Piltdown Man Hoax

The Piltdown Hoax began in 1912 near the southern English town of Louis, in the tiny village of Piltdown. These supposedly ancient bones were found by amateur Archaeologist Charles Dawson. This hoax had scientists fooled for over forty years, because they were not allowed to perform tests on the fossil's which would have proven, they were fake. This hoax caused a rather large set back in the scientific community, because now people wondered how we could be sure of age, if it was so easy to fool a scientist by staining bones. Some citizens most likely wondered if scientists themselves foraged evidence of evolution to further their own careers.

The hoax itself was discovered after World War Two, when a new technology was created which allowed the use of fluorine measuring to date fossils. It was soon after they discovered not only were the bones not very old, they were also stained, and not human. The fluorine test was conducted in 1949 to test the age of the bones. The test revealed the bones to be rather young, maybe only about a hundred thousand years old, but they were not finished testing them yet. Finally in 1953 Scientists were able to conduct a full scale analysis on the Piltdown man bones.  This is when they discovered that the staining on the bones was fake.

They also discovered that the jaw bone was not human, but instead a female orangutan, who's teeth had been sanded down prior to being found, so it would seem human. This jawbone was also less than one hundred years old.  Pieces of the jawbone that would have shown it did not fit with the skull had been purposely broken off. The skull itself was human, but not the jaw. Scientists were stunned by the realization that they had been tricked.

Being human we do all have faults, the faults seen here are greed and selfishness. These faults caused someone to forge information that set scientists back quite a bit. Someone wanted money or wanted their theory to be recognized, so they set up a scenario that would make it so. These faults caused people to be less eager to accept scientific advances as they could not be sure that scientists were trustworthy anymore. Some also questioned what all a scientist could possibly know, if they were fooled so easily. There is also the fault of an eagerness to learn that for some scientists over ran their feelings of distrust and the need for absolute proof.

The positive human faults were that because scientists were curious, when things began to become confusing, they dug deeper. As technology grew and allowed them to be more thorough, they discovered more and more that did not add up in this hoax. Through the use of fluoride testing, microscopes, and full scale analysis. All three put together they found the actual date of the bones, how they had been fooled, and the actual origin of the jaw bone, which was not human at all, even though the skull was human.

You cannot remove the "human" aspect from science, because all scientists are human. Perhaps in the future we might theoretically create robots who can conduct science, but even then they were created by humans and are essentially ran by humans as well. I personally do not believe we could ever or should ever remove the human aspect from science. Humans may have faults, but these faults do not always run who we are and what we are capable of. This hoax was a major set back scientifically, but it also led to knowledge on how to prevent future hoaxes like this one from happening.

The life lesson I would take from this is to never let your eagerness for learning get in the way of making sure the facts add up like they should. Never be in such a hurry to accept something that you forget to thoroughly check out all the details first. While I believe even if the scientists had been more careful, currently they did not have the technology which would have fully proven the fossils to be fake, not to mention how the fossils were kept tightly locked up to prevent what little testing was possible at that time.