Piltdown Hoax

The Piltdown hoax was an Archaeological site in England, which was discovered in 1908 by Charles Dawson. The scientific community was shocked at the findings as this was a crucial period for evolution. At the site, a fragment of what appeared to be an ancient human skull was found along with animal fossils.  Perhaps most astonishing find was a jawbone, apparently to the same skull found earlier. The jawbone was surprise because it did not look human, it actually looked more like it belonged to an ape. This remarkable find appeared to fit as the last piece to human evolution puzzle, the “Missing Link”.

The hoax was discovered after Word war two. A new technology, chlorine testing allowed scientist to measure roughly date fossils. When they tested the Piltdown fossils,  the results returned was the fossils were relatively young. It would of made sense, if the remains were millions of years old, however they turned out to be more like hundred thousand. Another evidence on how the findings were a hoax was the fact that the teeth were filed down, the were scratch marks, as if some-one purposely wanted to shape these to a desired shape. Finally the jawbone was tested as well and even more surprisingly it dated back only to less than one hundred years.

Charles Dawson died before the hoax was discovered.  Father Tielhard who was an original member of the findings, was very quiet when the hoax was unraveled.  There were other scientists prior to announcement of the hoax,  who were coming up with mixed results after re-examining the bones. For example in 1913 David Waterson stated that  the skull was of a human and the jaw belonged to an ape. A german anthropologist by the name of Franz Weidenbreich who studied evolution studied the remains and he came to similar conclusion that the skull was perhaps of a fossilized ape and that the jaw appeared to be of an orangutan with filed down teeth.

Scientists are indeed humans, and all humans make mistakes. The faults the come into play for this scenario was simply lack of knowledge. Without the tools and technology they could not have tested the age more accurately. This negatively impacted the scientific process because at the time it formed a falsiable hypothesis which couldn’t be tested wrong. Those who were skeptic, kept silent and choose not to speak out against such prominent figures of the time such as  W.J.  Sollas.

In 1953, Scientists launched full scale analysis of the remains. It included radiological dating methods. Pieces were broken off which could of shown that the jawbone did not belong to the skull. They also removed the pieces that would of shown that the bones did not match directly. Furthermore, evidence showed that the front part of the jaw was broken off which proved to be of an ape and not human like specie.

I think it is possible to remove the “human” factor from science at least to a certain extent. A good example of this would be computers. Large, complex calculation no longer have to be handworked and result in human miscalculation, instead computers accurately calculate a desired data for us. I would like to remove the human factor as much as possible to prevent such incident as the Piltdown hoax from wasting the scientific community’s time.

The moral of the story for me was to be very skeptical when approaching new discoveries from an unverified source.  One can be duped purposely to believe something that is not true and waste precious time. Most importantly, I would limit myself from jumping to conclusions no matter how good the outlook my project to be.