Science: 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.