Piltdown Hoax

1    On December 18, 1912, archaeologist Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum had announced a remarkable discovery. After three-years of excavation of the Piltdown gravel pit in Sussex, England, Dawson had dug out human-like skull fragments and a jaw with two teeth, along with animal fossils and primitive stone tools. Dawson and Woodward announced that one of the skulls and the jaw belonged to a human ancestor, who lived some 500,000 to 1 million years ago. The scientific community celebrated Dawson's discovery as the long-awaited "missing link" between ape and man and the confirmation of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. As time passed and new information began to be revealed, the Piltdown man findings started to not make sense. Today many think that Dawson was the hoaxer, but controversy continues. Some think that Dawson had helped to create this hoax from people like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a young priest who helped in the excavation. Others place the blame on a man by the name of Martin Hinton, an employee at the British Museum whom Woodward once refused a job. He had been drawn in to the number of suspects since a boxful of artificially stained bones that may have belonged to him were discovered in 1975. Even Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes novels, has been named as a possible suspect due to living near Piltdown.

3.      A group of researchers the British museum by the names of Kenneth Oakley, Wilfred Le Gros Clark, and Joseph Weiner ran test that prove the skull was fake. They used fluorine-based test to date the skull. With this test they were able to see that the upper skull was approximately 50,000 years old. The jawbone, however, was only a few decades old. A second test, using nitrogen analysis, confirmed the first test. They also found that the jaw had been artificially stained with potassium dichromate which made it appear older. The British Museum researchers argued that someone must have taken the jawbone and teeth of a modern ape, probably an orangutan, and stained them in order to make them appear much older then what they were. These artifacts, the jaw and skull fragments, must then have been planted at the Piltdown site.

4.      I do not believe that “human” factor can be removed from science. Simply because it takes humans to study science. Of course technology is very advance now but I believe technology is simply there to assist us.