Piltdown Man

The Piltdown Man

Fifty years after Darwins publication of The Origins of Species there was still no evidence of humans and apes being related. In Germany bones that resembled humans had been found that they named them Neanderthal, shortly after they found remains in France and Spain as well. The British were annoyed that they had not discovered anything. Then in 1912 Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward introduced what was nicknamed "the earliest Englishman” ("The Boldest Hoax." N.p., n.d. Web) also known as Piltdown man. “It was the proof of Darwin's theory” ("The Boldest Hoax." N.p., n.d. Web.).

            Charles Dawson was an armature archeologist who first discovered the Piltdown man in Piltdown, England. Dawson was digging in a gravel pit and claimed to have found a piece of an ancient human skull. He then invited Arthur Smith Woodward a leading geologist and a French paleontologist to join him in his dig where they found other ancient pieces such as stone tools and animal bones that implied that the site was more than a million years old. After Dawson’s death in 1916 no more fossils were found.

            The Piltdown man had a huge impact on the scientific community as it lead scientist down the wrong path. It favored Dawsons and a man named Arthur Keith’s idea that the humans brain size had evolved before they evolved there upright position. For the next decade the Piltdown man dominated research and then in 1920 ancient remains were found in Asia and Africa that dated 100,000 years after the Piltdown man, but the skull looked less human not more with a bigger brain size.

            The Piltdown man Hoax was discovered after World War 2 when new tests were developed that you can date by testing the fluorine content, the Piltdown man turned out to date just from 100,000 years ago. Furthermore in 1953 the first set of full tests were conducted proving that the jawbone was less than 300 years old and it was in fact from a female orangutan. A piece of the front jaw had been broken off that gave away big clues that it was an ape jaw bone piece. Also the teeth had been filed down to look flatter like human molars and the canines had been filed down as well showing still the texture from where they filed them.

            The human faults that came into play were that everyone suspected that the Piltdown man was a hoax but people were too afraid to say anything. There ego also got in the way from being honest about things because they wanted to believe that England was a place where humans inhabited millions of years ago. The Natural History museum allowed very few outsiders to view the artifacts, which raised speculation if the pieces had been forged. There could have been more examination to the pieces maybe even comparing them to other ape jaw bone pieces. People had been saying that the pieces looked at if they didn’t belong together. With this false information on the evolution of humans, scientists were lead down the wrong path as to how humans evolved. Scientist were lead to believe that the brain size evolved before bipedal walking in humans. This also confused scientist when they later found a real hominine fossil and were confused to where it fit because it dated after the Piltdown man fossil yet the size of the skull was much smaller.

            I don’t feel like it would be possible to remove the human factor from science. It’s not something that can really be done without people. We need scientists thinking out side the box to come up with new ideas. Removing humans from a situation like this would not reduce the chances of error. Not jumping to conclusion and accepting the first thing you hear because it might be what you want to believe would make a difference. The life lesson that I learned from this article was to form my own opinions on things and not assume what’s right because someone says so.