Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of the Department of Geology at the British Museum, travelled to Piltdown to see the pit for himself. Working with Dawson, the two found more skull fragments, and then a very curious jawbone.

In December, 1912 Woodward displayed a reconstruction of the strange fossil creature they had pieced together at the Geological Society of London. Woodward argued that it was the skull of a man, whom he called Piltdown man, and that the man had probably lived about half a million years ago, during the Lower Pleistocene period.

The Piltdown man caused an enormous stir amongst scientists. The curious thing about it was the jaw, which looked far more apish than one would expect to find attached to a high-vaulted, human skull. Its appearance and age confounded the generally accepted theory of the evolution of modern man.

Many scientists raised objections to the Piltdown man. They argued that the jaw and skull must have belonged to different creatures. Nevertheless, those in favor of the authenticity of the Piltdown man won out. The skull was given the scientific name Eoanthropus dawson, or "Dawson's Dawn Man," and entered the scientific textbooks as such.

Over the next few years more fossil objects continued to turn up in the Piltdown pit: animal bones, an object that looked like a cudgel, and two more skulls. Then, in 1916, Dawson died. Woodward became the main advocate for the Piltdown man.

For over three decades the scientific community accepted the Piltdown man as an authentic artifact. Then, in 1953, a team of researchers at the British Museum (Kenneth Oakley, Wilfred Le Gros Clark, and Joseph Weiner) published a report in which they announced their discovery that the skull was a fake.

At first, fraud wasn't even suspected. The fossils were, after all, cleverly done, and no money was involved. There were other European finds - Neandertal, Cro-Magnon, and Heidelberg - so another European "missing link" wasn't too surprising. After the first publication, many scientists commented that the jaw seemed to be from a chimpanzee. They expressed strong doubt that the skull and the jaw were from the same species. The scientists solved this by planting a second jaw and second skull at a second location. After that find, some of the doubters were satisfied.

Arthur Woodward's reconstruction of the Piltdown man skull

Using a fluorine-based test to date the skull,  researchers concluded that it was approximately 50,000 years old. The jawbone, however, was only a few decades old. A second test, using nitrogen analysis, confirmed the first test. They also found that the jaw had been artificially stained with potassium dichromate to make it appear older.

In their report, the researchers argued that someone had taken the jawbone and teeth of a modern ape, probably an orangutan, and stained them in order to make them look ancient. These artifacts had then been planted at the Piltdown site. The skull, however, was probably genuine, though it was not as old as had been claimed.

Who was responsible for this forgery? Woodward had a strong reputation for honesty and seemed to be innocent. Dawson, instead, was fingered as the likely culprit. His motive for perpetrating the hoax was complex, since he never profited from it financially. However, it seemed likely that he had done it to gain scientific fame and recognition.

After the British Museum team published their findings, it was then discovered that Dawson had trafficked in other fake antiquities. This seemed to confirm that he probably was the culprit behind the Piltdown man hoax. However, to this day controversy still simmers over whether or not Dawson had an accomplice in his scheme.