The Piltdown Hoax: a Flaw of Man

In the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists in Britain fairly desperately tried to be the first to find a "missing link" between humans and apes in Great Britain not only to win the accolades of being the one to find it, but to also gain the international prestige for Great Britain as being a place that shared links to the origin of mankind, since as of yet they had none.

But in the early 1900s the remains of a skull fossil were found in the county of Sussex, England near a village called Piltdown by a worker who gave it to amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson. This led to a series of finds at the Piltdown site including tools and other prehistoric animals. Dawson, along with noted geologist Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, had spent a considerable amount of time digging through the site to find further evidence of what they deemed the earliest Englishman. Their work seemingly paid off when they found a piece of a jawbone similar to apes, but with human-like teeth that was considered a link to the early skull piece. From these finds, Dawson and Woodward introduced to the scientific community an ancestor to humans that was vastly different from specimens found elsewhere in the world, and boldly said that the origin of man was from Britain, and not France, Germany or Africa.

There were still skeptics, though, especially because of how broken the jawbone was, omitting any connection to the actual skull and having an absence of canine teeth. But a year later disbelief was somewhat subdued when Dawson, Woodward, and another amateur archaeologist, French philosopher and priest Teilhard de Chardin found a canine tooth at Piltdown that almost perfectly matched what they had proposed the size of the tooth would be. And even more amazingly, in 1917 Woodward announced their discovery of a second Piltdown man, turning previous theories on the origin of man upside down, given that it fit nowhere in the path of evolution that previously discovered fossils had already set.

But in 1953, the scientific world was turned upside down once again, when Professor Kenneth Oakley of the British Museum proved that the fossils found at Piltdown were fake. By using the method of relative dating through fluorine analysis, he and his team were able to test the amount of fluorine in the bone samples, intending to prove that the jawbone did not belong to the skull fragment, but also revealing that the bones didn't even belong to the same animal. Not only was the staining applied to the fossils to get them to match, but also the jawbone was that of a female orangutan or chimpanzee whose teeth had been filed down.

The embarrassment from this revelation stemmed from the fact that in its thirst to have such a discovery in its country, many renowned scientists in Great Britain never thought to inquire further about the facts of Piltdown, while the rest of the scientific world already seriously questioned its authenticity. The research of several scientists who studied evolution and had trusted this find implicitly was for naught; they were misled for near fifty years, searching down a path that was a complete dead-end and would get them nowhere.

It seems as though the main fault of Charles Dawson was his fervor to receive academic recognition, which may have been what caused him to falsify most of his findings (since after Piltdown, it was discovered that over 40 of his findings were hoaxes). But his fault of being too prideful and reputation obsessed is shared with the scientists of his country, whose similar eagerness and egotism allowed them to trust his findings without double checking everything first. I don't know what exactly caused them to make this error in judgment, but a simple test at the beginning would have shown that the teeth were filed down, or that the two fossils didn't belong together. The broad majority of scientists at this time seemed to take the word of other acclaimed scientists, spreading their agreement through word of mouth rather than through tests and retesting.

Although there was a huge blunder in Great Britain at this time because of human fault, I wouldn't want to remove the human factor from science. The humanness of this situation caused the mistake, yes, but it also caused the solution; and because we are human, we have learned from this complete oversight and it will never happen again. We're allowed to make mistakes, and I think that's the beauty in being human. Mistakes are what lead to learning, and the knowledge gained from that is invaluable. Plus, people's curiosity leads to even greater discoveries, and if we were without it, we may not learn anything new.

The real fix to this problem and the major lesson in this event is to verify everything that another person poses as fact before supporting it and including it as a part of a theory, or on a more applicable student level, before including it in any academic paper.