Piltdown Hoax Blog Post 

The Piltdown hoax occurred in the 1900's in the County of Sussex in Southeast England. A laborer who was digging at Barkham manor, a short while from the village of Piltdown, discovered a strange piece of what looked like a skull. The man not knowing what he found brought the fragmented skull to Charles Dawson who was a local amateur archaeologist. After receiving the bone, Dawson began to dig the area up himself and he found more bone fragments at the site. Believing that he had made an incredible discovery, likely to rival Germany's findings of the Neanderthal, Dawson took his findings to The Museum of Natural History in London. There he met esteemed geologist, Sir Arthur Smith Woodward who, realizing how big of a discovery this could be, traveled back with Dawson and began digging with him. During that summer of digging the men found numerous prehistoric animals and even, stone age tools. They soon struck gold, when they found an apelike jawbone with what appeared to be human like teeth, which Dawson connected with the skull the laborer had originally brought him. It appeared that Dawson and Woodward had found the connection between man and primate, established mans place in nature, and proved Darwin's Theory. On December 8th 1912 Woodward and Dawson introduced the creature Eoanthropus dawsoni, nicknamed the Piltdown man. There was some speculation overseas that the maybe the different findings did not actually go together and that perhaps separate ape and human fossils were mixed together in the same deposit To prove this theory incorrect, Woodward and Dawson needed to find another piece to this puzzle, a canine tooth. Back at the dig site the men invited another archaeologist, French philosopher and priest, Teilhard de Chardin to search with them. The men were lucky and not only found a canine tooth that matched their predictions in size and shape, but they also only a few short years later, found another piltdown man, in the form of a skull and tooth. These findings silenced their doubters for the next forty years.

Unfortunately in 1953 evidence came about the Piltdown man was a hoax. It wasn't until 1949 that the Piltdown man was even questioned again. With the discovery of fluorine analysis, in 1953 that analyses how old fossils are, scientists wanted to test their new found knowledge out on the Piltdown fossils. The results showed that the fossils weren't ancient at all but relatively recent. Further analysis showed that the jaw wasn't even human, and was instead the jaw of a young orangutan that had the teeth filed down to resemble human teeth. The skull pieces that had been found were in fact human but belonged to a recently deceased human not an ancient one. The fossils had been stained and died so they would look as if they had been found at Piltdown. As it turned out, every single one of the finds and Piltdown had been faked and planted. The British Science World was in an uproar. They had built whole careers and theories on these findings only to find out they were fraudulent.

There were many human faults revealed during the Piltdown Hoax. I believe that envy and selfish ambition were  faults that played the biggest role in this hoax. British scientists were extremely envious of the fact that while seemingly every country had begun to find evidence of early man, they had yet to find anything. This jealousy could have been what led to the hoax and what led to the immediate acceptance and praise of the Piltdown man findings, even with other countries skepticism. The mastermind's selfish ambition also played a large role in the hoax. Whoever was behind this hoax let their own needs and desires trump their ideals and morals and allowed them to fabricate a breakthrough scientific discovery that reflected badly on everyone. These faults negatively affected the scientific process because the scientists who had spent their lives and careers analyzing this findings began to doubt the accuracy of science. If the Piltdown fossils hadn't been tested again it could have gone undetected and if something like this had happened once whose to say it wouldn't happen again. 

Even with the negative aspects of the scientific process revealed, there will still many positive aspects of the scientific process revealed through the hoax. A positive scientific tool that was revealed was the fossil dating system. Fluorine analysis, which helped scientists discover that the Plitdown fossils were fraudulent, is an example of a fossil dating system. There are two types of fossil dating, there is relative fossil dating which just tells you that something is older or younger than something else, but it doesn't tell you much else. The other form of fossil dating is chronometric or absolute dating. Chronometric dating gives fossil age in an estimate in actual numbers of years.

While I think that it is possible to remove the "human" factor from science I would not want to remove humans from science. I think that there is room for error in every practice and that people make mistakes regardless and that's ok as long as we learn from the mistakes of the past. I think that science has grown from this hoax and that science have moved on and will continue to try to ensure that another Piltdown hoax does not occur again.

The lesson I learned from this story is to not take anyone's word at face value. Even if it appears to be true make sure the source is reliable and if you have any sort of inclination that the source is not reliable do not let your own selfish, whimsical ideals corrupt you to make questionable decisions.