What is the Piltdown hoax ? It was one of the biggest hoax to happen in the science world.It all begun on December 18, 1912 in the Southern English , in the town of Lewes in England in the village of Piltdown.A British amateur archaeologist one day he was digging in a gravel pitch what he had claimed to have found a piece of ancient human skull. He then invited a geologist by the name of Arthur Smith Woodward he was an English paleontologist , Known as a world expert in fossil fish.He worked in the Natural History Museum.Charles Dawson also invited Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was a French idealist philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontology and geologist.
The three of them made an astonishing finding at the gravel.They discovered a jaw bone a big discovery in England because it was never seen before, it didn't look like a human it looked like a jawbone of an ape.The holy grail of paleontology the connection between humans and apes.In December 1912 there was a meeting held of the royal geological society made the first public announcement of their findings.The human faults that come to play in this scenario is all these three men lied and deceived everyone. They deceived England this was huge in England they must have been disappointed, and the Scientist must be more disappointed because they thought they had to connection between humans and apes just to find out they been lied to.
After the discovery of the discovery of the jawbone some scientist were skeptical in 1949 they tested the fluorine content of the fossil and they discovered that the age of the fossil is less than 100 years of.They also discovered an artificial stone and the teeth had been filed on the fossil and in the end they found out that the fossil beloved to a female orangutan whose teeth had had been filed it will look like a human like teeth. Dawson also found many other fossils with the same artificial stain found in the Piltdown fossil. At the end the finding has been just a hoax and there was never a connection between humans and apes.
The positive aspect of this situation is that when the modern scientist were able to date the skull and developed a better technique so that they could avoid a fraud.The scientist use fluorine to determine the age of the object by trimming the duration of how long the object would absorb the fluorine and chemical that was able to show the stains.The human factor in these cases of the Piltdown should be able to removed because back then because the didn't have the technology back then. Unfortunately the human factor is reducing now with all the new technology we have now that are more accurate. The life lesson from this hoax is that we need more research before confirming something so big like this cause or saying anything to the public until you have at least more than 3 scientists confirming Charles was an amateur geologist for a reason.
Hi there!
ReplyDeleteGreat post, seems as though you got all the information, and it helped me better understand the videos.
Are you saying that dating fossils was the positive outcome of all of this? I could be mistaken, but when scientists revealed this hoax. We had already known how to moe accurately date fossils.
You have a lot of great information but a few things are a little incorrect.
ReplyDelete1. The culprit of the hoax is unknown, so which scientist deceived the scientific community is still up for grabs.
2.Fluoride testing wasn't discovered because of the hoax, it was used to discover the hoax.
You have a lot of good detail in your synopsis and do well to tell the story for your reader. Some clarification:
ReplyDelete"The holy grail of paleontology the connection between humans and apes."
Well, fossils like this do add onto the pile of evidence that confirms the connection between humans and non-humans apes (since humans ARE apes) but by this time it was less an issue of asking "if" humans and apes are related and asking instead "how" humans had evolved from that common ancestor with non-human apes. That "connection" you write of is another way of saying "missing link" and the information in the assignment modules explains why this concept is incorrect.
So what was the significance of this find if it was far beyond the simple "connection" between humans and non-human apes? In part, it was significant to find what was called the "first Englishman". Beyone that, had it been valid, Piltdown would have given us a better understanding of *how* humans evolved from that common ape ancestor, namely that the large brain evolved early in the process, before other hominid traits such as dentition and possibly bipedalism (Arthur Keith was a proponent of this theory). We now know this to be false, but that would have made a significant contribution to science at that time.
How was the discovery received by the scientific community? How was the fraud discovered? This should have been part of your synopsis.
"The human faults that come to play in this scenario is all these three men lied and deceived everyone."
Faults are human traits, not their actions. Faults would be things like greed or ambition or pride, which can cause people to lie and deceive, and this case may have caused them to create the hoax in the first place. Other than the culprits, can you find fault with anyone else? How about the scientific community? Why did they accept this find so readily without proper scrutiny? What might have inspired them (particularly the British scientists) to not do their jobs properly when it came to this particular fossil?
"After the discovery of the discovery of the jawbone some scientist were skeptical in 1949..."
Why did it take nearly 40 years for them to test the fossil? When did they become skeptical?
One of the bones, the jaw, was only 100 years old and was the jaw of an orangutan. The other was human and much older.
Can you describe the technology of the fluorine analysis? Who completed this test? How about the process of science itself? Why were scientists still studying this find some 40 years after it was uncovered? What aspect of science does that represent?
You seem to be assuming all factors are negative. Is that the case? Do humans bring nothing positive to the scientific process? How about curiosity, ingenuity and innovation? Could we even do science without these factors?
Okay on your life lesson but this was meant to be a personal life lesson for you, not just how science should proceed.