The Piltdown Man Hoax

The story of the Piltdown man hoax began in 1912 when Charles Dawson found fragments of a fossil in the village of Piltdown. After finding the first fragment, Dawson invited Arthur smith Woodward (at the time he was England’s leading geologist), and Pierre Tielhard de Chardin ( a French paleontologist) to Piltdown. Dawson found the most interesting piece, which was a jaw bone. This jaw bone had the shape on an ape but the teeth of a human. At first everyone was excited because remains were found in England, but then confusion came abroad when the Piltdown man didn’t match any of the other remains being found in other countries. Even if people didn’t agree they were scared to challenge it.  Years later scientists discovered that jaw actually belonged to a female orangutan and someone had made it appear otherwise. Scientists were shocked that someone could do such a thing. The Piltdown hoax had scientists fooled for over 40 years. In the end, it taught scientists to be aware that people are capable of pulling something like this off because before this event, scientists were thought of as scholars and gentlemen.

Scientists are human, and just like any other human, they have faults. Just as Giles Oakley stated “Egotism, pride, ambition, rivalry, these things affect even scientific judgments.” In this situation, these faults negatively impacted the scientific process because for 40 years scientists believed something that wasn’t true. Whether the hoax occurred because someone was jealous that other countries were discovering remains and England wasn’t, or because someone wanted to receive the credit, the hoax caused scientists to be fooled for over 40 years.

The hoax began to be discovered in 1949 when scientists found a new way to figure out the date of remains. Scientists did this by measuring the fluorine content of fossils (fluorine analysis), and when they measured the fluorine content of the Piltdown man, the remains turned out to be a lot younger than they expected.  Then in 1953 scientists did a full scale investigation with better dating methods. It turned out the fossil had been stained to appear older, the parts that had been cut were cut after they were already fossilized, and the teeth had been filed down.

I don’t think it is possible to remove the human factor from science unless we get a bunch of robots to do it for us. However the human factor plays a positive role because humans are naturally curious and they question things and want to know more. If we took the human factor away there wouldn’t be curiosity, which is one the reasons scientists do what they do.

A life lesson we could learn from this is not to believe everything you hear or see right off the back. Sometimes things (or people) appear different from what (or who) they really are. It is always important to look into things even if their face value looks real and trustworthy. Unfortunately there are deceitful people in this world and are capable of anything.