The Piltdown Hoax is a false discovery of parts of a fossilized skull that scientists believed at the time to be of a new early human remains. The bone fragments were part of a skull and jawbone found by an amateur archaeologist named Charles Dawson. He claimed to have found a piece of an ancient human skull in a gravel pit in a small village called Piltdown in England in 1912. Dawson called the leading geologist of the time, Arthur Smith Woodward and a French paleontologist to examine his finding. There wasn’t any doubt about the discovery because of Woodward’s prestige. The effects were tremendous in the scientific community because it was a great distraction. It lead in a new direction that ended up being completely false. The scientists thought they had discovered the missing link between humans and apes. Scientists of the time cheered the news. They thought they finally had evidence that England like, the other great countries, had ancient human fossils. They also thought that England’s human ancestors turned out to be the oldest of all.
The human faults that come into play in the Piltdown Man discovery is that the scientists and people of the time trusted the prestige of a couple of scientists. There wasn’t an extensive checks and balance system or a scientific process. People just took the word of a couple highly regarded men, Woodward, who specialized in fish fossils and Arthur Keith, a leading anatomist at the time. They uncovered more fossils at Piltdown and this kept any suspicions at bay. The more fossils they found the less likely it was that anyone would challenge either of the prestigious men. These false discoveries cost science 40 years of fake beliefs based on fake evidence because they didn’t have a way of testing the evidence.
The positive aspect of the scientific process that is responsible for revealing the skull to be a fraud was the fact the conclusions were based on tested observations. Other scientists in other countries began finding skulls, but the skulls they found were less human not more human. The Natural History Museum didn’t allow very many people to access the Piltdown fossils so there wasn’t a wide study, which left a lot of inconsistencies undetected. The new technology that measured fluorine content of fossils after World War I is what first began the controversy. The fluorine test on the Piltdown fossils showed that the remains were much younger than thought, about 100,000 years old, which would have made no sense. With the invention of better dating methods it became plain that the stain of the skull was superficial and that the material was cut into using a steel knife. When scientists used new technology, like the microscope, to look at the teeth, they discovered that they had been filed down and had deep scratch marks. The new technology and information also revealed that the jaw bone belonged to a female orangutan that was less than 100 years old, and that the canine tooth had been filed down flat. All this evidence pointed to one conclusion, that this was a fake fossil. Finding out the truth was a positive aspect for future discoveries and information.
I don’t think it is possible to completely remove the human factor from science. Although it is flawed, the human factor is also what inspires and motivates new discoveries and motivation to search for answers to the “unknowns.” With the technology of today and the lessons from the past we can come very close to ensuring such errors don’t occur again but I don’t think we will ever be able to eliminate the chances 100%. Discoveries, inventions and technologies are all created by humans and human factors. There really isn’t any way of eliminating it because the human factor is apart of everything we do and create. I wouldn’t want to remove the human factor from science either because of what the human factor can do for science.
The life lesson we can take from this historical event regarding taking information at face value from unverified sources is DON’T. It is extremely important to observe the scientific process that is in place today. There are reasons why information should be tested and verified and backed up by solid evidence, and the Piltdown Hoax is one of them.
Bethany, great job in summarizing the Piltdown Hoax and observing both the negatives and positives that the Hoax revealed to better science today. I agree that it is impossible to completely remove the human factor from science and that it is this element that inspires men to further discovery. With the scientific method being thoroughly used today, it is less likely to make mistakes. I have to wonder if the Piltdown Hoax would have been overlooked for such a long period of time if better methods of testing had been in place and if people were not so afraid to question Dawson in the first place. Certainly Woodward was duped, but also I think because he overlooked a key point that Dawson was merely an amateur and no one else in the area had found anything similar to back up his findings.
ReplyDeleteExcellent post!
ReplyDeleteOne small correction... This wasn't evidence of a "missing link". A common misconception. There is no such thing. You later statements regarding the drive to have England included in the recent fossil finds in Europe is the real benefit of the find, if it had been correct.
Hello Bethany,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed your post. It was well written and informative. You took that mountain of information, and whittled it down into precise and concrete paragraphs. I like how you tied in your personal opinion of the Piltdown Hoax in reference to not taking information at face value from unreliable sources. As you mentioned, the “Piltdown Man” is the perfect example of such, when the scientific community took Dawson’s “discovery” as ultimate fact without due process of the scientific method.
Lynnet Rodriguez