Hat Ailed Old Neanderthal Man?
 

In 1912 the famous Piltdown skull was found in a gravel bed in southern England by Charles Dawson. It created a sensation since it clearly was a creature halfway between man and beast. Evolutionists were ecstatic.

While a few scientists were skeptical, it was accepted by scholarly opinion throughout the world. It is no exaggeration to say that one could fill a very large room with learned articles and books about Piltdown Man, including 500 doctoral dissertations! In 1953 - 41 years later - careful examination revealed the Piltdown Man to be a very crude forgery consisting of a recent human skull combined with the jawbone of a female orangutan, appropriately dyed with chemicals to give it the appearance of great age and slightly modified to fool the expert paleontologists of the British Museum.
The Piltdown hoax illustrates an eagerness to believe in anything that might help to support the theory of evolution. One can almost picture men in museums all over the world hurrying with gray paint and brushes to paint out that branch of the human tree on the day the hoax was exposed. The next day, Piltdown Man had never existed. All the supposed family trees in the textbooks before 1953 show how Piltdown Man fit into the great story of human evolution.
No orthodox expert would dare to propose a recent beginning of man which would correspond to the Biblical account. Although various authorities have pointed out that the variability found among human fossils is really no different from the amazing variability found among people today, little or nothing is made of this fact in the textbooks. White, middleclass scientists should not necessarily make themselves the model from which fossil bones are judged and compared (Custance, 1968, p.26-31).
In the business of studying human fossil remains, astonishingly different reconstructions have been made from casts of the same skull fragments. As someone has noted, the features of the ape or the philosopher may be constructed on the surface of the same skull (Time , 5/17/1973, p.75-76).
It is of more than passing interest in the consideration of fossil man than an anthropologist stated several decades ago that living style and habits, climate, and diet can influence the anatomical features of the skull to the point that experts may place such species into different genera. An additional factor of great significance is the physical degeneration and extraordinary physical variability that occurs among isolated inbred populations (CRSQ , 1968, 5:1, p.5-7).
It is not well known that when 'primitive' Java man was discovered in 1891, two other skulls were found in the same formation and of the same age which were no different from skulls of modern Australian aborigines. The news of the modern skulls found with Java man was not made public for twenty years because they were not what the man was looking for (CRSQ , 1964, 1:2, p.9).
In 1963 Dr. Leakey found a fossil, which he named Homo habilis , at the lowest level of strata where he was working. Homo habilis was much like modern man. The problem was that Homo habilis seemed to be much more advanced than fossil remains which had been found higher up in the strata. Since evolutionary theory requires a sequence of primitive to more advanced, the find became very controversial. On occasions such as these, explanations become very creative but strained in order to cling to evolutionary theory. Dr. Leakey suggested that all anthropology works be rewritten. A widely accepted 'solution' was that Homo habilis and the more primitive creatures were contemporaries, and that the search would continue in still older strata for the ancestor of Homo habilis (CRSQ , 1966, 3:1, p.14). Hope springs eternal!
Neanderthal man is a story by itself. When the first discovery was made about 1856, science at last thought it now had the overwhelming evidence it needed to show the intermediate stage between man and ape. Texts today still faithfully illustrate this famous beetle-browed, bent-kneed, subhuman slob. There was only one apparent slight drawback. Its brain on the average was more than 13% larger than the brain of modern man. It was still considered, however, to be the perfect illustration of an important step in the evolutionary sequence of man. Neanderthal man was still cited as the most compelling proof of evolution just a few decades ago (Time , 6/21/1968, p.34).
The famous names of early evolutionary theory made much of Neanderthal man, and texts published today still reflect their views. Haeckel proposed to solve the world riddles once and for all with Neanderthal man. Lyell and Huxley pointed confidently to the Neanderthal skull as evidence that there had been a low-caste, half-human creature, intermediate between man and ape (de Santillana, 1969, p.71; Victoria Institute , 1866, 2:72).

It is interesting thatTime , May 17, 1971, proclaimed that the primitiveness of Neanderthal was unwarranted. Except for physical ailments, he could walk the streets today and be unrecognized. One writer commented that in later centuries historians may declare all of us insane, because the incredible blunder about Neanderthal man was not detected at once and was not refuted with adequate determination.
 

It is a tragic commentary on the scientific community that the following must be said. Back in 1872, Virchow, probably the greatest biologist of his day and the founder of medical pathology, cited evidence that the peculiarities of Neanderthal man were due not to a special place in the chain of evolution, but rather to a bad case of rickets. An authority reported in Nature , 1970, that every Neanderthal child's skull studied so far showed signs compatible with severe rickets.

Again back in 1872 another medical authority declared that Neanderthal skulls showed medical problems, and that similar skulls of modern man may be found in any medical school (CRSQ , 1968, 5:1, p.5-7; 1970, 7:4, p.232-233; 1964, 1:2, p.9). The obsession to 'prove' evolution with Neanderthal man was so overpowering that it took more than 100 years for the scientific community to face up to the obvious truth that Neanderthal man was fully human.
Hard work for the past 150 years has brought scientists no closer to finding the so-called 'missing link' between man and animal than when the search began. Every year or two another article appears in National Geographic with spectacular new discoveries about human evolution. Without exception they are without substance. The fossils are either fully human or fully apelike with nothing in between.
In the great eagerness to believe preconceived notions of what must have been, fraud and a great deal of humbug have been produced to fill the need. 

Unmasked: The truth behind Piltdown Man fraud to be revealed 100 years after it fooled the world

• Scientists tested remains of 1912 hoax to discover who was responsible
• Believed to be amateur fossil hunter Charles Dawson, who found the fragments
  

By Becky Evans
Published: 10:04 GMT, 16 December 2012 | Updated: 17:10 GMT, 16 December 2012

It was one of the most enduring hoaxes in history and fooled scientists into believing a crucial evolutionary 'missing link' had been found in England.
Now 100 years after the discovery of the Piltdown Man, a team of archeologists and anthropologists will finally be able to expose the truth behind the scam, and pinpoint who was responsible.
The Geological Society will meet this week to discuss the results of their investigation into the elaborate hoax, almost a century to the day after the same society hailed its importance to the world.

Fraud: A replica model of the 'Piltdown Man' hoax skull. The original was comprised of a human skull and an ape jaw, possibly from an organutan

Excavation: Charles Dawson (sitting) poses at the Piltdown gravel pit in 1913 alongside Robert Kenwood Jr, left, Arthur Smith Woodward, far right, and 'Chipper' the goose

Elaborate hoax: A Natural History Museum scientist examines the Piltdown Man fragments during a previous investigation
The remains of Eoanthropas dawsoni was discovered alongside stone tools and animal fossils in a gravel pit in Piltdown, East Sussex, in December, 1912.
For almost 40 years archeologists believed it was the missing piece in the link between humans and apes.
The scam was only exposed when modern techniques showed the fossils, once belied to be around 500,000 years old, were was in fact a recent composite of two different species - a human skull and an ape jaw, believed to be an orangutan.
Among those implicated in the fraud was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who invented Sherlock Holmes and composed his own paleontological thriller The Lost World.
But the prime suspect remains amateur fossil hunter Charles Dawson, who 'found' the pieces of skull and jaw.
And it is hoped new tests will conclusively prove him as the culprit.
Dr Miles Russell, an archaeologist at Bournemouth University who has published a book called The Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed, told The Sunday Telegraph: 'It is quite clear that over his lifetime he fabricated 38 separate dubious finds all of which seem to have been intended to impress museum curators to get into different scientific societies.
'When you look at the finds, however, they seem to have happened within 15 miles of his house in East Sussex. In many cases material he found then went missing after he described it.'

Exposed: The 1953 meeting in which Geological Society revealed the Piltdown Man to be a hoax
Among the 'finds' Dawson made were one of the earliest timber boats in the country, that went missing shortly after discovery, and a tooth he said was a missing link between reptiles and mammals.
The Piltdown Man 'fossils' were locked away followings Dawson's death in 1916 and it was not until 1949 that scientists were able to carry out extensive tests.

Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, who lived near the site, was one of the people rumoured to have been involved in the hoax
As well as discovering the remains originated from two different species, they also found microscopic scratches on the teeth, proving they had been filed down to appear more human like.
Most of the finds at the site, including the tools, had been artificially stained to match the local gravel colour. 
In the recent investigation, scientists subjected the bone fragments to DNA analysis to prove which ape species the jaw came from.
Tests on the different stainsused in the Piltdown Man will also finally prove who was responsible.
If material obtained at the two sites match then Dawson is the most likely culprit.
Natural History Museum anthropologist Professor Chris Stringer, who is leading the study, told the Sunday Telegraph: 'We haven't got a signed confession so we can never know conclusively, but I think we can add more evidence that it was probably one person who was responsible.
'That person was probably Dawson.'
But despite being a fraud Prof Dawson believes the Piltdown Man does have a genuine importance.
He said: 'The hoax is a stark reminder to scientists that if something seems too good to be true then perhaps it is too good to be true.
'It is a warning to scientists to keep their critical guard up, but on the positive side it is also an example of the eventual triumph of the scientific method.'