Piltdown Man Hoax

In 1912 an amateur archaeologist by the name of Charles Dawson claimed to have found the missing link between ape and man. Dawson found the remaining’s in a gravel pit Piltdown village in Sussex, England. This suggested that not only did England have ancient ancestors, but that they were the oldest of ancestries found at the time. As time would soon play out, it was discovered the Piltdown man was a hoax. The Piltdown hoax wasn’t discovered in a matter of hours, it took a series of events to disprove the existence of the Piltdown man or at least disprove the evidence found by Dawson and, the first thing that was found that caused suspicion were remains of early humans found in the 1920’s and 1930’s all around the world. These remains didn’t show the large brain and jaw like structure. The remains also suggested that the jaws and teeth were human like long before the brain evolved into the huge brains we have now. The next event happened in 1939, with the growth in technology scientist were able to prove, with the help of fluorine, that the remains discovered by Dawson were between 50,000 years old. Then with carbon technology, it was discovered that the fossils were older than 600 years old. Finally, in 1953 the Natural History Museum stated Piltdown Man as a fraud after it was discovered that the skull and jaw were possibly from an ape just filed down to make them look more human.  Scientist were dumbfounded and shocked, especially because those times it was believed that men were gentleman and lying and deceiving were not heard of. After the revelation, scientist also started paying closer attention to fossils found and any other artifact because they didn’t want to fall prey to hoax and frauds again.

Many human faults were played in this hoax, ego, pride, accomplishment. Arthur Keith, at the time he was England’s leading anatomist and a strong believer in the Piltdown Man’s existence only because this theory supported his theory that the brain was large before humans can walk upright. You also had prestige’s scientist who were basically god when it came down to science and people feared to go against them because at the time, they not only would they look down on you but they were the smarted scientist at the time and going against their believes was unheard of. These faults negatively impacted the scientific method because there was no scientific method. It was basically I am a powerful person and you must go with what I said. These people could’ve have said they can fly, and people would’ve believed them.

The testing the hypothesis played a crucial part in all this. If scientist never examined the artifacts, we could’ve still believed in the Piltdown Man. Not only was it tested once, but it was tested multiple times to see the validity of the results. The fluorine testing and later the carbon testing. Also, the closer examination using the microscope, and would also say, other ape skulls. Because without the other skulls we wouldn’t have known missing parts and how they got the found skull to be.

I don’t think it’s possible to remove the human factor because it takes a human to discover a scientific fact. Adding, remains tend to have biases to everything, even though we say we don’t, we do, its our nature. What we can do is discover something and have another human unrelated to the experiment and/ or findings and test the hypothesis. The lesson is, that if you don’t agree with someone, no matter what education, background, or social status they pose, don’t be afraid to say something. Especially, if there is no concrete evidence. Many people here didn’t agree with the findings but were too afraid to speak up due to the education many of these people possessed.