people had more opportunities to study it. For example, 0:14:25.680 --> 0:14:29.240 American zoologist Garrett Smith Miller published quote the Jaw of 0:14:29.280 --> 0:14:33.320 the piltdown Man in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections in nineteen fifteen, 0:14:33.800 --> 0:14:36.920 and which he concluded that the skull fragments did come 0:14:37.000 --> 0:14:39.880 from a real human skull, but that the mandible came 0:14:39.920 --> 0:14:44.640 from an extinct species of chimpanzee. Writing an American anthropologist, 0:14:44.720 --> 0:14:49.560 William K. Gregory later published an analysis the molars which concluded, quote, 0:14:49.880 --> 0:14:53.280 I believe that Mr. Miller is fully justified in holding 0:14:53.360 --> 0:14:56.040 that the lower molars of the Piltdown jaw are those 0:14:56.120 --> 0:15:00.640 of a chimpanzee and not of an extinct genus of hominity. 0:15:02.120 --> 0:15:05.200 As more analysis emerged, there were also people who not 0:15:05.280 --> 0:15:09.760 only questioned whether this work was quote scientifically justifiable, but 0:15:09.840 --> 0:15:14.120 also warned that all this buzz and heightened expectations were dangerous. 0:15:14.680 --> 0:15:18.240 George Grant mcgurdy had published a fairly credulous overview of 0:15:18.280 --> 0:15:21.800 the pilt Down findings in nineteen fourteen, but by nineteen 0:15:21.840 --> 0:15:24.720 sixteen he had not only revised his own opinions, but 0:15:24.840 --> 0:15:28.120 was also alarmed at the state of scientific inquiry around 0:15:28.120 --> 0:15:32.160 the pilt Down man. In the journal Science, mcgourty outlined 0:15:32.160 --> 0:15:35.800 a range of doubts, criticisms, and skeptical inquiries that had 0:15:35.880 --> 0:15:38.720 come in from the United States Britain, France, and Italy, 0:15:38.760 --> 0:15:42.600 among other places, and he included this warning quote. Has 0:15:42.720 --> 0:15:47.600 not this dazzling combination blinded the discoverers and indirectly some 0:15:47.680 --> 0:15:51.120 of their colleagues, even at a distance, because of the 0:15:51.200 --> 0:15:54.640 high pitch of expectancy to which recent discoveries in the 0:15:54.720 --> 0:15:59.960 prehistoric field have not, without reason contributed. Under the circumstance, 0:16:00.360 --> 0:16:05.280 such blindness, if only temporary, would be pardonable and comparatively harmless. 0:16:05.680 --> 0:16:10.000 But serious danger lurks in the possibility of its persisting 0:16:10.160 --> 0:16:13.400 long enough to become an obsession and a hindrance to 0:16:13.600 --> 0:16:18.000 future progress in this particular field. And that's exactly what 0:16:18.080 --> 0:16:21.600 was happening. In spite of the growing body of skepticism 0:16:21.640 --> 0:16:25.360 and criticism, the pilt Down man became a widely accepted 0:16:25.440 --> 0:16:29.320 part of a body of scientific literature. Things started to 0:16:29.440 --> 0:16:33.320 unravel a little about a decade after the pilt Down discovery. First, 0:16:33.520 --> 0:16:36.560 in ninety six, it was discovered that these gravel beds 0:16:36.560 --> 0:16:39.880 where the fossils were found were not old enough to 0:16:39.920 --> 0:16:45.960 contain five hundred thousand year old fossils whoops uh. Then, 0:16:46.240 --> 0:16:50.400 starting in the nineteen thirties, paleontologists started finding other hominid 0:16:50.400 --> 0:16:53.680 fossils in other parts of the world, and they seemed 0:16:53.720 --> 0:16:56.440 to suggest an evolution of human life that was taking 0:16:56.480 --> 0:16:59.720 place primarily in Africa and Asia. And as we noted 0:16:59.840 --> 0:17:02.640 or Leier that the jaws were becoming more human link 0:17:02.720 --> 0:17:05.320 before the brain cases and not the other way around, 0:17:06.800 --> 0:17:09.320 it made less and less sense that some critical moment 0:17:09.400 --> 0:17:12.480 in human evolution had happened on some tiny islands off 0:17:12.480 --> 0:17:16.000 the northwest coast of Europe, following a totally different pattern 0:17:16.080 --> 0:17:19.879 from what was being discovered elsewhere. But even so, a 0:17:20.000 --> 0:17:23.439 sizeable chunk of the scientific community carried on believing that 0:17:23.480 --> 0:17:28.040 the Piltdown specimens were genuine. A number of chemical and 0:17:28.040 --> 0:17:32.000 isotopic dating methods started to be developed in the nineteen forties, 0:17:32.160 --> 0:17:35.280 and in nineteen fifty three, Kenneth Oakley, then head of 0:17:35.280 --> 0:17:38.840 anthropology at the British Museum, analyzed the pilt Down man's 0:17:38.880 --> 0:17:43.639 skull fragments through florine dating, and the fragments were definitely 0:17:43.760 --> 0:17:46.719 much newer than Dawson and Smith Woodward had said, and 0:17:46.760 --> 0:17:50.080 they were way way too new to be the missing link. 0:17:50.640 --> 0:17:53.800 The first test suggested that it was only fifty thousand 0:17:53.920 --> 0:17:58.320 years old, not ten times that Following Oakley's discovery, the 0:17:58.359 --> 0:18:01.919 British Museum publicly announced that the pilt Down Man was 0:18:02.040 --> 0:18:06.720 a fraud, and these floorine tests definitely were not perfect. 0:18:07.200 --> 0:18:10.000 They showed that all the skull pieces were the same age, 0:18:10.160 --> 0:18:13.400 whereas later analysis would show that in fact they were not, 0:18:14.160 --> 0:18:17.400 and later on more refined dating methods would also determine 0:18:17.440 --> 0:18:20.600 that the pieces were only about six hundred years old, 0:18:20.960 --> 0:18:25.000 certainly not fifty thousand. But in spite of those shortcomings, 0:18:25.040 --> 0:18:27.720 they were definite proof that the pilt Down Man was 0:18:27.840 --> 0:18:31.800 not a real hominid fossil. Yeah, as our ability to 0:18:31.840 --> 0:18:35.399 test things got better over time because we learned, so 0:18:35.520 --> 0:18:37.960 did our ability to point out just how fake these 0:18:37.960 --> 0:18:43.399 things really were. Further analysis showed the mandible was really 0:18:43.480 --> 0:18:47.800 from a juvenile orangutan, and that all these pieces that 0:18:47.920 --> 0:18:53.720 had been purported to be a person's remains were actually 0:18:53.760 --> 0:18:57.760 meticulously altered to look genuine. They had been stained to 0:18:57.800 --> 0:19:00.399 match the material in the gravel beds, but the danes 0:19:00.440 --> 0:19:03.159 were not made of substances that were local to the area. 0:19:04.119 --> 0:19:07.359 The moehlers had also been artificially worn down to like 0:19:07.600 --> 0:19:10.920 natural and then other mammal fossils that were found in 0:19:10.960 --> 0:19:14.280 the same area were actual genuine fossils, but they were 0:19:14.359 --> 0:19:18.760 not from species that actually lived in pilt Down. This 0:19:18.840 --> 0:19:22.280 was not a case of somebody accidentally finding some human 0:19:22.320 --> 0:19:25.480 bones near on orangutan bone for some reason and then 0:19:25.560 --> 0:19:31.360 drawing of logical but incorrect conclusion. It was a deliberate hoax. 0:19:32.560 --> 0:19:35.160 The good news was, with the pilt Down Man out 0:19:35.200 --> 0:19:37.520 of the way, all of the other fossil evidence that 0:19:37.560 --> 0:19:40.320 had been discovered in Africa and Asia in the decades 0:19:40.359 --> 0:19:44.040 since then made a lot more sense. There was no 0:19:44.080 --> 0:19:48.080 longer any lingering question of, well, if humanity's origins are 0:19:48.119 --> 0:19:50.520 in this part of the world and evolving this way, 0:19:50.520 --> 0:19:53.440 traveling in this pattern, what is this other fossil doing 0:19:53.520 --> 0:19:58.720 way over here following a completely different model. This was 0:19:58.760 --> 0:20:02.320 incredibly important in terms of the study of human evolution. 0:20:02.880 --> 0:20:05.480 The pilt Down Man had become such a dominant presence 0:20:05.480 --> 0:20:08.320 in the field that people were using its existence to 0:20:08.320 --> 0:20:14.480 totally disregard legitimate fossil findings that strongly suggested human origins 0:20:14.600 --> 0:20:19.000 in Africa. One of the foundations of scientific progress is 0:20:19.040 --> 0:20:22.080 the ability to reassess your conclusions when you're faced with 0:20:22.160 --> 0:20:25.080 new compelling evidence. But the pilt Down man was such 0:20:25.160 --> 0:20:29.560 a juggernaut that people were disregarding that new evidence instead. 0:20:30.000 --> 0:20:34.360 This was probably complicated by a conscious or unconscious reluctance 0:20:34.480 --> 0:20:38.320 among at least some scientists to believe that modern humanity 0:20:38.480 --> 0:20:43.200 rose in Africa, not in Britain. But the bad news 0:20:43.640 --> 0:20:45.960 was that a lot of the world had fallen for 0:20:46.000 --> 0:20:50.879 this hoax. It had impeded progress and perpetuated inaccurate information 0:20:50.920 --> 0:20:54.560 for decades. On top of that, the revelation that it 0:20:54.600 --> 0:20:58.919 wasn't real eroded the general public's belief in science. In 0:20:58.960 --> 0:21:01.800 the words of Earnest A. Houghton of Harvard, writing an 0:21:01.840 --> 0:21:06.239 American Anthropologists in ninety four, quote, what really worries me 0:21:06.440 --> 0:21:09.240 is the revelation to a lady that is often hostile 0:21:09.320 --> 0:21:13.280 to biological science, of calculated dishonesty on the part of 0:21:13.320 --> 0:21:17.879 someone intimately concerned with a discovery of supposedly great importance 0:21:17.920 --> 0:21:21.040 to the history of man. It is as shocking is 0:21:21.080 --> 0:21:23.240 the proof that men in high places of our own 0:21:23.280 --> 0:21:27.280 government have betrayed their country. Already, the press is flooded 0:21:27.320 --> 0:21:30.880 with accusations by anti evolutionists that all of the other 0:21:30.920 --> 0:21:34.120 evidence of man's origin from an ape like ancestry has 0:21:34.119 --> 0:21:38.199 been deliberately faked by unscrupulous scientists. The fact that the 0:21:38.240 --> 0:21:41.720 pilt Down fraud is possibly and even probably unique will 0:21:41.760 --> 0:21:46.040 be very difficult for the public to accept. Before you 0:21:46.080 --> 0:21:48.240 get too attached to the wise words of Ernest D. 0:21:48.359 --> 0:21:52.560 Houghton here, I mean they really touched me. I feel 0:21:52.600 --> 0:21:56.639 like they are applicable even still today. Uh. He also 0:21:56.680 --> 0:21:59.679 did a lot of work combining race in criminology that 0:22:00.080 --> 0:22:04.199 is influenced by the eugenics movement, and the lot of 0:22:04.240 --> 0:22:07.880 that work was pretty definitely racist. So as much as 0:22:07.920 --> 0:22:11.359 I love these words that he has to say about 0:22:11.400 --> 0:22:13.960 how damaging it was for this to be revealed as 0:22:13.960 --> 0:22:17.919 a fraud, there are other factors of his work. So 0:22:18.000 --> 0:22:21.640 this is not a h an endorsement of him as 0:22:21.640 --> 0:22:28.160 a scientist by us as podcasters who are not scientists. Uh. Yeah, 0:22:28.240 --> 0:22:31.520 we can appreciate his insight in that moment without applauding 0:22:31.560 --> 0:22:34.160 the rest of his body of work, for sure. Uh. 0:22:34.160 --> 0:22:37.639 And with this finding now unquestionably shown to be fraudulent, 0:22:38.160 --> 0:22:40.840 the focus then turned to piecing together who had done 0:22:40.840 --> 0:22:42.639 it and why, And we're going to talk about that 0:22:42.720 --> 0:22:44.679 after we first pause for a word from one of 0:22:44.720 --> 0:22:55.560 our sponsors. In the years after the pilt Down Man 0:22:55.680 --> 0:22:59.160 was shown to be a hoax, many many theories were 0:22:59.200 --> 0:23:02.760 put forth out the potential culprits. A lot of the 0:23:02.760 --> 0:23:06.080 attention has been on Dawson himself. After all, he was 0:23:06.160 --> 0:23:08.399 the one who reported the findings of the first place, 0:23:08.720 --> 0:23:12.320 and he was instrumental in the announcement and the initial investigations. 0:23:12.880 --> 0:23:15.840 He may have hoped that such a profound discovery would 0:23:15.880 --> 0:23:19.840 earn him admission into the Royal Society. A couple of 0:23:19.840 --> 0:23:23.119 people who either knew or worked with Dawson were citing 0:23:23.359 --> 0:23:28.520 sided as possibilities as well, including Samuel Woodhead and Pierre 0:23:28.600 --> 0:23:31.880 Taliard de Charness. The latter was the one who actually 0:23:32.400 --> 0:23:36.480 found that canine tooth. Even though he played such a 0:23:36.560 --> 0:23:40.200 huge role, most people did not suspect Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, 0:23:40.320 --> 0:23:43.120 believing him to have been an unwilling dupe or one 0:23:43.119 --> 0:23:45.760 of the intended targets, since his reputation would have been 0:23:45.840 --> 0:23:48.720 ruined if word had gotten out while he was still alive. 0:23:49.520 --> 0:23:52.399 Sir Arthur Keith, whose paper on the skull reconstruction we 0:23:52.440 --> 0:23:56.920 talked about earlier, was also suggested as a suspect. One 0:23:56.960 --> 0:23:59.600 of the most famous suspects at least outside of the 0:23:59.640 --> 0:24:04.240 world of scientists was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who knew 0:24:04.320 --> 0:24:06.800 Dawson had an interest in this type of thing and 0:24:06.880 --> 0:24:11.200 lived nearby. In ninety weird set of criteria to say 0:24:11.280 --> 0:24:15.320 somebody is a suspect. I mean there were like, apparently 0:24:15.359 --> 0:24:16.800 there were people who were like, he just wants to 0:24:16.840 --> 0:24:22.360 destroy the evolutionists, right, that's so seriously circumstantial stuff that's 0:24:22.440 --> 0:24:27.120 getting piece together. Flimsy circumstantial stuff. Uh. In nineteen sixty six, 0:24:27.160 --> 0:24:30.359 a trunk found in storage in the British Museum was 0:24:30.440 --> 0:24:33.760 discovered to contain a number of bones, including some that 0:24:33.840 --> 0:24:36.919 had been stained in a similar manner to the Piltdown Man. 0:24:37.600 --> 0:24:41.440 This trunk, marked with the initials M. A. C. H 0:24:41.520 --> 0:24:45.560 apparently belonged to Martin A. C. Hinton, who also amassed 0:24:45.640 --> 0:24:49.359 quite a collection of other bones, fossils and specimens. He 0:24:49.440 --> 0:24:51.679 had been working as a volunteer at the museum in 0:24:51.760 --> 0:24:54.760 nineteen twelve, and he became its keeper of Zoology in 0:24:54.880 --> 0:24:59.480 nineteen thirty six. So naturally this brought up lots of 0:24:59.600 --> 0:25:01.520 theory is about what was going on with what was 0:25:01.520 --> 0:25:03.399