Piltdown Hoax

The Piltdown man hoax was a fossil skull found in Piltdown a village on England which it was said to be the missing link between apes and humans since it seemed to have human teeth but an ape jaw. A laborer found a strange piece of skull which it was passed to Charles Dawson. The Piltdown man hoax was a devastating thing for scientist and they thought it was a horrible and nasty basically a vicious piece of art. The hoax was created to gain credibility it was a selfish way of thought since this discovery only harmed the research instead of helping, because it was made up. Two scientists collaborated on this discovery of the so call missing link one of them was Charles Dawson and also Sir Arthur Smith Woodward. These two scientists took advantage of Britain’s desperation on finding fossils of early human presence because they wanted to gain credibility and be recognized for the discovery.

                The Piltdown man hoax was a selfish piece of art made by a creative scientist. This skull made some things clear of “the missing link” since it was said to be par ape and part human. What scientist did not do was to inspect the skull and to learn more from it, sure they did not have carbon dating or radiometric dating to learn how old the skull was, but the one thing they had the means to do it look at the teeth which was one of the breaking point in knowing that was an ape skull. What also was not right to do is keeping the skull away from everyone and keeping it at the museum because if the scientist from the natural museum in Britain would have let other scientist give their opinion on the skull then there would not have been any confusion as in what kind of skull it was. What also seemed to happen was that because Britain wanted to also have early signs of human presence they did not wanted to research the skull any further.

                With a series of chemical test applied by Kenneth Oakley to help authenticate and date the fossils (radiometric dating) which revealed that the fossil was much younger than expected. In the mineral department test were carried out to determine the content of nitrogen. The skull seemed to be older than it was because it was stained. Another factor that contributed to this case was when they found out that the teeth were boiled and carefully filed down to look human like then paint colored to give that age look. And one of the canine teeth which were made in a rush was partially suspicious which lead to the investigation of the others.

                It is not possible to remove the human factor from science to reduce the chance of errors. If humans were to be removed from this chain then how would we know where we’ve come from? There are proof that humans and apes shared a common ancestor which indeed seems to be part human and part ape the so call “missing link”. Also in order for us humans to evolve from apes there had to be early signs of human traits on apes otherwise we could not have evolved from humans. In order for us to share a common ancestor we need to have a great amount of similar physical attributes.

                What I have learned from this is that I should not rely on unverified resources because even though I might have what I need for my research it might not be true. What I also learned is that any information given must be verified by many people because it might end up being fake.