 Today's subject is not a building or nuclear disaster, but that of a hoax, which drew in many of the most intelligent paleontologists of the time. It offered a vital piece of evidence in human evolution, a missing link if you will. This chance discovery would influence paleontology study down a dead end for over 40 years. My research, investigations and journalistic spirit has led me here to a small hamlet in East Sussex, England at stupid o'clock in the morning, parked outside a closed pub, rethinking my career choices. So whilst I calculate my HMRC mileage expenses claim, let's get on with the video. My name is John and today we're looking at the fascinating story of the pilt down man hoax. Background, a discovery. It is 1908 and workmen are digging in a gravel pit just over one mile from the town of Uckfield East Sussex, aka the town that those class 170 DMUs go to from London Bridge. The area is known as the hamlet of pilt down. Piled up for gravel and soil, a rounded object, which they believed to be a fossilised coconut, was discovered. Due to the workers assumption, the item is broken up and piled up with the rest of the rubble. The fragments for whatever reason were then collected and after initial examination by those on site, the decision was made to seek professional advice. The workers contacted English lawyer and local amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson. The fragments were handed over and for four years Dawson would hold onto them until February 1912, when he decided to show off the discovery to one of the most respected museums in the world, the Natural History Museum. Charles Dawson was the co-founder of the Hastings and St Leonard's Museum Association. In the late 1880s and 1890s, Dawson had become a prolific discoverer of spectacular artefacts, leading to his nickname as penned in the Sussex Daily News as the Wizard of Sussex. Dawson, at the start of 1912, sent a letter to the Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum after Smith Woodward. The letter outlined Dawson's discoveries. Now I should say Dawson had some legitimacy to his name, having been made a fellow of the Society of Geologists and Society of Antiquities of London in 1885 and 1895 respectively, thus having the official titles of Charles Dawson FGS FSA. On top of that, due to his many donations to the British Museum, he had also gained the title of Honorary Collector. With such credentials, Dawson had some sort of credibility to his discoveries, more than say one of the workers who had dug up the skull fragments in the first place. The chance of becoming part of the discovery as big as Dawson's letter exclaimed, led Arthur Smith Woodward to visit the site of Piltdown in the summer of 1912. The discovery offered a chance of proof of the first Englishman, the veritable two fingers to the French and Germans who had been discovering the remains of Neanderthals for the best part of the last century. So, throughout June to September, Woodward Dawson and Pierre Telhard D. Chardin, a Jesuit, Priest and Paleontologist, worked on the Piltdown site. Strangely, every new find was unearthed by Dawson alone, mostly amongst the sole heap from the gravel quarry. Even though every find was discovered by just one man, Dawson, Woodward took the artifacts back to the Natural History Museum for evaluation and reconstruction. In total, five human skull fragments and ape-like jawbone with two teeth had been found, forming the basis of the new discovery. This showed a link of a human skull, ape-like jaw, with human-like teeth, which had been worn down. Interestingly, the bones were stained a dark red-brown colour, the same as the ancient gravel that had been excavated. It is important to say that none of these discoveries, save for the skull fragments found in 1908, were actually discovered in situ. Instead, they were found in the already dug-up spoil. This would lead for two to present the Piltdown man as the fragments had soon enough become known as to the Geological Society of London on 18th December 1912. During this meeting, Dawson exclaimed that a reconstruction of the fragments indicated that the skull was remarkably similar to that of a modern-day human, albeit more ape-like. For example, the brain size was about two-thirds of that of a modern human, as well as the part of the skull that sits in the spinal column, looking not so human-like, but a rangotang-like jawbone apparently housed the human-like teeth rather well, adding credence to the idea of the Piltdown discovery being a missing link. Woodward explained that the discovery was a vital missing link in human evolution, estimated to be roughly 500,000 years old. Further excavations on the site at Piltdown found more artifacts, some more believable than others, including a loose canine tooth and an elephant bone carved to look like a cricket bat. The narrative couldn't be any more perfect. The ancient Englishman was a cricket player. All he really needed yet was a cup of tea, a monocle and outdated views on empire. Obviously, the last few things weren't actually found. The Piltdown man would be given the Latin scientific name of the Anthropos dosani, or Dawson's Dawn Man in English. Once again, Dawson struck gold in 1915 when he discovered more skull fragments near Sheffield Park. However, when probed by Woodward, the exact location was not revealed. The finds went undocumented initially, but would eventually be seen as further proof of the Piltdown man, when Woodward presented the fragments as new evidence after Dawson's death, in the process implying he knew where they had come from, even though he had never seen the second site. Dawson, just four years after the discovery and taking British paleontology by storm, passed away in August 1916. With the main artifact finder's death, strangely no more fragments were found. Now, due to the period that the Piltdown man was found, international interrogation of the facts was somewhat limited. This was due to the First World War, with a triple entente, i.e. the allies of World War One, were fighting the central empires, which included Germany, one of the main sources of Neanderthal discovery. Even more important, that the English Piltdown man, Trump, the European discoveries. But although a big chunk of the scientific community was now the enemy due to four years of bloody war, limiting Link was not without its domestic detractors. The discovery challenged. Almost right from the get go, the Anthropos Dawsoni had its critics. Copies of the fragments had been made by the Royal College of Surgeons under Professor Arthur Keith. And they managed to make a completely different model, with a larger estimated brain cavity. However, Keith became convinced after the Sheffield Park discoveries, thinking that the odd occurrence of an orangutan-like jaw and human-like skull couldn't actually happen twice by accident. As a side note here, Keith probably wanted it to be real. He was a eugenicist, who believed that Africans and Europeans had evolved separately. And thus, a British discovered English missing link fitted his scientific racism views rather neatly. But Keith was not the only initial detractor. As early as 1913, an article published by David Waterston from King's College London in Nature magazine concluded that the sample consisted of an ape mandible and a human skull. French paleontologist, Marcine Boulay, also came to the same conclusion in 1915, as well as an American zoologist, Jared Smith Miller Jr. who also concluded that a piltdown's jaw came from a fossil ape. He even stated, deliberate malice could hardly have been more successful than the hazards of deposition in so breaking the fossils as to give free scope to individual judgement in fitting the parts together. Which was proven to be true, with Keith's rearrangement being drastically different from Woodward's original interpretation. Later in 1923, German anatomist Franz Wiedenreich also concluded that both the jaw and skull were from different animals, with the addition of file downed teeth to look more human. But the detractors wouldn't be the ones to blow open the discovery. That would be down to the passage of time, causing the Anthropos dorsoni to become an ever increasing difficult to explain anomaly against the ever increasing weight of evidence to the contrary. You see the piltdown man was very different an ever increasing amount of evidence discovered post-World War I, with ape men having much smaller brain cavities than the Anthropos dorsoni. However, to British scientists invested in the Anthropos dorsoni, the newer continental discoveries were the outliers. Britain must have had the correct missing link, right? Right? Well, wrong. As more evidence that contradicted the piltdown man became available and opened to scientific scrutiny, the Anthropos dorsoni was increasingly looking suspicious. Piltdown man, a fraud. Well, not exactly everything in our story was actually true. There were many holes in the Dawson story, with the line of custody of the skull prior to 1912 being ropey at best. A hoax had formed in that gravel pit in Piltdown. Someone had tried to pull the wool over the eyes of the Natural History Museum. In doing so, leading British paleontology down a dodgy path. The best part of 40 years after the discovery, the piltdown man would actually be conclusively found to be a fraud. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the fragments were extensively re-examined, with greater scientific scrutiny. Microscopic examination found foul marks on the teeth, which could have only been caused by a deliberate, actimist lead. It was also found that the bones had been stained using an iron solution and chromic acid. Even that cricket bat was fishy. I know. This is where the bullshit alarm probably started to go off for you as well as me. But it was discovered under a microscope that it had been carved using a modern knife. The nail in the coffin of the Piltdown man was in 1949, when Kenneth Oakley used fluorine absorption dating, which showed the fragments to be no more than 500 years old. The results exposing the fraud were published in Time Magazine in 1953. Although fake, the question loomed as to who was behind the fraud. Was it just one person or many? Well, that question remains largely unanswered. But we'll have a run over the suspects. Our list included the obvious and even some celebrities. I'll start by saying it is highly likely that Dawson was behind the hoax, as well, many of his other discoveries that earned him his fellowships were also scams. A multi-tuberculate mammal, pal Gaiulax Dawsoni, in which Dawson apparently found in 1891, was also found to have similarly filed teeth to that of the Piltdown man. Another discovery, the Bilverhive Hammer, was found to be shaped with an iron knife, the same way as that cricket club had been braided. So clearly Dawson was at the heart of the fraud. Later DNA testing also found that teeth from both the Piltdown site as well as the mystery site in Sheffield Park were from the same animal, meaning whoever had one must have had the other. History of workmen finding skull fragments in 1908 was also a recycled explanation of Dawson coming into possession of artefact. So the Piltdown man was a culmination of a career of frauds. Why, however, we will never know, but were there any accomplices? Possibly Pierre Tellhard Descartes. He had previously travelled to regions of Africa where the orangutan could have been sourced from, and in 1970 a suitcase owned by staff member of the Natural History Museum, Martin Alistair Campbell, Hinton was found with stained bones similar to Dawson's Piltdown man. He was also banded around that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was in on the hoax, as he had given Dawson lifts to the excavation site. It is very likely Dawson was the key member of the hoax, but whether he had accomplices or not we will probably never know. As is the same for the story of Dawson's motives, but is possibly likely it was done for clout. My personal theory is the amateur wanted to be seen as the expert at any cost. There was actually a monument to the Piltdown man erected in 1938 by Arthur Keefe, which is down this road behind this gate. It's on private land, so this is as far as I could get. Now the hoax has gone down as one of Britain's greatest. I mean it did alter nearly a whole country's line of scientific investigation for the best part of a century. It highlighted British sensibilities of the time, or that being a big brained early human would of course come from England and play cricket. Ok so I'm going to rate this as a number three, oh balls people will remember this, and a nine on my legacy scale. This is a plain difficult production. All videos on the channel are creative commons actuation share alike license. Difficult videos are produced by me John in the currently wet and miserable corner of southern London UK. I have YouTube members and patrons who support the channel financially and I'd like to thank you as well as the rest of you who tune in every week to watch these videos. I have Twitter and Instagram where I post up random photographs and all sorts of other odds and sods. And all that's left to say is thank you for watching and Mr Music players out please.