- The Piltdown Man -

The Greatest Hoax In Scientific History.

In 1912 researchers around the world were intensely searching for what was called, the "missing link" between apes and humans. Charles Darwin had published "On the Origin of Species" just 53 years previously. In parts of Europe, fossils were found of early humans. A main part of Europe that was being over looked by the evidence found in Germany and France were the British Isles.


        Then, in early 1912, an archaeologist by the name of Charles Dawson, had written a letter to the head keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum. Dawson wrote in the letter that he was claiming to have found evidence of a piece of thick human-like skull in gravel beds at Piltdown in Sussex, England. The news of this shocking, yet exciting discovery, brought the head keeper Arthur Smith Woodward and Charles Dawson together to team up and they began the search for more evidence. In their findings, they came across more skull fragments, a jawbone with 2 teeth, and different animal fossils and some stone tools. As you may guess, these were used as evidence of early human life know as "The Piltdown Man". Arthur Woodward believed the two fragments of the skull and jawbone to be of the same individual. With the evidence, Woodward made a reconstructed skull. The large portion of the skull at this time was thought to indicate a level of intelligence, this was to set it apart from the apes skull. The jawbone resembled an ape but the teeth resembled humans teeth. Dawson and Woodward believed the evidence of the skull was of a human from over 500,000 years ago. The new specimen was named by Arthur Woodward as Eoanthropus dawsoni - Dawson's Dawn Man.


       At the end of 1912 at a large Geology meeting, Arthur Smith Woodward felt it was time to announce their discovery to the rest of the world. For the most part everyone was convinced the findings to be real. In 1913, a canine tooth was discovered to provide more evidence. Dawson, even claimed to have found more canine teeth and skull fragments near the site of the original findings. However, in 1916 Dawson passed away and since then, there has yet to be any findings of further evidence.
              As years passed, more and more human fossils and the discoveries of these skulls began to resemble apes while the jaws resemble humans. This began to throw up red flags to the findings of Dawson. At a point in the 1920's in almost every article regarding science, there were parts regarding the findings of Dawson. However, as more and more of the fossils were found that didn't match up with Dawson's findings , the less the Piltdown Man was even talked about. As more and more red flags came up and as technology advanced, tested were ran on the Piltdown Man.

(J.S. Weiner and Kenneth Oakley taking Fluorine tests)

            In 1953, Dr. Joseph S. Weiner, along with Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark and Kenneth Oakley, ran forensic test on the fossils. It did not take long for them to find out the fossils were fraudulent when they observed them closely under a microscope. They saw the skull was of a 500-year old human, the jaw was from a chimpanzee or orangutan , and the teeth were of an ancient elephant or hippo that they had fied down to resemble human teeth and look worn to the eye. The bones have been stained to look old. The jaw was actually broken so it would fit on the human skull. These findings would make viewers of science be skeptical of findings ever since the Piltdown Man was determined as a hoax.

The impact of the hoax would impact the scientific process by making the deniers of science use this as an example to state that science is just looking for evidence that researchers are so eager because they accepted false evidence in order to prove the  Biblical creation myth wrong.

A positive impact for revealing the Piltdown Man a hoax, would be a reason for the fossils not to be found as a fraud earlier was due to the inability to use technology to determine the fossils false and the lack of knowledge of the skulls. An argument can be that the  fossils only amounted to a hypothesis at best about human evolution. Scientist were able to investigate the hypothesis and determine it to be false due to evidence, which was tampered with. So just because a few early scientist made fraud evidence doesn't mean the value of the other scientist should have to be overshadowed.

Scientist in the late 1940's and early 1950's used fluorine tests, to determine that the fossils were only 50,000 years old which would falsify the ability for them to be 500,000 years old. The used the scientific method to determine the falsity of the evidence.



Is it possible to remove the “human” factor from science to reduce the chance of errors like this 
happening again? Would you want to remove the human factor from science?

    - No , I believe that the errors will not decrease because human factor plays a huge part in evolution. I would not want to remove the human factor because technology today because scientist have the knowledge and the technology to provide accurate data.

Life Lesson: What lesson can you take from this historical event regarding taking information at face value from unverified sources? 

     - To always see the bigger picture and not completely focus just on the little details. It is not a bad thing to focus on the details of things, but when its all you focus on, then the main goal or picture gets overlooked because we start to worry about the wrong things when the problem is right in front of us.