Piltdown hoax - Essay

Mark Glen
9/25/2012
Anthro 101

      The Piltdown hoax was a great deception on the science world that occurred during the early end of the 1900's in Piltdown, East Sussex, England. An amateur archaeologist, Charles Dawson, had supposedly found artifacts of an earlier humanoid ancestor while digging in a gravel pit. He immediately began to construct a team of only the best scientists in that region; England's leading geologist Arthur Smith Woodward, French paleontologist Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and England's leading anatomist and Woodward's best supporter, Arthur Keith. Together, these men discovered what has become known as the Piltdown man. The Piltdown man was a fake all along, but it took the world of science 40 years to discover its fraud.

     Indeed, by nature, humans have faults and in this situation, many of them were displayed. Archaeologist Charles Dawson was a man who sought fame and notoriety, he wanted to be nationally recognized for his scientific contributions. So his self-interest was the fuel that propelled his drive and motives. It caused him to lie among his colleagues, cheat with artificially stained evidence, and deceive the entire science world. Though his "findings" were accepted at first, they were thrown out when science was proficient enough to properly and thoroughly check their genuineness.

     Finally, in 1949, when science had the appropriate tools to properly date fossils, a full analysis of the Piltdown man artifacts was conducted. Scientists began with Florine tests, which by measuring the Florine contents of fossils they'd be able to roughly estimate a date for them. They discovered that the jaw-bone was less than 100 years old and belonged to a female orangutan and not a human. It wasn't until a few years later in 1953 that they realized the bones were artificially stained, cut and shaped with a steel knife, and its teeth were filed down. A man named Martin Hinton who was a volunteer worker at the time had more bones in a trunk that were dyed the same way as the bones of the Piltdown man. Scientists were able to tell tell the parallel consistencies by engineering an identical process of dying other bones and producing the same result.

     The human-factors that cause errors such as the previously mentioned to occur, also cause tremendous discoveries for science. I believe it is impossible to entirely make the human-factor obsolete. They can definitely be reduced, however, they're naturally occurring passions. For instance; jealousy, persistence, desperation, and impatience all have the potential to drive motivation, but it's the individual that decides what path to steer the vehicle. So I would, as much as possible, try to reduce the human-factor.

     Taking data at face value with unverified sources can be very dangerous, especially in science. To be recognized as a reliable scientist source, you have to be prepared to present a sound argument for your discoveries, this means your claim must be able to support your conclusion and both must be falsifiable. An entire project can be disregarded or stopped altogether if the sources of data are unsustainable. My advice is, to make matters convenient on yourself, verify your sources and thoroughly analyze your experiments, because the facts and credibility depend on both the analysis and source verification.