The Piltdown Man :: essays research papers

1. A hoaxA hoax n. 1. Practical joke 2. Deceptive blind 3. P reside trick upon 4. Decieveexample Piltdown ManFor forty years they were considered one of the archaeological finds of the century A disassemble of nettle and a part of a skull that could prove man evolved from the apes. They were the bone up of Eoanthropus dawsoni found near Piltdown Common in Sussex. The bones of the "Missing Link." non since 1953 the name "Piltdown" hasnt been associated with great scientific discovery, but great scientific fraud. It was in that year that a group of scientists, lead by Kenneth Page Oakley, try to use the new method of fluorine testing to get a more exact date on the bones. What the test showed surprised them The jaw was modern and the skull only six hundred years old. Additional epitome soon confirmed the fluorine tests. The jaw was really that of an orangutan. It had been filed down and separate that might have suggested its simian origin were broken off. Both pi eces had been do by to suggest great age. Piltdown was proclaimed genuine by several of the about brilliant British scientists of the day Arthur Smith Woodward, Arthur Keith and Grafton Elliot Smith. How did these faked fragments of bone fool the better scientific minds of the time? Perhaps the desire to be part of a great discovery blinded those charged with authenticating it. Many position scientists felt up left out by discoveries on the continent.Neanderthal had been found in Germany in 1856, and Cro-Magnon in France in 1868. Perhaps national pride had kept the researchers from noticing the scar marks made by the filing of the jaw and teeth. Items that were appargonnt later on on to investigators after Oakley exposed the hoax. Even as early as 1914, though, there were those that doubted the fossils. William King Gregory wrote, "It has been suspected by some that geologically the specimens are not old at all that they may even make up a deliberate hoax..." Who per petrated the hoax? Many historians lay their bets on Charles Dawson, the amateur geologist that supposedly discovered the bones in a gravel pit. Others, though, lay the blame at the feet of people as diverse as a young Jesuit priest, named Teilhard de Chardin, who assisted in the dig, to the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived in the area. Dawson was an English solicitor who sought and collected fossils.