Piltdown Hoax
In 1912 a man, working as a laborer in southeast England, discovered an unusual piece of a skull while digging in the village of Piltdown. He passed it to another man, named Charles Dawson. "Dawson later claimed he noticed that the skull was extremely thick and appeared rather primitive." He gathered a group of men from different fields to begin a further search of the same dig site the laborer found the original piece of skull. They found remains of Stone Age tools and prehistoric animals, but their biggest success was finding "an ape-like jawbone with human-like teeth that seemed to link it to the skull Dawson got from the laborer." At this time the remains of primitive humans had been discovered so far in France, Germany and Asia; none had been found in England. Scientists of England were excited by the idea of being marked as another great county with ancient human fossils. Some forty years pass and new fossils of human ancestors were discovered in Asia and Africa which appeared to look less like humans, but more like apes. These new fossils were in fact older than the Piltdown ones, and this caused a clear conflict in our ancestral timeline. Professor Kenneth Oakley proves the jaw bone to be forged using fluorine analysis. This was a bit of a wake up call for the scientific community. It taught scientists that they need to always retest theories, take a closer look, and to not always completely trust what another scientist puts out.
Charles Dawson was purely trying to establish credibility, by "discovering" this jaw bone that could have been England's first Neanderthal. He clearly was desperate, his ego got in the way, and he saw it as an opportunity to make a name for himself. The best way of describing Dawson's actions was he wanted to achieve success without having to work for it.As Giles Oakley said in the NOVA Piltdown Man video, "Scientists are no different from other human beings. They're not all dispassionate seekers after truth in some kind of neutral way, unaffected by the pressures that affect non-scientists. Egotism, pride, ambition, rivalry, these things affect even scientific judgments." For England, patriotism played a major role in their initial reaction to Piltdown man. As a country they wanted to feel like a great and important country who is home to our potentially oldest ancestor.
Professor Kenneth Oakley, of the British Museum, used the method of fluorine analysis in the early 1950s to reveal the truth behind the Piltdown hoax. He did this by showing that a hymn skull was actually a bit older than the jawbone that was in question. Once this was proven, other scientists along with Oakley took a closer look at the bones and found it was the jaw of an orangutan, not a hominin. "The staining on the bones was superficial." When looking at Piltdown man's teeth under the microscopic they appeared to have been filed down, still showing scratch marks. This all lead to one conclusion, "somebody had forged the Piltdown fossils."
The question "Is it possible to remove the “human” factor from science to reduce the chance of errors like this happening again," stumped me at first. I can not think of a single way that would make removing the human factors from science even possible. Science is studying the world through human observation and experiment. The human factor is inevitable, and therefore emotions and biases will always be present in scientific work. This does not always have to be a negative influence though. You would never want the human factor to be completely removed from science, because personal opinions, can and have lead to important discoveries. Sometimes it is a good idea to trust your hunch, or intuition.
Taking information at face value from unverified sources can be a risk and I believe should not be 100 percent trusted. One should do research and experiments of their own before just going off what another said. Without having doubts and asking questions, we would not get very far in finding new discoveries.
Charles Dawson was purely trying to establish credibility, by "discovering" this jaw bone that could have been England's first Neanderthal. He clearly was desperate, his ego got in the way, and he saw it as an opportunity to make a name for himself. The best way of describing Dawson's actions was he wanted to achieve success without having to work for it.As Giles Oakley said in the NOVA Piltdown Man video, "Scientists are no different from other human beings. They're not all dispassionate seekers after truth in some kind of neutral way, unaffected by the pressures that affect non-scientists. Egotism, pride, ambition, rivalry, these things affect even scientific judgments." For England, patriotism played a major role in their initial reaction to Piltdown man. As a country they wanted to feel like a great and important country who is home to our potentially oldest ancestor.
Professor Kenneth Oakley, of the British Museum, used the method of fluorine analysis in the early 1950s to reveal the truth behind the Piltdown hoax. He did this by showing that a hymn skull was actually a bit older than the jawbone that was in question. Once this was proven, other scientists along with Oakley took a closer look at the bones and found it was the jaw of an orangutan, not a hominin. "The staining on the bones was superficial." When looking at Piltdown man's teeth under the microscopic they appeared to have been filed down, still showing scratch marks. This all lead to one conclusion, "somebody had forged the Piltdown fossils."
The question "Is it possible to remove the “human” factor from science to reduce the chance of errors like this happening again," stumped me at first. I can not think of a single way that would make removing the human factors from science even possible. Science is studying the world through human observation and experiment. The human factor is inevitable, and therefore emotions and biases will always be present in scientific work. This does not always have to be a negative influence though. You would never want the human factor to be completely removed from science, because personal opinions, can and have lead to important discoveries. Sometimes it is a good idea to trust your hunch, or intuition.
Taking information at face value from unverified sources can be a risk and I believe should not be 100 percent trusted. One should do research and experiments of their own before just going off what another said. Without having doubts and asking questions, we would not get very far in finding new discoveries.
Hello Alexandra,
ReplyDeleteI just read your essay on the Piltdown Hoax and I think that your essay is very descriptive of the event. Pride did get in the way of the Piltdown Hoax, but i was wondering if you had considered any other suspect besides Dawson who could have done the hoax to benefit from it. Though Charles Dawson is the first who comes to mind of who could have committed the lie I believe that the person who had more to gain from the hoax was Arthur Keith. Arthur Keith was the leading English anatomist at the time and his theory of humans evolving big brains before walking upright coincided with the Piltdown skull fossil. My theory is that Dawson was an innocent because of the fact that he was an amateur archaeologist, so he could have easily been fooled into thinking that he found the oldest human ancestor when in reality he had not. To me Dawson was unknowingly used to create the whole Piltdown Hoax.
Alexandra,
ReplyDeleteI agree with your comment that it was a wake up call for the scientific community once further tests revealed that the Piltdown fossils were fake. I am sure many scientists were embarrassed that they were fooled for such a long period of time. The fossils were not readily available for further examination as they were kept at the Natural History Museum. I believe this also contributed to the reason the Hoax for continued for such a long period of time.
Overall, very good synopsis. I would have liked to see a bit more on why this fossil would have been so important, had it been valid. Yes, it was significant because it was the first hominid found on English soil, but what would it have taught us about how humans evolved? Check out Arthur Keith's theory of human evolution to see if you can figure out the answer.
ReplyDeleteVery good discussion on human faults, though a caution for laying blame on Dawson as we still, to this day, don't really know who was responsible for this hoax.
Can you describe the process of the fluorine analysis? And besides new technology, what about the process of science itself helped to uncover the hoax? Why were scientists still analyzing this fossil some 40 years after it's discovery?
Great explanation for the section on the human factor.
Good final life lesson.