The Piltdown Hoax began in the early 1900’s in southeast England when a laborer unearthed a strange piece of skull. That piece of skull eventually made its way to Charles Dawson, a local amateur archaeologist. Through the work of Dawson and popular geologist, Arthur Woodward, the world was led to believe that they had found extremely primitive human remains that were thought to be the missing link in the evolutionary lines between man and ape. However, 40 years later, it was found that the Piltdown man was actually an aged orangutan skull from roughly 100,000 years ago, and it had been forged to resemble some sort of ancient fossil. Dawson died before it was proved to be a hoax, but still was the presumable culprit.
This hoax had an array of different effects on the scientific community. First and foremost, it led scientists to literally go through 40 years of studying false information. The scientific community would have made so much more progress had their attention not been focused on what was thought to be extremely pertinent information.
The most unsettling part of the Piltdown man Hoax was that it stemmed from the scientific community in the first place. Scientists have always been regarded as a fact based, unbiased group of people. It was very uncommon for things like this to happen as most scientists worked under the same goal, and that goal was finding the truth in different phenomenas. However, these scientists are human and are subjected to the same pressures and desires as the rest of us. Although the scientific method is usually what is followed to prevent these sort of things from happening, there are certain scientists who manipulate the scientific method so that their findings can be interpreted to coincide with their theory. There is a lot of pressure among scientists to make advancements and come out with groundbreaking findings. Arthur Keith for example, was an anatomist whose personal theory of evolution stated that primate brains evolved to its largest size prior to bipedal locomotion - and the Piltdown Man findings supported this theory to a Tee. Although we now know that Keith’s theory is false, this situation is a great example of the sort of motivators that might bring someone to doing this. I’m sure that, as a scientist, everyone wants their theories to be correct. However, this need for being right, this need for being successful and regarded as such, (that we all look for at some point in our lives) can end up being a fault in the scientific process because even though the scientific method is there to facilitate, it doesn’t facilitate the personal emotions of the scientists and can’t control the inherent biases that affect the information being USED in the scientific method.
The best part about the scientific community is that there are different focuses. Not all scientists specifically study evolution, chemistry, the brain, etc. Although the scientific community that focused on evolution may have gone through what could be considered a 40 year hiatus, the scientific community focusing on technology, continued to flourish. Thus, new tools for dating and analyzing fossils had been developed, and were used to determine that the skull was a fraud. They did this by measuring the fluorine content of the fossil itself in order to roughly be able to date it, and found that the fossil was only 100,000 years old.
I don't think there is any way to remove the human factor from science, but I do think there are ways to facilitate it. If you look at the Piltdown Man study, there was no widespread research done and barely anyone was allowed to even examine the artifacts. This idea of allowing a study to be widespread, allows for more eyes on the subject as well as more criticism. Had this been one of those widespread studies, I think someone down the line would have been able to identify the falsehoods. Even so, I wouldn’t want the human factor from science for two reasons. The first reason is because of curiosity I consider curiosity to be one of these “human” factors, and curiosity is the basis for even studying these things in the first place. The second reason is because science takes so much more than just facts in order to progress. It takes things like intuition and philosophical thinking as well in order to come up with creative ideas and different ways to look at things.
Again, the biggest issue with the entire Piltdown study was that it wasn’t analyzed on a large scale and thus, never made way for any verification of the artifacts, or how they were found. With that being said, if there is anything to take away from this whole thing, it's that one should always make a point to make sure that what you are analyzing is credible. This was a difficult situation because the fossil was found by people who were in the scientific community, a group of people whose statements are usually not questioned, but rather accepted as credible. Nevertheless, it just shows that you need multiple different sources to determine whether something is credible or not, not just one or two.
You've got the basics for your synopsis but there is a lot of important missing information and some points that need to be corrected.
ReplyDeleteFirst off, you used the term "missing link". The guidelines for this assignment explicitly explained that you could not use this term in your post and there are explanations for this in the assignment folder. Please make sure you go back to review that information so you understand the problem here.
So had Piltdown been a valid fossil find, what would it have taught us about how humans evolved? (EDIT: I do see that you discuss this later, but it should have been included in the initial synopsis.) One piece of significance is that this would have been the first hominid found on English soil, so the range of hominid migration had been expanded. Beyond that, it would have given us a better understanding of *how* humans evolved from that common ape ancestor, namely that the large brain evolved early in the process, before other hominid traits such as dentition and possibly bipedalism (Arthur Keith was a proponent of this theory). We now know this to be false, but that would have made a significant contribution to science at that time.
The skull was human and relatively modern. It was the jaw that was from a female orangutan.
How was this discovery received by the scientific community? Expand on this. And why did it take 40 years to uncover the hoax?
"...even though the scientific method is there to facilitate, it doesn’t facilitate the personal emotions of the scientists and can’t control the inherent biases that affect the information being USED in the scientific method."
Yes, but let's not ignore that it was the scientific method, particularly the testing and re-testing of the materials to re-evaluate conclusions, that eventually uncovered this hoax.
Your fault section is a good exploration of the interaction between scientists and the process of science, and I agree with the faults you identify that may well have encouraged scientists like Woodward and Keith to have accepted this discovery so quickly. But shouldn't this fault be extended to the scientific community in general? Someone, anyone, should have expressed the necessary scrutiny and demanded that the due process of science move forward with independent analysis of the fossil evidence. Why didn't this happen? Why, in particular, might British scientists might have been so enthusiastic over this find? Could national pride (a fault) come into play? You also seem to ignore the initial faults that would have led the actually perpetrators to create the hoax in the first place. Regardless of who the culprits were, why did they create this forged fossil?
Good discussion on the benefits of science that helped to uncover the hoax. Don't miss the key point, however, that these scientists were returning to a 40 year old discovery and re-testing the evidence. Why? Remember that science continued on throughout all of this and paleontologists were uncovering new fossil hominids that were contradicting the conclusions drawn from Piltdown. Piltdown no longer "fit" into the puzzle picture created by all of these other fossils and this indicated a problem. This ongoing re-testing and re-working and re-thinking of former conclusions is a core part of science that helped to eventually reveal this hoax.
Good discussion of the human factor. I agree with your conclusion.
Good life lesson.