Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
a modern human braincase and the lower jaw of an orangutan and
that both had been stained to appear as if they were from the same
and farther back where it hinges with the skull, were missing, and the
teeth had been deliberately filed to look more like those of humans. The
gravel pit had also been salted with stone tools and fragments of fossil-
ized hippopotamus, deer, horse, and mastodon from other places, which
gave the false impression that the skull was very ancient.
But at the time, Piltdown Man seemed real. Even though potentially
revealing features of the jaw were missing, what remained still looked
significantly apelike. Anatomists had to reassemble fragments from the
broken cranium and fill in the missing portions of the jaw in order to
fit the pieces together. Some scientists favored a restoration that had a
more apish jaw but with hinges that were humanlike enough to attach
to the cranium. Others preferred to make the missing parts of the jaw
appear more humanlike. Although the scientists argued heatedly about
these details, all of the Piltdown restorations resulted in some combina-
tion of humanlike and apelike features. A mixture of traits, after all, was
expected for a missing link.
Despite their quibbles over the skull's details, most scholars em-
braced Piltdown as a legitimate human fossil—at least until 1953, when
tests of the amount of nitrogen and fluorine in the Piltdown remains
further investigations that eventually showed the extent of the fraud:
“There did not appear to be a single specimen in the entire Piltdown
collection of hominoid bones, associated fauna, and cultural remains
ering the “seemingly ludicrous marriage of an orangutan mandible to
a palpably modern human braincase,” the length of time it took for the
hoax to be exposed was remarkably long. There were, however, under-
standable reasons why Piltdown had been accepted as an ancestor.
By the time of the Piltdown announcement, Charles Darwin's gen-
