Piltdown Hoax

In the early 1900s in Sussex, England, a piece of skull was dug up in by a laborer. He then passed it on to an amateur archaeologist named Charles Dawson who concluded the skull was very old. Dawson, excited with this find, proceeded on looking for fossils and anything else he could make a discovery with. He paired up with Sir Arthur Smith Woodward and eventually found a piece of a jawbone. However, this jawbone did not look human, but more of an ape jawbone that seemed to fit perfectly with the piece of the human skull he had discovered earlier. This, they though, might be the link to the missing link. Dawson and Woodward became heroes in Britain and their discovery had been termed, “the Piltdown Man”. More discoveries, like teeth, were made which caused more to believe this was a true missing link find. But in 1953, the world found out it was all just a hoax. A man named Kenneth Oakley applied a chemical test on the bones that dated the fossils and concluded that they were not as old as everyone had thought them to be. The teeth had been filed down and just so happened to, by luck, fit the jaw bone. He also concluded the skull was not an ape skull at all, but a skull of possibly an Orangutan. Scientists were in shock! They had been fooled for 40 years.

The biggest human faults that come into play here are the accusations and beliefs of the scientists. Charles Dawson and his fellow scientists that helped him to make these discoveries and no tested to see if this could actually work. Everything seemed to fit together nicely but there were no actual scientific testing that took place. By not forming hypotheses and tested experiments on the fossils and findings, this greatly affected the way the scientific process is performed.

Thanks to Kenneth Oakley, who concluded that the Piltdown Man was a hoax, the scientific process was used correctly. He used a chemical to test to the age of the fossils to find that they were not as ancient as Dawson and other scientists had perceived them to be. Also, in the Natural History Museum, tests revealed the nitrogen content of the fossils and found out the same thing Oakley found; the fossils were much younger than Dawson had perceived them to be. Oakley also gets the credit for finding the jaw to be that of an Orangutan and not that of an ape. “The fossils had been boiled and carefully stained with chemicals to give them an aged look. But the canine tooth, one of the key discoveries, seemed to have been made in a rush. It was crudely filed and colored with paint.” (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3202_hoax.html)

I do not believe it is possible to remove the human factor from science. There always has to be scientists to make these kinds of discoveries. However, I believe there are ways of preventing human error by being thorough and professional about your work. If Charles Dawson had performed scientific testing, experimenting and hypothesizing, then this mistake could have easily been prevented. He may not have become this big hero but in the end he would not have looked like a fool either.

When you take unverified sources, you can end up believing something that could be totally incorrect. This historical story, like all history, teaches us what happened in the past and how we can learn from it. We must all make sure that everything we read, hear, or see can be proved correct before we believe it. Scientists all over the world learned this as well.