Page 788 - Atlas of Creation Volume 4

12. Piltdown Man” was a hoax

In 1912, Charles Dawson, a well-known doctor and also an amateur paleontologist, claimed to have
found a jaw bone and skull fragment in a depression near Piltdown, England. Although the jaw bone re-
sembled an ape jaw, the teeth and skull resembled those of a human being. The fossils were given the

name “Piltdown Man,” dated at 500,000 years old, and put on display in the British Museum as the most
significant evidence of so-called human evolution. A great many scientific papers, analyses and illus-
trations were produced over the next 40 years. Some 500 academics from different universities wrote
doctoral theses about Piltdown Man. 53

On a visit to the British Museum in 1935, the well-known American paleoanthropologist H. F. Osborn
said, "... Nature is full of paradoxes... a discovery of transcendent importance to the prehistory of man." 54
But Piltdown Man was a huge fraud, a deliberately manufactured hoax.
In 1949, Kenneth Oakley from the British Museum Paleontology Department sought permission to use

the newly developed “fluoride test” on a number of ancient fossils. The Piltdown Man fossil was duly test-
ed using the technique. The test revealed that there was no fluoride in the Piltdown Man jaw bone. This
meant that the jaw bone had been underground for no more than a few years. The skull itself contained a
small amount of fluoride and must have been a few thousand years old.

Subsequent chronological research based on the fluoride technique revealed that the skull was no
more than a few thousand years in age. It was also realized that the teeth in the jaw bone had been ar-
tificially worn down, and that the primitive tools found beside the fossils were replicas carved out us-
ing steel equipment. 55 Oxford professor of physical anthropology Joseph Weiner’s detailed analyses de-

finitively confirmed this fraud in 1953. The skull was human, around 500 years old, while the jaw bone

The Fake
Piltdown Man Skull

The Piltdown Man is an infamous hoax, assem-
bled by adding a human skull to the jaw of a
recently deceased orangutan. This hoax fossil
was displayed for some 40 years in the British
Museum as proof of the supposed evolution of
man. When the fraud was exposed, in 1949, it
was hurriedly removed from both the museum
and the scientific literature. However, this fossil
has been immortalized in the history books as
a source of enormous shame for Darwinists.

786 Atlas of Creation Vol. 4