Over 50 years after the Piltdown Man remains were exposed as fake, scientists have put amateur antiquarian and solicitor Charles Dawson in the frame

Crime scene investigators have revisited the greatest scientific hoax of the 20th century and named the prime suspect.

Last man standing in the line-up of citizens under suspicion for the notorious Piltdown fraud – the faked discovery of fossil evidence of an early human species, which misled anthropologists for almost 40 years – is an amateur antiquarian and country solicitor called Charles Dawson.

Dawson was the only person there at all the related discoveries between 1912 and 1914 at a gravel pit in Piltdown, in Sussex, of part of a skull, jaw, teeth and even a carved bone tool shaped like a cricket bat. Piltdown Man was named Eanthropus dawsoni in his honour.

The evidence was faked; what is now the Natural History Museum,which originally authenticated and displayed the find, admitted this in 1953. Somebody had matched a human braincase, some teeth and an orangutan jaw and passed them off as evidence of an authentic survivor from the dawn of humankind.

Other genuine mammalian fossils and tools had been planted at the site to add plausibility. The “cricket bat” had been carved by a steel knife from an elephant bone.

New forensic examination of the original material, published in Royal Society Open Science, shows that all the faked evidence of Piltdown Man betrays the same authorship.

Sixteen scientists from eleven research institutions subjected the bones and teeth to technologies not available for most of the history of the find- computerised tomography scan, morphometric analysis and DNA sampling - and found a consistent fingerprint of forgery.

“Solving the Piltdown hoax is still important now,” the scientists write. “It stands as a cautionary tale to scientists not to see what they want to see, but to remain objective and subject even their own findings to the strongest scientific scrutiny.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Workers excavating the Piltdown site in 1912. Photograph: Nils Jorgenson/Rex

Two human sets of remains may have been used in the fraud, but only one orangutan. The bones and teeth were filled with small stones and repaired with putty. The teeth had been reset in the jaw with putty. One tooth had been damaged in the forgery, and then reconstructed by the faker. They also confirmed that teeth found at different intervals came from the same orangutan.

Over the last century, a number of possible culprits had been paraded for identification: among them Arthur Smith Woodward, the Museum expert who along with Charles Dawson announced the find; the thinker, anthropologist and French Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin, who joined the search; Martin Hinton, Smith Woodward’s then assistant, and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived nearby, was a member of the same archaeological society as Dawson, and published The Lost World, a novel involving pterodactyls and primitive hominids, in the year of the Piltdown find.

But the latest study shows that the forgery was the work of one person, working with bones and teeth that had never been fossilised, but altered and stained to look plausible.

“We have shown in this work there is only one orangutan, and there is only one faker. We see the fingerprint of the putty that is used to modify things, the same materials used to weigh things down, to fill the little holes, to fix the pebbles and the gravel inside,” said Isabelle de Groote, of Liverpool John Moores University, who led the study.

“It is always the same orangutan. So it is clearly always the same person.”

The researchers think Dawson, who died in 1916, had a motive: he had put his name to more than 50 scientific publications and he wanted scientific recognition. In particular, he wanted to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and had even angled for a knighthood. He also had an opportunity: he would have known that researchers were looking for a “missing link” between apes and humans.

“As a long-established collector, he would also have known what to add in the form of fossil mammals and stone tools to testify to the antiquity,” they write.

“We know there are at least 38 fakes that he planted, not just in palaeontology but also a Roman statuette for example,” said Dr de Groote. “So we know he planted numerous fakes. Maybe he had a dark side.”