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© Copyright 2003, Jim Loy
In 1912 it was announced that the broken skull and jaw of a primitive pre-human had been discovered by Charles Dawson in the Piltdown rock quarry in Sussex, England. Some scientists were skeptical that the skull and jaw were from the same animal, as the skull seemed to be human, while the jaw seemed to be ape. Further discoveries (announced in 1917) of a second skull and the bones of other animals converted some skeptics. As time went on, Piltdown man became an anomaly which did not fit in with other fossils and bones around the world, and as such became relatively unimportant to the study of human history.
In 1949, fluorine content showed that the bones were relatively recent. Then in 1953, Piltdown man was shown to be a hoax. The skull was that of a modern human; the jaw was that of a modern orangutan. The bones had been stained to imitate great age. The teeth of the orangutan had been filed down to imitate the wear of human teeth. And the joining fragments, which would have shown that the skull and jaw did not really fit together, had probably been broken off and discarded. Like many hoaxes, it may have been perpetrated in fun, and later regretted.
Charles Dawson had died in 1916, and he was the main suspect in the hoax. There are other suspects, including Teilhard de Chardin (a famous paleontologist and priest) who participated in some of the discoveries. The hoax had not been discovered earlier because most scientists involved only studied plaster casts of the original fossils which were locked away in the British Museum.
Is Piltdown man a failure of science, or an weird aberration that will never happen again. The truth is that fraud will happen in all segments of human society, including science. It may be rare, but it is important. And error is also important in science. But, in science, error does lead to truth eventually, for error will raise questions which demand answers. Science gives us few absolute truths. Scientists hedge almost every statistic with a plus or minus probable error. And yet, science gets closer and closer to absolute truths, much closer than do other methods. The Piltdown hoax is important in the history of science, as an amusing sidetrack, but mostly as an example of how science corrects its errors.
See The Scientific Method and N-Rays.