Science progresses not only when scientists have brilliant ideas, but also when they’re wrong. A wrong idea faces testing through experiments, and those experiments sometimes not only disprove the wrong idea, they uncover the truth.
Because of this, science has always been susceptible to hoaxes. A well-executed hoax appears to have solid evidence behind it, and therefore to be worthy of discussion.
A history of scientific hoaxes would take up a book — and has. Having only a small column, I, alas, must limit myself to the most famous hoax of all: Piltdown Man.
In 1908 an English lawyer and amateur archaeologist, Charles Dawson, wrote to his friend Arthur Smith Woodward, head of the department of geology at the British Museum, that a crew of laborers had turned up an ancient fragment of human skull in a gravel pit near Piltdown, England. Dawson said further excavations had turned up more skull fragments, animal bones and flint tools. He invited Woodward to come take a look.
Woodward accepted, and after studying the skull fragments, concluded Dawson had stumbled on some of the oldest human fossils ever found. A few days later he and Dawson came up with an ancient lower jaw, some teeth, and a bunch of bone fragments.
Woodward publicly announced this “monumental” discovery before the Geological Society of London in December, 1912, where he exhibited a complete skull, reconstructed from the fragments he and Dawson had found. He estimated it to be 500,000 years old and said it could be the “missing link” between humans and apes, because although the skull was completely humanoid, the jaw was very ape-like.
Java Man, Peking Man, Neanderthal Man, Cro-Magnon Man and other famous folk had recently been uncovered, but all the same, many scientists were skeptical of Piltdown Man, or “Eanthropus dawsoni” (Dawson’s Dawn Man). If his jaw were that primitive, and he really had lived 500,000 years before, he didn’t fit at all into the evolutionary tree they’d been drawing up for humankind. They argued the jaw was not just ape-like, it was pure ape, and had ended up next to the human skull only by coincidence.
Woodward and Dawson, however, pointed to the molars found with the jaw, which were flat like human teeth, not pointed like ape teeth. In 1915 an identical skull-and-jawbone set turned up not far from the original, and seemed to clinch things. An ape jaw and human skull might be found in close proximity once by coincidence, but twice, within two miles of each other? Not likely.
A year later, Charles Dawson died, knowing Eanthropus dawsoni enjoyed general scientific acceptance. Woodward continued excavating, but found no more fossils.
Other fossils from other places, however, made Piltdown Man increasingly hard to fit into evolutionary theory, leading, in 1949, to a re-examination of the original fossils. New dating techniques showed the skull was only 50,000 years old, not half a million.
Four years later the most exhaustive tests ever carried out on any fossils confirmed the skull was only 50,000 years old, and revealed that the jawbone wasn’t ancient at all: it belonged to a recently deceased orangutan and had been stained brown to look like a fossil. The flat teeth were actually pointed ape teeth that had been filed down.
That settled it: Piltdown Man, enshrined in textbooks and museums for 40 years, was a hoax, perpetrated, further detective work proved, by Charles Dawson.
The moral of all this isn’t, as the rabidly paranoid might think, that you can’t trust scienctists. The moral is, keep questioning, keep experimenting, keep thinking.
Science sometimes confuses people because findings announced with great fanfare are often called into question by other findings shortly thereafter. But contradiction and argument, for science, aren’t weaknesses: they’re strengths. It’s through testing and re-testing ideas that new knowledge is uncovered and old knowledge is refined.
The point of Piltdown Man isn’t that Dawson fooled science for 40 years; the point is that, even after 40 years, an idea could be tested, a hoax uncovered, and truth revealed.
In science, more than any other endeavour, you learn from your mistakes.
