To be fair, what I understand is that much of the expressed skepticism was more of a political/nationalistic response than a serious scientific concern.
Piltdown Man - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Scientific investigation
From the outset, there were scientists who expressed skepticism about the Piltdown find.
G.S. Miller, for example, observed in 1915 that "deliberate malice could hardly have been more successful than the hazards of deposition in so breaking the fossils as to give free scope to individual judgment in fitting the parts together."
[5] In the decades prior to its exposure as a forgery in 1953, scientists increasingly regarded Piltdown as an enigmatic aberration inconsistent with the path of hominid evolution as demonstrated by fossils found elsewhere.
[1] Skeptical scientists only increased in number as more fossils were found.
Early 20th century science
The Piltdown case is a strong example of how racial, nationalist, and gendered discourses shaped some science at this time, just as it shaped society more generally. Piltdown's semi-human features were made sense of by reference to non-White ethnicities who were at that time considered by many Europeans to be less evolved than themselves.
[15] The influence of nationalism was clear in the differing interpretations of the find: whilst the majority of British scientists accepted the discovery as "the Earliest Englishman",
[16] European and American scientists were considerably more skeptical, and several suggested at the time that the skull and jaw were from two different creatures and had been accidentally mixed up.
[15] Regarding gender, the find was discussed as a male, despite Woodward suggesting that the specimen discovered was a female. The only exception to this was in coverage by the
Daily Mail newspaper, which referred to the discovery as a woman, but only to use it to mock the
Suffragette movement of the time, which the
Mail was highly critical of.
[17]
Such discourses were not uncommon in the biological sciences, and persisted up until the middle of the century. The atrocities committed by Nazi scientists before and during World War II brought the dangers of scientific racism to the foreground, and along with changing attitudes in society more generally, had the effect of largely purging these practices from science.
[18]