Piltdown man finally crumbles
In 1953 Piltdown man, the bane of many a African based anthropologist searching for early man in Africa, was finally demonstrated a clear hoax.
Piltdown man had been the beam in the British scientific establishment's eye for so long and had led to the ridicule and thwarting of many efforts to find early human ancestors in Africa.
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By John Cooke - http://blog.geolsoc.org.uk/2012/12/13/a-tale-of-three-meetings/geological/, Public Domain, Link
Dart, Broom and Leakey had all suffered from its curse but now the way was opened.
The Piltdown man house of cards came tumbling down the moment a newer dating technique was applied. After a very recent date was indicate the bones were examined more carefully. All forty odd were found to be forgeries. The scull bits belonged to a modern human, the jaw was that of an Orangutan.
By Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net)., CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
Dart would have the last laugh, he would say later of the matter, calling it:
"the most outrageous palaeontological fraud which was to mislead the thinking of every recognised authority in anthropology for forty years and so arrest the recognition of the Australopithecines until July 1953 "
Less than a decade later Mary Leakey would find her own Austrolopithicene and firmly place Africa where it belonged in the origin story.
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The intertangling of Science and Politics is an automatic pathway to Piltdown.
The politicians that hold the purse strings to billions of dollars of research funding often require a specific result from scientists. Unfortunately too many are willing to oblige in their quest for a name and a nice living. The really “productive” ones are able to dress up their sow’s ear like a silk purse
Piltdown Man was heralded as the missing link, connecting humans to their ape ancestors. Discovered in England in 1912, the fossils were exactly what British paleontologists were hoping to find. Newspapers proclaimed: "Missing Link Found - Darwin's Theory Proved."
But the remains that traced early human ancestors back to England were eventually overtaken by doubts, and, in 1953, scientists concluded that Piltdown Man was an elaborate fraud, compiled of pieces of a human skull and orangutan jaw and teeth.
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