The Piltdown Man
Science has been so eager to prove an unprovable Theory that in the past it has resorted to manufacturing evidence.
The article below is from the very science friendly wikipedia.com site:
The "Piltdown Man" is a famous hoax consisting of fragments of a skull and jawbone collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, a village near Uckfield, East Sussex. The fragments were thought by many experts of the day to be the fossilised remains of a hitherto unknown form of early human. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawn-man", after the collector Charles Dawson) was given to the specimen.
The significance of the specimen remained the subject of controversy until it was exposed in 1953 as a forgery, consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan combined with the skull of a fully developed, modern man.
The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous archaeological hoax in history.
It has been prominent for two reasons: the attention paid to the issue of human evolution, and the length of time (more than 40 years) that elapsed from its discovery to its exposure as a forgery. (end quote)
2 comments:
Hey jamie- you're right, Piltdown man did fool scientists for a long time. But two things: one, no one knows who perpetrated the hoax, so you can't fairly say that "science" manufactured the evidence. Sure, they lapped it up: it was brilliantly done, and fit in with current theories. But there is no evidence that it was done by a scientist (although it's not impossible, to be sure). And two: who finally uncovered the hoax? Not theologians or evolution-deniers, but scientists.
And the fact that Piltdown is one example of a famous hoax, but that there are hundreds of finds of hominid fossils which are not hoaxes, puts Piltdown more in perspective: a good lesson for scientists, but not a good reason to disbelieve in human evolution.
cheers from starry Vienna, zilch
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