Paleontological fraud. Perhaps the most famous fraud in the history of paleontology, the faked remains of Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus dawsoni) influenced theories about human origins for more than 35 years. The hoax began in 1912, when a lawyer and collector named Charles Dawson visited Arthur Smith Woodward, the keeper of the British Museum geological collection. Dawson claimed that he had found some ancient skull fragments in a gravel quarry in Sussex, England. Together Smith Woodward and Dawson, accompanied by the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard De Chardin searched the quarry for more remains. On one of these expeditions, Dawson uncovered a lower jaw that looked as apelike as the skull fragments looked modern. However, two teeth still embedded in the jaw showed signs of wear like human teeth. Based on this evidence, Smith Woodward described Eoanthropus dawsoni in December 1912 as the “missing link” in the evolutionary chain between apes and humans.
From the beginning, some scientists expressed doubts that the Piltdown jaw and the skull belonged together. Two significant parts of the lower jaw were missing—the chin and the joint where the lower jaw connects to the upper jaw. Other finds quieted the questioners. In 1913, Teilhard de Chardin discovered a canine tooth that again combined characteristics of apes and humans. In 1915, Dawson found two more skull fragments and a tooth at another site some miles away. Piltdown Man went unquestioned by most scientists until 1949 when Ken¬ neth Oakley proved that the remains had not been in the quarry very long. Finally, in 1953, Oakley, working with colleagues, discovered that the bone fragments had been artificially stained and that the teeth had been hied to resemble human teeth. The skull fragments were in fact from a modern human skull; the jaw was an orangutan’s.