After 84 years, the man behind one of science's biggest frauds - in which a skull was held as evolutionary proof of a missing link between apes and humans - may have been identified.
The apparent culprit was Martin A.C. Hinton, a curator of zoology at Britain's Natural History Museum when the so-called Piltdown Man skull was dug up in 1912, according to Brian Gardiner, professor of paleontology - the study of fossils - at King's College London.Many other suspects have been suggested over the years. But last week's issue of the weekly science magazine Nature says a trunk with Hinton's initials, found in a loft at the museum in London, appears to identify Hinton unequivocally as the hoaxer.
The trunk contained animal bones stained the same way as the Piltdown fossils to make them look old, indicating it was Hinton who faked and planted the skull at a gravel pit at Piltdown, 30 miles south of London.
The skull was unearthed there by Charles Dawson, a lawyer and amateur geologist who yearned for scientific recognition. He died in 1916.
In 1953, the increasingly skeptical museum conducted tests that showed the Piltdown skull was a cleverly assembled fake, combining part of a modern human skull with the jaw of an orangutan. But Hinton, a known practical joker, was never formally identified as the hoaxer until now and took his secret to the grave in 1961.
"The discovery is the first solid evidence in the case after decades of speculation" about the hoaxer's identity, the magazine wrote on Thursday. "The evidence appears to identify Hinton as the sole fraudster - and Dawson as his unwitting dupe."
The discovery of the skull set the scientific world ablaze. Researchers hailed it as proof of a missing link between apes and humans.
They said the ape-like jaw of the Piltdown skull indicated that humans were the culmination of a very ancient lineage and that skull's large brain area indicated that the first modern human feature to evolve was the enlarged brain.
Modern researchers say although apes and humans are distantly related, there is no direct evolutionary line of descent from apes to humans. They also say human lineage in evolutionary terms is relatively young and that expansion of the brain took place relatively late.
Gardiner has been trying to identity the culprit ever since the hoax - but not the hoaxer - was exposed in 1953.
The Times of London on Thursday quoted him as saying: "I first learned of the trunk's existence in 1988. I was already almost sure that Hinton was the perpetrator. Lengthy examination of the contents has now confirmed my suspicions."
The trunk was first discovered by contractors clearing the loft in the southwest tower of the museum in the 1970s. No more was thought about it until Andrew Currant, a researcher at the museum, mentioned its existence to Gar-di-ner.
They found that rodent dissections, bits of fossil hippopotamus, elephant teeth and other bones inside were stained with iron and manganese in the same proportions as the Piltdown skull, Nature said.