Question
Do the ages of the mammal bones confirm the age of the human remains of Piltdown Man?
Piltdown man
In order to prove Dawson and Woodward really had found the earliest human ever discovered, they needed to work out the age of the bones. Click on the picture to find out how they did it. Compare it with the techniques scientists would use today.
2. Dating the bones | Stegodon tooth
Stegodon tooth
©The Natural History Museum
Woodward matched all the mammal remains from Piltdown to those in the Natural History Museum collections to work out which animals they came from. With his knowledge of the fossil collections at the Museum, it probably wouldn’t have taken him long to realise these two fragments of teeth came from the tooth of a Stegodon – an ancient elephant that lived at the beginning of the Ice Age. He would have compared the Piltdown fossils to teeth in the collections to prove his hypothesis.
All the bones Woodward identified came from animals that had lived around 400,000 years ago in the late Pliocene or early Pleistocene. Woodward decided that the youngest, best preserved mammal bones, would provide the most accurate date of the Piltdown site. He concluded that the site dated to the early part of the Pleistocene.
References
- Bodies of evidence:
from the Channel 4 TV programme - Radiocarbon dating:
the Dating Game interactive from NOVA
