Piltdown man

The Piltdown Hoax was an archaeological find that was located near Piltdown village in Sussex, England. This discovery was found in Pleistocene gravel beds by a laborer who later gave it to an archaeologist named Charles Dawson in 1912. This fossil would have provided us with a new branch of the evolutionary tree and might have given us a view of an early common ancestor or a species that branched off from the evolutionary tree. The fossil would have provided us with mankind's earliest ancestor and a connection between humans and apes. This discovery proved that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was right. This also gave scientists the idea that our earliest ancestors weren’t actually from Africa but from England. Even though it was considered a crown jewel within the Natural History Museum, many people still had their doubts still. The hoax was uncovered within the museum by a man named Kenneth Oakley, who used a chemical test in order to help authenticate and date the fossil but to his surprise, the Piltdown man was younger than expected. Then a separate test was taken place within the mineral department to estimate the nitrogen content and they found that the fossil wasn’t as old, the skull was stained, and the teeth were filed down. After the hoax, many scientists who built their careers upon this discovery lost their credibility as scientists and this was also embarrassing for the British sciences.

The fault within this hoax has to be greed and the desire to become famous. Charles Dawson created this hoax in order to get his name out there within the scientific community in Britain and gain recognition and credibility as an archaeologist. He was considered one of the foremost amateur antiquarians during his time. This allowed him to present things to the Royal Society, Antiquarian Society, and British Museum directly. These presentations gave him credibility as an archaeologist and a scientist. I think that this negatively impacted the scientific process because without even analyzing the skull or doing research to date it, people believed that this was our earliest common ancestor without proof but the testimony of several people.

The positives of the scientific process that proved this to be a fraud were observations as well as experimentation. Without the chemical test, the age of the skull wouldn’t have been reached.  Without the microscope, scientists wouldn’t have been able to see the grind marks on the teeth.

I think that it is possible to take out the human factor within science so that something like this doesn’t happen again because we are able to make mistakes as well as skew data but with machinery, we can have precise and true date. I personally wouldn’t take away the human factor because without our intuition and creativeness we wouldn’t be living the way we are in society and constantly making new breakthroughs in technology.

I learned that you should never take the words of others as factual until you researched and determined if what they are saying is either true or false. Even though what they are saying might be true it is always important to do extra research and come to a conclusion by yourself.