1. The Piltdown Hoax began in 1912 when a man named Charles Dawson was believed to have discovered an ancestor of humans in Piltdown village near Sussex, England. The significance of the find is that the discovery would suggest is that humans had evolved directly from apes which we know now to be untrue. Humans and apes share a common ancestor but each underwent their own evolutionary processes. The big idea here is that the fossils proved were those of an apelike hominid yet showed proof of a larger brain similar to a humans. Therefore the findings were evidence that the human brain evolved long before previously thought. What eventually happened to Dawson's find was that it was proven a hoax in the 1950s. The remains that Dawson found were forged to be something they were not and he managed to fool some of the top minds in their respective fields that they were real (Smith Woodward and Author Keith). This caused a whole line of scientific work to be done based on the fact that the discovery was true when in the end it was not and the work done in that span of ten years was set back to the start. To this day we are not sure if Dawson knew the truth about the fossils or if he too was fooled but the effects of the false discovery remain the same. (Fossils originally found at the site included a jaw bone, skull fragments, teeth, and tools. The jaw bone and teeth came from an orangutan and the cranium came from a small brained human modern human.)
2. I think the humane traits at fault here were that too many people wanted the evidence to be true therefore did not question the findings to the extent they should have been questioned. At the time the technology we had obviously was not as good as the technology used to ultimately disprove the findings, but there should have been more testing done nonetheless before declaring the discovery true. It can be argued that a big reason for immediate acceptance is that the discoveries were accepted quickly by top names in Woodward and Klein and if those two men accepted it then they must be true in the eyes of many other scientific figures at the time. The fact that this discovery fulfilled the "missing link" in its theory that had already been predetermined allowed the perfect opportunity for quick acceptance on a discovery that should have been more closely looked at.
3. The Piltdown man was concluded a fraud thanks to a new dating method discovered after World War I called the Fluorine Absorption Dating Method. What this method did was measure the amount of fluorine the bones had absorbed while in the ground. After the testing it was determined that the bones were less than 100,000 years old. Along with this evidence, the teeth that were originally found had shown scratches and marks of reshaping. This was all the evidence needed to debunk and disprove the Piltdown Hoax and all the scientific work done based on it after its discovery.
4. The human factor of science is what drives our advancement. No I would not want it to be removed and I do not think it is possible to even if we tried. It still takes a human to decide where to dig, it still takes a human to decide what gets tested, it still takes a human to analyze evidence and determine what that evidence means to mankind. I do agree that everything found should undergo tests and these tests should be done through the most advanced technology available to confirm our findings, but if science had an instruction manual like these machines that test our discoveries then there would never be any advancement. It would just be a bunch of artifacts and fossils confirmed to be real and no further investigation as to what they mean and could entail about our past and future. We need the human brain to keep advancing further and further.
5. What you can take away from this scenario is that one should never believe things like this without valid proof from a reliable source. Its just like writing an essay and using facts from a reliable source. I could argue that aliens are real and there would be plenty of evidence I can pull from theory websites and blogs that everyday theorists post online, but none of it would be as valid as something directly from our government saying that no evidence has been found of outside life. What Dawson's discovery did was begin a chain of new scientific discoveries in theory of human evolution. With Dawson's discovery to be true, it opened the door to a whole new area of study that scientists immediately began working on. However when the Piltdown man was proved a fraud, it set back all those years of new scientific study that was started by Dawson. So the lesson here is always confirm before you accept.
Submitted late for half-credit.
ReplyDeleteSynopsis:
"The significance of the find is that the discovery would suggest is that humans had evolved directly from apes which we know now to be untrue."
False on a couple of counts. (1) Humans ARE apes, so we share an ancestry with them. We evolved directly from a common ancestor of apes. (2). This not the significance of this discovery. It wasn't old enough. Had it been valid, it would have represented a twig on the hominid family tree, nothing more.
So the issue of significance remains. Yes, this was significant because it was the first hominid found on English soil, but there was also *scientific* significance. Had Piltdown been valid, it would have helped us better understand *how* humans (not *if*) evolved from that common ancestor with non-human apes. 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.
" Therefore the findings were evidence that the human brain evolved long before previously thought. "
That's better.
Why did it take so long to uncover the hoax? What else was happening during this time in paleoanthropology that helped uncover the hoax?
"It can be argued that a big reason for immediate acceptance is that the discoveries were accepted quickly by top names in Woodward and Klein and if those two men accepted it then they must be true in the eyes of many other scientific figures at the time"
Actually, not in the scientific community. Scientists can gain prestige by shooting down the claims of another scientist, so there is no incentive to accept a conclusion without question... in fact, it is the JOB of a scientist to question, so beyond incentive, scientists actually failed to do their job properly when they accepted Piltdown with so little skepticism. This needs to be explored. So why did the scientists fail to do their jobs? Remember that Germany and France had already found their own hominid fossils. This would have been England's first. Would you like to be the British scientist that killed England's chance to be on the hominid map? Could national pride have played a role here?
"The fact that this discovery fulfilled the "missing link"..."
In the guidelines, it is specifically stated that the term "missing link" could not be used to describe the significance of this find. Did you review the information in the assignment module that explains why this term is not valid? Please make sure you go back and review this.
What about the perpetrators themselves? Why did they create the hoax in the first place? What human faults are involved there?
Good discussion of the technology used to uncover the hoax, but 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?
Good on the human factor and good life lesson.