Piltdown Hoax

The Piltdown hoax is one of the biggest frauds known in scientific history. It took place in a small village called Piltdown in the town of Lewes located in Southern England in the year 1912. An amateur archeologist from Sussex England named Charles Dawson had received a primitive skull from one of his laborers who had discovered it. Dawson was already building a reputation for himself within the scientific community and became an opportunist when he realized that the ancient skull that the laborer had found could catapult him to elite status within the academic society. He was very enthusiastic about making spectacular discoveries and he would go to any length to accomplish doing so even if he had to fool the world in the process. Dawson had forged the skull found at Piltdown and claimed that it was the so called missing link that would connect humans and apes, and in the process put Britain on the map in regards to having ancient hominid history His hoax went undiscovered for forty years until scientific technology improved ..

Scientist are well respected individuals and scholars and a hoax played on the scientific world by one of their own would be the last thing you expect a scientist to do. Scientist were outraged because of the amount of attention paid to evolution regarding the Piltdown find. It was covetousness and greed that drove Charles Dawson to deceive his colleagues they proclaimed. For forty years people believed that prehistoric man had existed in England and more importantly they believed that the skull was the missing link between humans and apes. Fortunately with the aid of new technology, Dawson’s hoax was exposed in 1953 by a professor named Kenneth Oakley of the British Museum. By using a technique called fluorine analysis, professor Oakley was able to prove that the jaw of the skull that Dawson presented was much younger than the rest of the skull because they contained different levels of fluorine and the amounts of fluorine the skeletal remains had from seepage of groundwater should have been the same considering that they were found at the same site.

Unfortunately it isn’t possible to remove the human factor from science so that such a hoax will never happen again. Human intervention with science is not a bad thing though considering it is us who come up with all the hypothesis, theories, and technologies that continue to advance science as we know it. A lesson to be learned from the Piltdown hoax is never trust anyone’s biased opinions based on their title or academic status and also take heed to any doubt that may surface no matter how small.