the Piltdown Hoax and the Search for Fact Amongst the Rubble

    The Piltdown man was discovered in 1912 in Great Britain. It was discovered by Charles Dawson, along with Sir Arthur Smith Woodward and a priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The Piltdown man was thought to be the oldest humanoid fossil ever discovered, and based on a jawbone that featured flat teeth like those of a modern human, but was in the shape of an ape jawbone. It was heralded as not only the “missing link,” but also as the earliest Englishman. Following the find, the National History Museum in London and the Royal Geological Society fell over themselves in support of the find, and in particular, Sir Arthur Keith, a leading anatomist and anthropologist in England, felt that the fossils proved that the Piltdown man validated his theories regarding human evolution. Cranial fossils found near the jawbone seemed to prove that our ancestors evolved large brains before they became bipedal (this turned out to be false).

    However, eventually new finds were found in other places on earth that looked much younger than the Piltdown man, but were much less evolved than the fossils found by Watson. This inconsistency threw up red flags and scientists began to question the validity of the Piltdown man fossils. Following WWII, scientist performed fluorine tests which showed the samples were much younger than originally thought. They then looked at the teeth and the broken segments of the jaw, and determined that they had been manually worn down using steel knives and files. Using carbon dating, they discovered that the jawbone was actually less than 100 years old. It was discovered to have belonged to a female orangutan. This forgery ended up setting the scientific community back with years of time wasted at the sites in Piltdown and nearby Sheffield Park (where a second Piltdown man was “uncovered” by Dawson), and raised many ethical questions about the faith we have with geological finds.

   The reality is that scientists are people, and people are inherently flawed. The perpetrator of this hoax defrauded the scientific community and humanity at large. Some of the suspects include Dawson (the chief suspect), his colleagues Woodward and Teilhard de Chardin, and a man named Martin Hinton who worked at the Natural History Museum under Woodward. Woodward continued to work at the sight for decades after the death of Dawson and found nothing more to prove the existence of the Piltdown man, and because of this, it is unlikely he perpetrated the fraud. Teilhard de Chardin may have known the fossils were a hoax, but was not at the sight long enough to be a true suspect. The two most likely suspects then are Dawson and Hinton. Hinton was said to have resented Woodward and may have created the hoax to discredit him. Also, following Hinton’s death, stained and filed bones were found in a trunk in his room that were very similar in style and appearance to the Piltdown fossils. He certainly had the knowledge and skill to perpetrate the hoax as the head of the paleontology department at the Natural History Museum. However, some believe the bones were his attempt at trying to discover how the process was done so that he could expose the hoax. Dawson is the most likely suspect since he had the most to gain, and was also the one most involved in the findings (which mysteriously stopped appearing after his death). Dawson was affected by greed, pride and a desire to be important and noticed in the scientific community. These desires may have led to him deceiving the scientific community, and ultimately the world, so that he would be deemed important. While not necessarily a chief suspect, Sir Arthur Keith is also guilty of exploiting the find to further his own agenda. He pushed the idea that the Piltdown man proved his theories of human evolution, and thus made him even more powerful and distinguished in the community. The irony is that his greatest legacy is built on a lie. The last culprit is not a person, but a group. The English community (desperate to find ancient human ancestors in Britain) was blinded by nationalistic fervor. Rather than let the find explain itself through examination and study, they made it fit into their own agenda and failed to see the hoax for what it was, and were blinded by its potential to fulfill their own desires.

    If anything good came out of the Piltdown hoax, it showed that the scientific method works. One of the most important parts of the scientific method is the submission of findings for peer review and testing and retesting hypothesis. The scientists who performed the fluorine tests on the fossils performed due diligence and refused to simply accept the findings as fact. They helped to uncover that something was wrong with the find. The other scientists who put the fossils (literally) under the microscope and looked for flaws were able to find the evidence of artificial interference on the fossils and finally, the scientists who dated the bones and discovered their true age helped to end the hoax. They all performed admirably, and shed light on the failings of their predecessors, who simply took the evidence at face value.

     The only way to eliminate the human factors from science is to increase the number of scientists who can test the theories. When only one person or select group of people gets to study an artifact or fossil, then they can put their own agenda first and the “truth” second. In the case of the Piltdown man, the fossils were kept hidden away from the scientific public, and nobody could test them and check their validity. By opening up the fossils to more scrutiny, their true nature was discovered and the hoax was exposed. Human flaws will always creep into research, as we all have personal biases and agendas to promote, but by opening our work up to criticism and correction, we can whittle down the effects of those biases on the value of our work.

    In all things, be they politics, scientific discoveries, or economic proposals, one should always exercise a healthy combination of cynicism and optimism. Though, this sounds like an oxymoron (which it basically is), I mean to say that one should never take something simply at face value. We can hope that something is true, or that we have discovered something important, or that something will greatly improve our lives, but we owe it to ourselves and to the community to go in with a critical mind, and try to find weaknesses and ways to improve the concept or finding. Ultimately, the failing of the scientific community in England to truly investigate the Piltdown man and express any doubts publicly led to decades of waste and forced many to doubt the sincere efforts of the scientific community at large. If scientific theories are to be taken seriously, we must be critical and unyielding in our search for fact.