Piltdown Man: A hoaxer still pursued
A nonsense: Chris Stringer holds a reconstruction of Piltdown Man's skull
It
was a shocker, no doubt about it. The Piltdown Man scandal is arguably
the greatest scientific fraud ever perpetrated in the UK.
The intention is not to try to re-authenticate them; rather, the purpose is to try to identify once and for all who was responsible for the deception.
The majority view is that it was Charles Dawson, a solicitor, antiquarian and amateur palaeontologist from the southern English county of Sussex.
He was at hand for most of the major "discoveries" at the dig sites on the edge of Piltdown village.
Most people believe his hand was responsible for planting the key faux specimens in local gravels.
These included an ape-like jaw fragment, complete with molars and a canine tooth, some human-looking cranial parts, plus assorted stone tools and ancient mammal remains. Much of the haul was stained to reflect long-term burial in the gravels, to make the artefacts look like they truly were many hundreds of thousands of years old.
The collection was utter rubbish, of course: a mix of bones - some very modern - that had in a number of cases been crudely filed to give them the shape expected of an ancient human species.
But although chemical testing finally exposed the fraud in 1953, there has always been some doubt over the culprit's true identity.
The Piltdown materials were stained to make them look old
"What we're trying to do is apply forensic level techniques to this material," he told the BBC World Service Discovery programme.
"We're trying to find out how many kinds of staining techniques there were, how many methods of modification, how many specimens were used between all these assemblages. The more we narrow it down to one person, the more in my view it will point to Dawson's central involvement in the whole thing."
The Piltdown 'cricket bat'
DNA testing should determine whether the jaw fragment really was from an orangutan or some other kind of ape.
Radiocarbon dating will tell the team the precise ages of the artefacts. That jawbone is probably a few hundred years old at most, but the new science ought to be definitive.
And spectroscopy should expose the chemistry of the staining fluids. If one "cocktail" is found to have been used to colour all the materials, it would hint strongly that a single perpetrator was at work, especially if that recipe was used at all dig sites. That is because only Dawson knew the location of the second site.
Dr Matt Pope from University College London has even been back to the Piltdown gravels themselves.
"We want to go back to the original records of the excavations, to follow the logic of Dawson and others involved and to see these deposits with modern archaeological and geological eyes," he told us.
"This will give a better understanding of the context of the fraud. It will provide samples that allow us to do two very separate things. One will provide materials we can study to understand the material basis of the fraud itself. But also - and for me this is the most exciting thing as a human origins researcher - it can allow us to begin the systematic study of the genuine part of this hoax - the Ice Age gravels, their age, their significance and the genuine finds associated with them."
Charles Dawson (L), pictured working the Piltdown gravels, was a solicitorAnd Prof Adrian Lister's research may well have identified the true origin of some of this material.
The jaw fragment probably came from a young orangutan"Even back then these species were recognized as being quite ancient, and that was quite deliberate because, not only, was it an attempt to make the site look real but also that the human remains were very old."
You would be forgiven for thinking that the British scientific community would really have liked to pack the Piltdown specimens in a box and have them crushed. But the memory and interest is maintained, if for no other reason than the whole affair serves as a warning for how things can go horribly wrong.
"People obviously have to keep their guard up when there is some new find," reflected Prof Stringer.
"Sometimes, if something seems too good to be true, maybe it is too good to be true. And just because something fits your theories you shouldn't therefore lower your guard and believe it absolutely from the start; you have to assess how the find fits into the bigger pattern."
Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow him on Twitter: @BBCAmos
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