Piltdown Culprit

Has the hoaxer been found?

It was one of science's most audacious hoaxes. For four decades after the announcement in 1912 of its discovery near the English hamlet of Piltdown, the curious fossil with the humanlike cranium and the apelike jaw was believed by many anthropologists to be the long-sought "missing link" between man and ape. But in 1953, after application of new analytic techniques to thefamous skull, the ruse was finally revealed: the Piltdown man, as the fossil was dubbed, was a fraud. It consisted of nothing more than fragments of modern human skulls mingled with portions of a contemporary ape jaw with teeth doctored to give them the appearance of antiquity. As the years passed, scientists abandoned hopes of ever identifying the prankster.

But last week, in a posthumous statement published in the journal Nature, the late British Geologist James Archibald Douglas offered his solution to the Piltdown hoax. The culprit, said Douglas in a tape recording made only a few months before his death last February at age 93, was his predecessor as professor of geology and paleontology at Oxford University, William Johnson Sollas. The motive: Sollas wanted to destroy the reputation of a hated rival by tricking him into publicly accepting as authentic what would later be unmasked as an elaborate joke.

As Douglas explained, Sollas was a pillar of British science in the early 1900s, but his position was being increasingly challenged by a rising young star in anthropology, Arthur Smith Woodward. Indeed, at one scientific meeting of the Geological Society, Smith Woodward actually derided a presentation made by the older man. Recalled Douglas, who was present at that almost forgotten confrontation: "Sollas said nothing at all', but I could see he was absolutely livid."

Sollas apparently decided to strike back by playing on Smith Woodward's credulity; he showed a tendency to accept purported new scientific findings as fact before they were rigorously proved. The ploy worked. Shortly after the planted Piltdown remains were found, Smith Woodward enthusiastically staked his reputation on the authenticity of the find. In fact, in a painting that still hangs in the Geological Society's London headquarters, Smith Woodward is one of several eminent scientists shown intensively examining the supposedly precious skull. What is more, he is pictured right next to its "discoverer," an amateur fossil hunter named Charles Dawson.

How was Douglas so sure that his noted mentor masterminded the fraud? For one thing, said Douglas, who worked in Sollas' laboratory, the telltale 1953 analysis of the skull showed it had been aged with the chemical potassium bichromate. When he first read that report, Douglas recalled, his mind immediately flashed back to a day in Oxford before World War I: "I can remember as if it was yesterday: a small packet arriving [at Sollas' lab], which Bayzand, the assistant, and I unpacked and found to contain potassium bichromate. We both said, 'What on earth's the professor ordered this for?' " There was still another piece of incriminating circumstantial evidence. Around the same time, Sollas had taken the unusual step of borrowing ape teeth from the Oxford anatomy department's collection. The final clue that convinced Douglas of his predecessor's culpability was the fact that every leading anthropologist in Britain--except Sollas--appears in the Geological Society painting.

As well as the hoax worked, Douglas pointed out, it ultimately backfired on Sollas. The Piltdown man was accepted not only by Smith Woodward but by almost the entire scientific establishment. Hence discretion required Sollas to remain mum. As the authors of the Nature article concluded, "When he saw all the other eminent names that joined in authenticating the find," it would have been "unseemly for a man in his position to admit such a trick."

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