Piltdown Hoax Post

In 1912 Charles Dawson who was a lawyer by trade and an amateur archeologist found the remains of part of a skull in Sussex and the village of Piltdown while digging in a gravel pit. He claimed the piece could be of an ancient man and then invited Sir Arthur Smith Woodward who was a well respected geologist at London's Natural History Museum to dig with him that summer along with father Teilhard de Chardin. Dawson later made the huge discovery of a jaw bone that seemed to belong to the same skull. The discovery of this later dubbed “Piltdown Man” was thought to be the missing link connecting apes and modern man. People like Arthur Keith used “Piltdown Man” to support his theory that the big brain came before upright walking for humans, which has now been proven to be wrong. Still, the scientific community seemed to want to believe that the missing link had been found in England even though new discoveries did not coincide with the Piltdown find. Later in the 1920’s new fossils of human ancestors that lived hundreds of thousands of years after Piltdown man were found in Asia and Africa but these fossils looked less human not more human. Dawson had died in 1916 and Woodward kept on digging at the site in the summer for decades after until 1938 without any new discovery. After fluoride testing was invented full testing was done on the Piltdown fossils and they were found to be frauds. All the evidence showed that someone had gone to much trouble to pull off this hoax and forge the “Piltdown Man” fossils. Most people could not believe that scientific men of respect could do such a thing. The most obvious guilty party was seen as Charles Dawson who was the first and last person to find fossil remains at the Piltdown site. It turns out that he was also known to be a liar and a cheat before his famous discovery. Also, in 1975 carved bones found by a workman in an old trunk at the natural history museum and in 1996 they were tested and shown to have the same staining as the Piltdown fossils; the trunk was found to belong to Martin Hinton. There are still unanswered questions about the hoax but the most important thing was the lesson the scientific community learned about using the scientific method to be sure about any new discoveries.

There were many human faults at work here and the most important I think would be pride. National pride may have caused Dawson or someone else to commit this hoax just so the British people could say that they also had the remains of an ancient man. Germany, France, Spain and Asia already had claims to ancient human remains and Britain wanted to be included. There was also possibly the selfish and greedy need of Dawson or others to be in the spotlight and be accepted as truly great scientists which would give them much prestige. The last faults I will mention are just the plain lack of honor or duty of a scientific mind looking for truth in a world filled with mysteries and endless questions. Real scientists are looking for real answers and explanations, not a chance at undeserved fame.

The positive aspects of the scientific process that were responsible for revealing the fraud were the continuous testing used by the scientific method. In the scientific method you test a hypothesis over and over until you can say that you consistently get the same results. As new methods of testing became available, science and the scientists of the time went to work to test important theories or discoveries of the time. After World War II, fluorine testing was invented which made dating of fossils more accurate. In 1949 the skull was tested and showed that the remains were only about one hundred thousand years old. In1953 there was a full scale analysis that found that the Piltdown fossils had been stained along with the artifacts and the teeth had been filed down to show human type wear. The jaw bone was actually found to be less than one hundred years old and belonged to a female orangutan that had been altered to look more human.

You cannot remove the human factor from science and I do not think I would even want to remove it. It is the human factor that makes us curious about our surroundings and interested in finding the answers to all the questions we have about nature, life, earth and the universe. It is that curiosity and tenacity that makes human beings special and the dominant species on the planet. It is our intelligence as human beings that can also make us dangerous and imperfect but has given us all our success and a thriving civilization up until now. We cannot guarantee that a hoax of this degree will never happen again, but we can probably all agree that the human factor will bring us much more success in the long run.

The life lesson that we all can take from this historical event regarding taking information from unverified sources, is not to do it. I imagine that this major hoax along with others has caused true scientists to be very careful with any claims or discoveries that they announce to the world. It seems now that modern scientists find it an important point to check and double check everything until they are 110% sure that they have enough evidence and scientific data or testing to back up any claims or discoveries. Real honorable people of science do not even want to be mistaken for a fraud or an amateur as it would ruin their careers. Every new discovery and claim must have verifiable evidence and be tested again and again before it can be taken seriously or presented to the scientific community or the world.