People have long found bones of ancient animals and tools of primitive man's labor in the earth. It was believed that they had remained there since the time of the Great Flood described in the Bible. The antiquity of some of man's tools indicated his earlier origin than the biblical 7 thousand years from the creation of the world. After the introduction of Charles Darwin's theory into scientific circulation in 1859 about the gradual evolution of ape into a man, an active search for an intermediate form between them began, which must have been according to the development of E. Haeckel, a follower of Darwin. The search in Europe for the missing link between man and ape, which lasted more than 30 years, yielded no results.
Good luck came to the Dutch physician Eugene Dubois, who found in Java in 1891-1893 the remains of a creature that combined the features of a man and a monkey - Pithecanthropus (ape-man). His age was about a million years! Then the fortune turned to Europe - in 1907 a European Pithecanthropus was found, the so-called "Heidelberg man" in Germany near Heidelberg, who lived a little about 600 thousand years ago. Finds of Neanderthals have become frequent (the name is given after the Neandertal valley in Germany, where their remains were first discovered) - human ancestors who lived in the interval about 200-100 thousand years ago. Gradually, the lineage of humanity began to take on an orderly form.
However, fate stubbornly bypassed England, nothing of the kind was found there, although local archaeologists made a lot of efforts to search for the “missing link”. If Pithecanthropus was discovered in Germany, why shouldn't it be in England as well? One of the search enthusiasts, amateur geologist L. Abbott, suggested that in the valley of the Ouse River in the south of England, where geological layers of several million years old lie, traces of the habitation of the most ancient people can be found. He told about this to his friend Charles Dawson. Dawson's main occupation was geology, paleontology, and archeology of southern England. Without a special education, he seriously took up these sciences and in 1885 became the youngest member of the Royal Geological Society. Dawson becomes a member of the Sussex Archaeological Society, conducts excavations of the Roman camp, ancient Neolithic caves,burials of the Iron Age, they found traces of the first use of cast iron in England. For success, following one after another, Charles Dawson was called "a gentleman of fortune". His house resembled a museum - numerous collections of antiquities were striking in their richness and completeness. His circle of contacts included many famous scientists of England, he was well known in Europe.
So L. Abbott turned to a fairly well-known specialist, especially since Dawson also dreamed of finding "his" Pithecanthropus in England. And in February 1912, Charles Dawson wrote to Sir Arthur Woodworth, the secretary of the Geological Society of England, whom he knew well, with a report on the found in the ancient layer of skull fragments similar to the skull of the "Heidelberg man." By May 1912, when Dawson arrived in London, he presented to a stunned Woodworth five skull fragments, found along with the teeth of a hippopotamus, a southern elephant, and several flints that showed signs of undeniable artificial processing. The finds were made at Piltdown at a gravel mining site. Dawson invited Woodworth to participate in further excavations, at his invitation, Abbot Pierre de Chardin arrived there from France,known for his work at the Institute of Human Paleontology in France.
Excavations continued throughout the summer of 1912. To suppress premature rumors, only Dawson, Woodworth and de Chardin participated in them with the help of one excavator. L. Abbot visited them occasionally. During excavations, de Chardin found a southern elephant's tooth and a stone chopper. Dawson then removed from the gravel a piece of the lower jaw with two molars. Woodworth also found a piece of the occipital bone of the skull. A month later, Dawson dug up another fragment of a human skull. In addition, by the end of the excavation, two more fragments of a skull, four teeth of fossil animals and one stone with traces of processing were found. All the objects found had a characteristic dark brown color that had passed on to them from the ferruginous gravels in which they were located.
And in December 1912, the Royal Geological Society made an official announcement about the discovery in Piltdown of the remains of a transitional type between ape and a man! It was a sensation! Finally, England has contributed to the history of human origins. The reconstruction of the Piltdown skull was amazing: it bizarrely mixed the features of ape and a man. The skull was undoubtedly human and the jaws were ape. According to the occurrence of geological layers, the age of the "Piltdown Man" was determined by a million years! The remains of fossil animals - a hippopotamus, a rhinoceros and others, found along with fragments of a skull - testified to this. The presence of an artificially processed stone tool testified to the high skills of this ancient creature. Unusual, not previously seen in Pithecanthropus,nor in the "Heidelberg man" the combination of the monkey's jaw and the human cranium indicated his special place in human evolution. This was the very beginning of mankind, its dawn, so the found remains were given the name of Dawson's eanthrope (Dawson's dawn man).
The news of the discovery of "the very first Englishman" spread throughout the world. In the summer of 1913, more than a hundred geologists, archaeologists and paleontologists visited the site. The famous Arthur Conan Doyle came to Dawson three times, asking him in detail about the find. He collected material for his book The Lost World. Almost all prominent scientists of the time took part in the discussion of the remains. The majority recognized the antiquity of the eanthrope, its important place in the course of human evolution. Confused only one thing: the combination of a human skull and a monkey's jaw. Opinions were divided - some considered such a combination acceptable, others believed that the jaw and skull belonged to different creatures and their finding in one place was just an accident.
However, excavations continued. In the summer of 1913, Dawson, Woodworth and de Chardin again explored the gravel pit at Piltdown, meter by meter. De Chardin found the eanthrope's canine and nasal bones. Again, there were teeth of fossil animals and stone tools. The 1914 season brought the discovery of a truncheon-shaped piece made from the bone of a giant ancient elephant with traces of drilling and processing! Until now, it was believed that man learned to process bone only 50 thousand years ago, but here it was about a million years!
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Despite the new remains, some scientists continued to believe that the reconstruction of the eanthrope's skull was done incorrectly: the skull and jaw belonged to two different creatures. But the 1915 find silenced them. Dawson in a completely different place - in Sheffidzpark - found the remains of another eanthrope in the same combination: a human skull and a monkey's jaw.
This silenced the most inveterate skeptics. Eanthropus has firmly taken its place in the scientific systematics of human evolution; a memorial sign was erected at the place of his discovery. Excavations in 1916 were unsuccessful, and in August of that year, Dawson died. More finds of eanthropus did not occur anywhere.
Time has passed. New remarkable discoveries were made in the field of paleoanthropology: in China, the remains of Sinanthropus were found, on the same Java - again Pithecanthropus, in South Africa - Australopithecus. If at the time of the discovery in Piltdown, scientists had only the bones of Pithecanthropus and the "Heidelberg man", by the beginning of the 1950s, a whole family of "missing link" had appeared. Carefully analyzing the new findings, scientists came to the conclusion that the evolutionary restructuring of the monkey's head was different from that of the eanthrope. There was a noticeable contradiction - the eanthrope had a human face and a monkey's jaw, while all other apemen, on the contrary, had a face and a human jaw. Sir Woodworth put forward a version of two evolutionary lines - a dead end for Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus and Neanderthal, and progressive for the "dawn man". But this state of affairs did not suit scientists, doubts arose about the correctness of this theory. The idea of two different creatures, whose bones were mistakenly combined into one skull, came up again …
In 1949, the minimum possible amount of tissue was drilled out of the bones of the eanthropus and the bones of animals found with him, according to which it was established that the skull and jaw could not be older than 50 thousand years! This shocked the entire scientific world. If the eanthrope was so young, then he was not the "missing link." The jaw of the monkey testified that chimpanzees rode across England during the Ice Age! A huge scandal broke out among scientists. In order to avoid error, in 1950 extensive excavations were carried out at the site of the find in Piltdown in accordance with all the rules of modern science. However, nothing was found: no animal bones, no human! In 1953, in London, the World Congress of Paleontologists decided on an unspoken taboo on the mention of the eanthrope in scientific works until this mystery was revealed. We decided to use a more advanced radiocarbon method. Tissue samples were again taken from the samples, which gave an amazing result: the jaw was dated at 500 + 100 years, and the skull was 620 + 100 years!
Anatomical analysis showed that the jaw belongs to an orangutan living in Sumatra! The radioactive method has indicated the origin of the hippo and the elephant from North Africa! The rest of the fossil remains found at Piltdown came from the Red Crag region in England, where they are found in abundance. The stone tools allegedly belonging to the eanthropus were 2-3 thousand years old! The entire complex of finds was artificially painted with a special dye in tones corresponding to the color of ferruginous gravels. On the truncheon-shaped product, traces of modern processing with a steel knife were revealed, and the teeth on the jaw were specially sawn down.
After conducting these analyzes, astonished scientists realized that in reality there was no eanthrope and they were dealing with a grandiose hoax on a global scale. F. Weiner, who took an active part in the study of the bones from Piltdown, decided to find the culprit in this case. It was evident from everything that the person involved in the falsification was well aware of the “missing link” problem. For a number of facts, it turned out that it could only be one of the participants in the excavations. A. Conan Doyle, who attended Piltdown, dropped out immediately. As a result of painstaking work, the candidacies of L. Abbott, A. Woodworth and de Chardin gradually disappeared. The greatest suspicion fell on the "gentleman of fortune" Dawson. While investigating his activities, Weiner establishedthat Dawson did indeed tint parts of the eanthrope's skull - an amateur archaeologist Guy Barbe accidentally caught him doing this. Then Dawson, without hesitation, explained that in this way he strengthens the finds from destruction. In 1917, after Dawson's death, his widow donated to the British Museum the fragments of the skull of another eanthrope, allegedly found in another place. They also turned out to be fake. Obviously, Dawson wanted to surprise the world.
So, it turned out that Dawson, who combined finds that were truly valuable for science with skillful falsification, was the author of the most grandiose forgery in the history of anthropology and archeology. Dawson caused irreparable damage to science, forcing scientists of two generations to study and accept into scientific circulation his forgery. The public craved new discoveries in search of the “missing link”, and they got them.
XX century. Chronicle of the inexplicable. Opening after opening. Nikolai Nepomniachtchi
