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Piltdown Man



The Piltdown man fraud had a significant impact on early research on human evolution. Notably, it led scientists down a blind alley in the belief that the human brain expanded in size before the jaw adapted to new types of food. Discoveries of Australopithecine fossils found in the 1920s in South Africa were ignored owing to Piltdown man, and the reconstruction of human evolution was thrown off track for decades. The examination and debate over Piltdown man led to a vast expenditure of time and effort on the fossil, with an estimated 250+ papers written on the topic.

The fossil was sufficiently influential for Clarence Darrow to introduce it as evidence in defense of Scopes during the Scopes Monkey Trial. Darrow died in 1938, more than ten years before Piltdown Man was exposed as a fraud. Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard met less fortunate timing, listing Piltdown Man as one of the ancestors of humanity in his book Scientology: A History of Man, and describing him as having "enormous" teeth and being "quite careless as to whom and what he bit." Piltdown Man would be exposed as a hoax just months after the publication of Hubbard's book.

The hoax is still cited by creationists as evidence of the failure of science and scientists in addressing the origins of man,[6] though it has been pointed out that it was science and scientists that discovered it was a fraud[7] albeit after an extremely long time.[6] The notoriety of the hoax remains strong and in November 2003, the Natural History Museum held an exhibition to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its exposure.[8]

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Timeline

  • 1908: Dawson discovers first Piltdown fragments
  • 1912 February: Dawson contacts Woodward about first skull fragments
  • 1912 June: Dawson, Woodward, and Teilhard form digging team
  • 1912 June: Team finds elephant molar, skull fragment
  • 1912 June: Right parietal skull bones and the jaw bone discovered
  • 1912 November: News breaks in the popular press
  • 1912 December: Official presentation of Piltdown man
  • 1914: Talgai (Australia) man found, considered confirming of Piltdown
  • 1925: Edmonds reports Piltdown geology error. Report ignored.
  • 1943: Fluorine content test is first proposed.
  • 1948: Woodward publishes The Earliest Englishman
  • 1949: Fluorine content test establishes Piltdown man as relatively recent.
  • 1953: Weiner, Le Gros Clark, and Oakley expose the hoax.

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See also

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Notes

  1. ^ a b c Lewin, Roger (1987), Bones of Contention, <http://www.clarku.edu/~piltdown/map_expose/chain_of_fraud.html> 
  2. ^ The Piltdown Man Discovery, Nature, July 30, 1938
  3. ^ Current Anthropology (June 1992)[1]. Retrieved on 2008-06-08.
  4. ^ TalkOrigins. Retrieved on 2008-06-08.
  5. ^ "Culture area", in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 3, pp. 563-568. (New York: Macmillan/The Free Press).
  6. ^ a b Harter, Richard (1997). Creationist Arguments: Piltdown Man. Retrieved on 2007-08-29.
  7. ^ Caroll, Robert Todd (1996). Piltdown Hoax. Retrieved on 2007-08-29.
  8. ^ The Natural History Museum Annual Review 2003/2004. Retrieved on 2007-11-17.

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References

 This article or section includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations.
You can improve this article by introducing more precise citations.
  • The Times, November 21, 1953; November 23, 1953
  • The hoax exposed: The Piltdown Forgery by Joseph Weiner 1954
  • The case against Smith: The Piltdown Man by Ronald Millar 1972
  • The Neanderthal Enigma by James Shreeve © 1995
  • Unraveling Piltdown by John Evangelist Walsh © 1996

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External links




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