Piltdown Hoax

       During the early 1900s in Sussex, England a laborer digging near the village of Piltdown found what seemed to be a piece of fossilized skull and passed it on to Charles Dawson, an (amateur) archaeologist.  Dawson thought this skull to be a primitive, human skull so he took to the Natural History Museum and met up with Sir Arthur Smith Woodward. Woodward and Dawson spent the summer of 1912 digging and eventually found what seemed to be a jawbone with a few human-like teeth included that the men thought to be related to the piece of skull the laborer presented to Dawson; they had found the "missing link" (or so they thought). Some scientists started to wonder if the skull and jawbone were related and if it was really in fact "the earliest Englishman". One crucial part of the "Piltdown Man" was missing, the canine tooth, which would help prove Dawson's claims so a year later Dawson, Woodward, and now another man Teilhard de Chardin went back to digging and very luckily found a canine. The canine forced doubters to believe and in 1917, just a few miles from the first dig, a second "Piltdown Man" was found by Dawson and the men. 

        Then, in 1953, the Piltdown Man was announced as a fake. Kenneth Oakley from the Natural History Museum applied a chemical test to the fossils to help date them and from this he found that the Piltdown Man was much younger than originally thought. The skull had been stained with chemicals and boiled to make it look aged, the teeth had been filed down as a disguise, and the canine was painted and filed. What scientists had was essentially an old ape jawbone with no real significance, everything found at Piltdown was forged and phony. Dawson, Woodward, and Chardin were initially suspects but attention was soon turned to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Sherlock Holmes creator, as the main suspect and he only lived a few miles away from the inital dig site. He was a medical scientist that specialized in fossils and frequented the dig site with Dawson. His motive is thought to be because of his belief in spiritualism (communicating with the dead) that led to his falling out with scientific community, perhaps he wanted to show them who the fools really were. Conan Doyle was thought to be a decent man, not the kind to allow so many lives to be wasted on this hoax, so attention turned back to Dawson who was labeled a "cheat" in the community after his untrustworthy move of purchasing the Castle Lodge and forcing the Sussex Archaeological Society out. Many of Dawson's other findings such as Chinese pottery were revealed as forgeries. No one in the scientific was pleased about this, it was an outrage, so much time and effort wasted on a joke.

        The biggest human fault that comes into play here is trustworthiness, scientists were too trusting of these finds. Everyone believed these to be real fossils and interpreted them to be the "missing link" which is a tall accusation to make and believe. Had someone had the bravery to truly question this and to test it sooner, as much as technology would allow at the given time, the answers would have been found much sooner and this mess could have been avoided. Scientists were so busy believing in the hype that no one was curious enough about it meaning that no one spent enough time making sure the findings were authentic. The positive aspects that revealed the skull as a fraud were research and verification. Curiosity plays a positive role here because Oakley set out to authenticate the fossils by doing a chemical test and this revealed "Piltdown Man's" real age. The mineral department at the Natural History of Museum completed tests to determine the nitrogen content of the fossils and this revealed all the tricks used to forge the fossils including the shaving down of the teeth and the staining of the fossils. 

      I don't think it is possible to remove the "human" factor from science because machines and technology alone cannot operate science, humans are necessary. I think the scientific community should be a bit more cautious with findings and studying them in depth before trusting them but humans can't be eliminated completely. Humans are needed to excavate findings, a machine could never do that, and to find and report important information such as forming hypotheses and proving theories. The combination of scientific technology and humans is what will prevent us from falling victim to such a hoax once again; that is, after all, how the hoax was proved false in the first place. Humans and technology rely on each other equally to dole out the most efficient findings and responses. The life lesson I can take from this incident, is to not blindly take information and to always research it first to obtain the validity of it. Finding the source of information given and making sure it is credible is a large part of science and life in general.