Piltdown Hoax Blog Post
1.) In 1912, a small village in England, Piltdown was given its first look at ancient human fossils, more specifically the human skull of our ancestors. Amateur archeologist Charles Dawson claimed to have found a piece of an ancient human skull. Dawson and other lead scientists at the time made more finds at the gravel pit, then presented their findings to The Natural History Museum. People in the 1900s were fooled along with various other lead scientists for almost 40 years before the truth had come out about the scandal. They deemed the "ancient fossil" Piltdown Man. Piltdown Man, if it weren't a scandal, would have taught us what our ancient ancestors evolved from and why we are the way we are today. It would've given knowledge on brain size and facial structures that we either have now or don't have anymore. If this was not forged, it would have connected humans to apes and established where humans stand in nature. This scandal had many people that could have contributed to it's forgery, making it very hard to trust findings at the time or trust scientists who could have been closely related to the scandal. In 1953, Kenneth Oakley applied a chemical test to show the age and authenticity of the Piltdown Man fossils, but the results showed that the findings were much younger than previously claimed to be. The Scientific Community was in ruins and many felt the need to seek out who falsified the remains of our ancient ancestor.
2.) The human faults that came into play were the amount of egotism, pride, ambition, and rivalry that caused many to be either naive to the forged fossil or that caused someone to forge such a significant find. Egotism caused great scientists to completely ignore the small details of the fossil like the filed teeth or the strange look. The pride of the Charles Dawson caused him not to second guess his findings along with the other great scientists who looked at it. The ambition caused Charles Dawson to force the findings upon the Natural History Museum either on purpose due to the forgery or by mistake because he was so passionate about his work and the search for this connection with other species. The rivalry of scientists in the quest to look for something new and amazing caused many to struggle to find that connection before others, showing forgery as a formidable option.
3.) The positive aspects of the scientific process is that there is always someone trying to prove things wrong in order to show the full truth about a discovery or idea. Because Kenneth Oakley wanted to know the exact age of the skull, he falsified the forgery. This then leads to other scientist being given a chance at discovering the same thing.The Chemical test on the bones would have either proved that the skull was authentic in its age or would have proven the bones to be newer. Because Charles Darwin was able to see the skull and claim that it looked like an orangutan skull, the process of science could continue. People could then take the look of the skull and compare it to other skulls of other species to see if they match up identically.
4.) It is not possible to removed the human factor from science to reduce the chance of errors because for now, only humans can truly dictate and correlate objects. I wouldn't say it's impossible, because technology is still advancing, but for now it is not possible. I think if we removed the human factor from science, we would lose a lot of authenticity, and people would be more naive thinking that the computer or technology can never be wrong. The human factor can check their own work or can cause others to check their work, but when a calculator calculates something, it doesn't speculate if the answer is right. It assumes so because it was programmed for that. I think the human aspect causes many great discoveries because humans are the ones asking the questions.
5.) I can see that the life lesson from this is to always ask questions regardless of how solid a piece of evidence may seem. I think that if someone is going to give you something, such as a certain claim, you should always ask why and try to understand instead of just agreeing with that person. I learned from this that someone should always check your work when displaying huge amounts of information because you could get caught up on something completely off-topic or difficult to comprehend. Never take information at face value because you never know if the person you are speaking to is telling the full truth or if they are uninformed. It is important to know your sources for information whether it is personal experience or word of mouth, you can't really just trust what people say.
2.) The human faults that came into play were the amount of egotism, pride, ambition, and rivalry that caused many to be either naive to the forged fossil or that caused someone to forge such a significant find. Egotism caused great scientists to completely ignore the small details of the fossil like the filed teeth or the strange look. The pride of the Charles Dawson caused him not to second guess his findings along with the other great scientists who looked at it. The ambition caused Charles Dawson to force the findings upon the Natural History Museum either on purpose due to the forgery or by mistake because he was so passionate about his work and the search for this connection with other species. The rivalry of scientists in the quest to look for something new and amazing caused many to struggle to find that connection before others, showing forgery as a formidable option.
3.) The positive aspects of the scientific process is that there is always someone trying to prove things wrong in order to show the full truth about a discovery or idea. Because Kenneth Oakley wanted to know the exact age of the skull, he falsified the forgery. This then leads to other scientist being given a chance at discovering the same thing.The Chemical test on the bones would have either proved that the skull was authentic in its age or would have proven the bones to be newer. Because Charles Darwin was able to see the skull and claim that it looked like an orangutan skull, the process of science could continue. People could then take the look of the skull and compare it to other skulls of other species to see if they match up identically.
4.) It is not possible to removed the human factor from science to reduce the chance of errors because for now, only humans can truly dictate and correlate objects. I wouldn't say it's impossible, because technology is still advancing, but for now it is not possible. I think if we removed the human factor from science, we would lose a lot of authenticity, and people would be more naive thinking that the computer or technology can never be wrong. The human factor can check their own work or can cause others to check their work, but when a calculator calculates something, it doesn't speculate if the answer is right. It assumes so because it was programmed for that. I think the human aspect causes many great discoveries because humans are the ones asking the questions.
5.) I can see that the life lesson from this is to always ask questions regardless of how solid a piece of evidence may seem. I think that if someone is going to give you something, such as a certain claim, you should always ask why and try to understand instead of just agreeing with that person. I learned from this that someone should always check your work when displaying huge amounts of information because you could get caught up on something completely off-topic or difficult to comprehend. Never take information at face value because you never know if the person you are speaking to is telling the full truth or if they are uninformed. It is important to know your sources for information whether it is personal experience or word of mouth, you can't really just trust what people say.
I really enjoyed reading your post I think you wrote it very well and it was full of information. I did notice that in the beginning you wrote that the people who believed Dawson were fooled. I feel like a different word could have been used. I don’t exavtly agree and think that they were fooled I feel like they just took the information that they had and went with it. I feel like if they were truly fooled then they wouldn’t have found a reason 40 years later to test the findings. I did like what you were about the life lesson. I do believe that we should always ask questions no matter how solid the information is.
ReplyDeleteOverall, good synopsis, but I need to make some corrections on the issue of 'significance'. You offer a lot of possible points on significance, with some being correct and some not. Let's go through them:
ReplyDelete"...taught us what our ancient ancestors evolved from and why we are the way we are today"
Partially. It would have given us some insight into how we evolved, but it was only going to be a brief snapshot in time.
"It would've given knowledge on brain size and facial structures that we either have now or don't have anymore."
Yes! This is closest to the key point here. Piltdown was characterized by large cranium combined with other more primitive, non-human traits, suggesting that the larger brains evolved relatively early in hominid evolutionary process. We now know this to be incorrect, that bipedalism evolved much earlier with larger brains evolving later, but Piltdown suggested that the "larger brains" theory, supported by Arthur Keith (one of the Piltdown scientists) was accurate.
"it would have connected humans to apes and established where humans stand in nature."
No. Piltdown, had it been valid, would NOT have demonstrated a link between humans and apes. First of all, humans ARE apes, but beyond that, Piltdown would have been a branch on the hominid family tree. It would have had nothing to say about the connection between humans and non-human apes. It didn't go back that far in evolutionary time.
One other comment on the synopsis...
"The Scientific Community was in ruins..."
It certainly did some damage, but this is a little over the top. Easy on the exaggeration.
Great discussion on faults, addressing both the faults of the culprits and the faults of the scientific community.
From the section on the positive aspects of science:
"Because Charles Darwin was able to see the skull and.."
??? Was this typed in error? Darwin was long dead by the time this hoax was uncovered. Even if you meant "Dawson", he was also not longer alive at this time.
Can you describe the actual scientific test that was used to provide evidence of this hoax? Also, what made scientists come back and retest Piltdown? What was happening in paleoanthropology in those 40 years that pushed them to re-examine this find? What aspect of science does that represent?
"I think the human aspect causes many great discoveries because humans are the ones asking the questions."
You are on the right track here but needed to extend this thinking. Do humans only contribute negative aspects to the scientific process? Do they bring anything positive to the process that you would not want to lose? Could we even do science without the curiosity in humans that push them to ask those initial questions? Or their ingenuity to create tests of their hypotheses? Or the intuition that helps them draw connections and conclusions from disparate pieces of information?
Good life lesson.
You do well in describing what the Piltdown Hoax actually was in your first paragraph. Just as a comment above says, I don't agree that the people and scientists were FOOLED by the artifacts because if they were they wouldn't have had doubts to test the authenticity later on.
ReplyDeleteAs for the human faults, you gave an abundance of them. Those of which I find are all apart of human nature and they clearly influenced the hoax significantly. The egotism portion you touched up about the scientists not bothering to check the teeth was spot on and because of this, they had to wait 40 years to see the authenticity of the artifacts.
You were very descriptive with the way to talked about the scientific processes used. You explained how all of these methods were used to show the full truth about a discovery or idea. And I agree with your statements about the human factor in science. Without it, we would lose lots of authenticity which in turn would make many claims not as viable. Later, when technology is more advanced we will be able to take out the human factor.
Your life lesson is closely related to the one the I posted. Always ask questions and don't always believe what you first see. A great rule to always live by.