The Piltdown Perp

When Charles Dawson, a lawyer and amateur geologist, announced that he had found what appeared to be the partly apelike skull of an ancient human in a gravel bed on Piltdown Common, near Lewes, England, in 1912, it was touted as a long-sought evolutionary missing link between apes and humans. But in 1953, chemical analyses of the remains showed that the scientific establishment had been duped for four decades. The cranium belonged to a modern human and the jaw to an orangutan, both skillfully stained and altered to look old (a model is shown at right). Since then, nearly everyone even remotely connected with Piltdown has been implicated in the hoax. But last May, paleontologist Brian Gardiner of King’s College, London, and his colleague Andrew Currant revealed the true identity of the perpetrator. Based on the first solid evidence, Gardiner and Currant conclude it was Martin A. C. Hinton (right), ...