The Piltdown case: further questions

About 60 years ago, a South African anatomist, Joseph Weiner, published a book entitled The Piltdown Forgery, exposing a hoax that had been perpetrated about 100 years ago at the site of Piltdown in Sussex, England. The announcement of 'Piltdown Man' - classified as Eoanthropus dawsoni and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:South African Journal of Science 2016-09, Vol.112 (9-10), p.12-2
Main Author: Thackeray, J. Francis
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Collectors
Fabrication
Forecasts and trends
forensic analyses
Forensic sciences
Fossils
Gravel
Hoaxes
Monkeys & apes
Museums
palaeontology
Piltdown Man
Pleistocene
Sussex
Teilhard de Chardin
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Summary:About 60 years ago, a South African anatomist, Joseph Weiner, published a book entitled The Piltdown Forgery, exposing a hoax that had been perpetrated about 100 years ago at the site of Piltdown in Sussex, England. The announcement of 'Piltdown Man' - classified as Eoanthropus dawsoni and believed to be a hominid apparently associated with Pleistocene fauna - had been made by Smith Woodward of the British Museum (Natural History) at Burlington House in London on Dec 18, 1912. However, it turned out that the 'hominid' was a fabrication in which a subfossil human cranium and a modern orangutan jaw (both stained brown) were placed together in a gravel pit, thereby confusing palaeontologists. In the process, Raymond Dart's announcement of the 'Taung Child' (Australopithecus africanus) from South Africa was disregarded by many (including the anatomist Sir Arthur Keith) who questioned Dart's claim that this small-brained fossil represented a genuine Pleistocene hominid.
ISSN:0038-2353
1996-7489
DOI:10.17159/sajs.2016/a0170