The Piltdown Man Hoax

1. The Piltdown Hoax was an event in the early 20^th century where fossils were discovered in a gravel pit in Piltdown, East Sussex, England. These fossils were allegedly the fossils belonging to the previously unknown early human. The one man most responsible for making this discovery was Charles Dawson. This was monumental in that time for the development of evolutionary theory because the Piltdown Man was believed to be the missing link between apes and humans in the fossil record. Evidence arose after Dawson’s death that revealed this discovery to be hoax and the fossils to be false. This is highly unfortunate for that time because much other real fossil evidence was overlooked in light of the Piltdown findings, effectively leading evolutionary study down a fake trail that exposed the vulnerability of honest scientists.

The excitement that surrounded such a monumental discovery could have been one of the main reasons there was no intense scrutiny of the find in the years following the discovery. However, once the scientific community decided to test the veracity of the find, they found that the bones were from three different species (human skull fragments, an orangutan jaw, and a chimpanzee tooth) that had been dyed and modified by filing and other methods. The scientific community was obviously not thrilled about the truth of the Piltdown finds, and they realized that there is now the possibility for someone to come into their community of honesty with lies and deception—something that had not been experienced before. Scientists were known to be eager minds searching for more and this event exposed the fault of human desire misplaced.

2. The human faults that came into play in the Piltdown findings were one man’s (or group’s) desire to elevate himself or his own discovery to the upper echelons of recognition, instead of working diligently to advance the science itself. This fault hurt the advancement of evolutionary study because it was a lie that led the whole community down a trail with a dead end. Humans can at times be incredibly selfish, desiring only to be famous or otherwise, and the scientific community was not invincible to such pitfalls.

3. The positive aspect of the scientific process that revealed the fossils to be false was testing. Peer review has always been one of the most foolproof ways that the scientific community has verified the work of peers in order to discover truth through science instead of arriving at bogus conclusions, like those drawn from the Piltdown fossils. Once skeptic scientists finally got their hands on the Piltdown fossils in order to apply advanced dating techniques unlike those present at the discovery of the fossils, the fakes were found to be mere centuries old—not hundreds of thousands or a million as purported by initial reports.

4. It is never truly possible to remove the “human” element from something that is exclusively done by humans. The scientific process is also somewhat predicated on the human desire to discover more about the world in which we live. Despite the whole of scientific study coming so far in recent history, it seems to be that the more we know, the more we understand we know almost nothing, and we drive towards knowing even more. The competitive element that drives some humans to lie and cheat other honest people exists almost everywhere and one of the best ways to combat this is already built into the scientific process—peer review. Having your peers check your work for you, especially those with no ties to you, is one of the best ways to insure that your work is legitimate. Your peers will be less biased towards the conclusions because they do not have any stake in the study being true; they will be able to see faults that you yourself cannot sometimes see. So, then, overall, the human element may never be removed from the scientific process, but I am not entirely sure if that is even a bad thing.

5. From this event, we can learn that we should be skeptic of information from unknown sources. Even if we are in what seems to be an honest circle of people, there remains the possibility for someone to want to get ahead and lie to get there. For any source that is unknown or unfamiliar it is always best to determine the ethos of the source and whether or not it can be trusted. If the source is not credentialed in the field they are speaking into, or are unrecognized by the majority of credible scholars, it might be wise to search for information elsewhere, no matter how tempting it may be to accept. Even for sources of information that are marginally recognized by a community, it is still wise to make sure that this source is actually doing legitimate work, and not working towards advancing a personal perspective, e.g.: only publishing information that drives towards this perspective.