Canada and the World
Current Events with a Canadian Perspective
Last update
05 January 2011
Evolution’s Missing Link Hoax
In December 1912, the world was abuzz
with the news that the missing link
between apes and humans had been found
Charles Darwin’s notion that humans and apes descended from a common ancestor has always stumbled a bit among the theory’s skeptics over the “missing link.”
If humans and apes are related then surely there ought to be evidence of that common ancestor, the missing link. And, when did the split take place, evolving into humans on one path and chimpanzees on the other?
As The New York Times reported (March 1992), “Where it counts, the period from 14
million to 4 million years ago, the fossil record is a virtual blank, a terra incognita
on the map of pre-
Missing Link Found in Southern England
At BBC History Kate Bartlett has written about the sensational news of the discovery of the missing link. In 1910, a labourer was digging in a gravel pit near the village of Piltdown in Sussex. He found a piece of what looked like a human skull which he handed over to Charles Dawson a local amateur archeologist.
Dawson started digging in the area and unearthed some other fragments and a jawbone. Sir Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum was called in and primitive tools and the bones of extinct animals also turned up.
Bartlett writes that on December 18, 1912, “at a meeting of the Geological Society
in London, fragments of a fossil skull and jawbone were unveiled to the world. These
fragments were quickly attributed to ‘the earliest Englishman -
More Interesting Finds at Piltdown
The experts decided that this creature (seen below in a recreation) with a skull
and, 
therefore, a brain the same size as homo sapiens but the jawbone of an ape must
be the “missing link.” There were skeptics who said the jawbone and skull were from
different species, but their cautious words were drowned out by the popular excitement.
Over the next few years, Dawson and Woodward found teeth that were bigger than those
of humans. Then, fragments of another Piltdown-
Piltdown Man Exposed as a Hoax
In the late 1940s, scientists developed ways of dating fossils. The Piltdown bones were given a closer scrutiny than they had ever been given before. The skull was found to be only 500 years old and the jawbone was that of an orangutan whose teeth had been filed down to disguise their origin.
In an article posted on the Bournemouth University website, the breaking of the news in November 1953 that the whole episode was a hoax is reported: “Not just any hoax mind, the London Star declared it to be ‘The Biggest Scientific Hoax of the Century.’ ” There never had been a ‘missing link’ preserved in the gravels of Piltdown; the whole discovery had been part of an elaborate and complex archaeological forgery.
How Pulled off the Piltdown Deception?
The perpetrator of the fraud has never been unmasked. The strongest suspicion has fallen on the men who profited most from the discovery, Charles Dawson and Sir Arthur Smith Woodward. They are now dead and there is no record of any deathbed confessions.
Dr. A.J. Monty White at Creation Ministries International is one of many who put forward the name of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “He lived seven miles from Piltdown,” writes White, “and would have had opportunity to place the bones and artifacts at the sites where Piltdown Man remains were found. It could be argued that he left clues in his book The Lost World where one of his characters argues that a bone can be as easily faked as a photograph.”
The BBC’s Kate Bartlett says “No single suspect, however, satisfactorily explains
all the complexities of the hoax. And it seems that we may never know the identity
of the Piltdown hoaxer -
Image credit
Anrie
Sources
“Jawbone Offers Clues in Search for ‘Missing Link.’ ” John Noble Wilford, New York Times, March 17, 1992.
“Piltdown Man: Britain’s Greatest Hoax.” Kate Bartlett, BBC History, October 15, 2010.
“Piltdown Man: Case Closed.” Bournemouth University.
© Canada and the World, January 2011
All rights reserved
A 1915 painting by John Cooke shows Charles Dawson (third from left) and colleagues examining the Piltdown Man skull.
NEBRASKA MAN
In 1917, Harold Cook, a farmer and geologist, was poking about in the dirt of Nebraska when he came upon a fossilized tooth. Five years later, no less an authority than Henry Fairfield Osborn, the director of the American Museum of Natural History, declared the ancient molar to have come from the Pliocene Era. That would give it an age of at least 2.5 million years. Osborn said the tooth was evidence of a common ancestor of apes and humans.
The creature was given a scientific name, Hesperopithecus haroldcooki, meaning “ape of the Western world,” and crediting its finder. It was more popularly known as “Nebraska Man.”
From the tooth a whole family was invented and a “likeness” drawn, which 
Osborn described
as “a figment of the imagination of no scientific value, and undoubtedly inaccurate.”
Scientists started looking more closely at the site where the tooth was found and more bits of a fossilized skeleton turned up. But the bones were not those of a human ancestor, they belonged to an extinct species of pig.
The whole Nebraska Man episode was put down to an error in identification. It has since been used by creationists in their attacks on the theory of evolution.
A JOKE
THAT BACKFIRED?
One theory about the Piltdown Man is that it was a practical joke that got out of
hand. 
This is based on one of the finds, which is in the shape of a cricket bat.
The joker presumably thinking when the bat turned up everybody would have a good laugh and realize they were having their legs pulled.
But, at BBC History, Kate Bartlett writes that, “Unfortunately it appears the joke backfired when Woodward and Dawson wrote up the find as a genuine early tool of Piltdown Man.” At this point the prankster could not reveal the truth without deeply embarrassing some prominent scientists so he or she kept quiet.