Welcome back to another exclusive sneak preview of the Hue Jackson School of Scam Artistry!

The weather’s turning nicer – and more and more people are going outside. Spring really is a lovely time of year – people love to get outdoors and be active! I can’t wait to be back on the field with Eddie George at Tennessee State soon enough – and I’ll enjoy my time on the hunt for the next great scam opportunity before training camp opens up again. In the meantime, I’ve been checking out a lot of archaeological digs – which even to me is a relatively unexplored area of scamming. Science, history and biology are three things that I know my expertise won’t measure up to the all-time greats in the scamming field – particularly this week’s subject. Let’s listen onwards!

CHARLES DAWSON: LAWYER, ANTHROPOLOGIST, GEOLOGIST, AND SWINDLER

BORN: July 11, 1864, Preston, England

DIED: August 10, 1916, Lewes, England

Our protagonist this week was a man who worked hard to be the best at his craft – when you’re the kind of person who dies without your scams being discovered until decades after the fact, it’s extremely clear you should be in the upper echelons of the Hall of Fame of Scammers.

The 19th century was a fantastic time to be a grifter – with the Industrial Revolution providing both incredible methods of technology and a vast reorganization of how most people lived their lives, it thus makes sense that a scant few who were able to stay ahead of the technological and educational curves would soon learn how to use their knowledge to illicitly gain fame, fortune and prestige. Charles Dawson was an all-timer at this – over a century after his death, scientific researchers are still finding new evidence to determine how he was able to pull off so many clever fakes and frauds in his short lifetime.

Charles Dawson, eldest of three sons in his family was fascinated with natural life and collecting fossils from a young age, following in the footsteps of his father. Additionally, he trained as a lawyer, further following in dear old dad’s path. (You could do this without needing a university degree back in the day… something that also seems ripe for scamming opportunities.) In part due to the status afforded him due to his profession, Dawson became a founding member of the Hastings and St Leonards Museum Association, one of the first museum benefactors groups in the UK. With Dawson in charge of artefact acquisition and documentation, he was in a plum position for discovering (or, in reality, manufacturing) some incredible finds for the museum. Despite having no formal training as a scientist or archaeologist, Dawson compiled such an impressive run of treasures that he was nicknamed “The Wizard of Sussex” by his local paper, and soon attracted the attention of the British Museum, and, eventually, the Royal Society.

Among all the hoaxes created by Dawson, there are a few that stand out above the rest:

• He created fake skeleton fragments for a number of prehistoric animals, including a dinosaur, iguanodon dawsoni, and a reptile-mammal hybrid, plaugialax dawsoni, both named after himself, naturally.
• He “discovered” evidence of Roman occupation of Pevensey Castle in Sussex, particularly some stamped bricks (which he had stamped himself, in fact); he also found a Roman statue made out of cast iron at Beauport Park – most unusual, especially considering almost all Roman statues were carved out of stone. What makes the statue so unusual is that it’s a complete fucking fraud – Dawson cast it himself.
• Dawson donated many artefacts and specimens to the British Museum, but among his known fakes include some highly complex forgeries: a Neolithic stone hammer; the Bexhill boat (an ancient timber ship from pre-Roman times); the Brighton “toad in the hole” (a frog preserved in a piece of flint, which was found in a fake flint mine in the Lavant Caves); and a fake bronze vase from China.
• He reported seeing a sea serpent in the English Channel, which local publications just ate up.
• He has said to have experimented with phosphorescent bullets in order to repel German Zeppelin attacks in the First World War, though it’s clear he never got far with that research.

Of all the things that Dawson ever did in his life, the Piltdown Man hoax is what earns him his Hall of Fame Scammer status. This hoax was so intricate and elaborate that it wasn’t decisively proven to be a scam until 1953 – thirty-seven years after Dawson’s death.

To preface the audacity of how ostentatious the Piltdown Man hoax was, we also have to consider the state of anthropology in the early 20th century; due to limited technology, archaeologists had unearthed just three notable finds of early human life since the study became fairly mainstream in the 1850s – homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal man, 1856); homo erectus erectus (Java man, 1891), and homo heidelbergensis (Heidelberg man, 1907). While these finds were fascinating and all extremely useful, they also represented a fairly broad range of human evolution; the gap between H. erectus and H. neanderthalensis remains upwards of almost 500,000 years in most parts of the world, save for in southeast Asia and Australia. As such, the appetite for discovering an additional “missing link” in modern humanity’s evolution from their primate cousins was extremely high in the early decades of the last century. Enter Charles Dawson, with an absolute masterpiece of scam artistry.

In 1910, Dawson “discovered” the first evidence of a new species of ancient human being, which he named Eoanthropus dawsoni, once again after himself. In 1912, his findings were presented in a meeting of the Geological Society of London. Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of the geological department of the British Museum, was fascinated with the discovery, and accompanied Dawson to the Piltdown gravel pits in Sussex many times in the hopes of excavating more evidence of early humans. Woodward never found anything – but Dawson did. Or rather, he presented things as though he had. In Woodward’s reconstruction efforts of the Piltdown Man skull, there were a few notable things presented to the scientific community:

• The lower jaw resembled that of a chimpanzee’s, though it had two molar teeth similar to those of a modern human;
• The skull was almost identical to a modern human’s, though it was only about two-thirds the size and a somewhat differently shaped occipital bone, at the rear.

Because of these two important points, Woodward postulated that this was an important evolutionary find – the size of the cranium compared to the size of the jaw was unlike anything that had been previously observed in skeletons found elsewhere in the world. Not only this, but it also suggested that the development of a larger brain happened before the enlarging of the bottom jaw – which was the exact opposite of theories posed by other anthropologists who had discovered H. erectus and H. neanderthalensis. The jaw has to have decreased before the brain enlarged, predominantly due to the fact that the human diet evolved to incorporate a wider variety of nutrition than ever before – and that they chewed much less than many primates before them, because they were better able to process this food. This change in jaw size and structure also allowed for advances in communication – which would have then needed larger brains in order to better utilize those communication skills. That A. dawsoni would go counter to this logic is evolutionarily absurd, according to most modern thought.

Even in the immediate publication of Dawson and Woodward’s findings, many scientists decried the Piltdown Man as a hoax – largely for the aforementioned jaw and cranium size reasoning. As it turns out, they were absolutely right – the Piltdown Man skull was a hybrid of at least two human skulls (about 600 years old), the jaw and teeth of an orangutan (some of which which had been filed down in a way to suggest more human-like chewing patterns), and the canine teeth of a chimpanzee. All the bones had been stained chemically – some with chromium and others with iron sulfate, and then fused together using a material similar to dental putty.

Despite the audacious nature of the hoax, Eoanthropus dawsoni was considered a matter of fact in UK anthropological circles until 1953, when extensive testing proved the scam once and for all. That Piltdown Man was allowed to be considered as fact for as long as it did remains up for debate today, as is the reason Dawson pulled off the hoax in the first place. Why would archaeologists want to accept something so far-fetched? Why would Dawson be so intent on making them believe it? Extreme nationalism and the idea of Anglocentric hominid development may have something to do with it. But at the end of the day, what remains most important is that Dawson appeared intent on using all of his scams as a means of entering the prestigious Royal Society – and perhaps also receiving a knighthood as well. However, Dawson’s premature death of septic shock at age 52 prevented him from accepting either of these things – and from perpetrating any more scams. Still, credit goes to him for having created a legacy of fraud that outlasted even himself.

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Now THAT’S the hustle I’m talking about. That’s championship caliber stuff right there. Remember, if you’re in the history books, it doesn’t matter whether what you did is good or bad – the important part is that you made it in there. That’s the kind of energy I’m hoping to bring to my offence this coming season. That’s also the kind of energy I want you to bring as you recommend these audiotape lessons to all of your friends! Remember – for every new referral you make, you’ll get an additional ten percent off your next monthly subscription – and for every referral your referrals make, you’ll keep getting discounts, discounts, discounts! Who says no to that? Charles Ponzi sure wouldn’t! Uhh… don’t look up that name. Anyways, thanks for listening. Until next time – I’m Hue Jackson.

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Information from this article taken from here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Banner image by The Maestro.