Who was behind the 1912 Piltdown Man hoax ?

[UM-Bot]

The man responsible for the infamous hoaxed skull has finally been exposed more than 100 years later.

http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/297692/who-was-behind-the-1912-piltdown-man-hoax

[Calibeliever]

If one piece of evidence was hoaxed, then we have to ignore all other evidence supporting the theory of evolution! 

[universal skeptic]

You can't be serious, Calibeliever.

[Rlyeh]

Pretty sure he's being sarcastic.

[Calibeliever]

Tongue-in-cheek of course. Half mocking those who try to invalidate science because one scientist did one thing wrong that one time

[universal skeptic]

Thanks for the clarification, Rlyeh & Calibeliever. My sarcasm detector obviously failed me. :)

[Professor Buzzkill]

Piltdown man was the catalyst for the theory of evolution being popularised. The fact that it took 40 years to be proved a hoax is quite damning.

[Calibeliever]

17 minutes ago, Professor Buzzkill said:

Piltdown man was the catalyst for the theory of evolution being popularised. The fact that it took 40 years to be proved a hoax is quite damning.

True enough. It's more of an indictment of those at the time that wanted it to be true so badly they never looked too closely at it. In fact, other more legitimate evidence was discarded in some cases because it didn't fit with this "discovery". 

[aquatus1]

Piltdown Man hadn't even been popular for a year before it began being debunked.  Multiple papers published in Nature showed how the remains were that of ape and human.  The collection of the remains was so reckless that a scientist of the time commented it seemed almost intentional, in order to make it harder to fit it together properly and definitively identify it as a known creature.  Even the scientists who supported Piltdown Man admitted that it seemed like an aberration

From the wiki:

Quote

Timeline

• 1908: Dawson claims discovery of first Piltdown fragments.
• 1912 February: Dawson contacts Woodward about first skull fragments.
• 1912 June: Dawson, Woodward, and Teilhard de Chardin 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.
• 1913: David Waterston concludes the sample to be an ape mandible and a human skull.
• 1914: Talgai skull (Australia) found, considered, at the time, to confirm Piltdown.
• 1915: Marcellin Boule concludes the sample to be an ape mandible and a human skull. Gerrit Smith Miller concludes the jaw is from a fossil ape.
• 1923: Franz Weidenreich reports the remains consist of a modern human cranium and orangutan jaw with filed-down teeth.
• 1925: Edmonds reports Piltdown geology error. Report ignored.
• 1943: Fluorine content test is first proposed.
• 1948: The Earliest Englishman by Woodward is published (posthumously).
• 1949: Fluorine content test establishes Piltdown Man as relatively recent.
• 1953: Weiner, Le Gros Clark, and Oakley expose the hoax.
• 2003: Full nature of Charles Dawson's career in fakes is exposed.
• 2016: Study reveals method of Dawson's forgery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man

 

[paperdyer]

Come on.  We all know the Human Cylons are the missing link.

[Codenwarra]

Sixty-three or so years ago Kenneth Oakley and Joseph Weiner, the two British scientists who exposed the hoax concluded that Dawson was the hoaxer. After visiting the region where Dawson had been active and interviewing surviving acquaintances of Dawson, Weiner found that some of them regarded the Piltdown finds as forged. More recently it has emerged that Dawson was an habitual forger of antiquities and was almost certainly the only hoaxer.

To be blunt, accusations levelled at others like Teilhard de Chardin and Martin Hinton do not make sense, as Hinton's dispute with Woodward postdated the earliest finds. de Chardin was not present when many of the finds were picked up as he was either in France or at his seminary in Enlgand on the days in question. While Doyle cannot be eliminated as a possible partner with Dawson, they were not close acquaintances.

It had long been my opinion that some later scientists, Stephen Jay Gould (particularly included) preferred to accuse de Chardin or Doyle because they could not accept that an amateur like Dawson could obtain the required knowledge to produce a reasonable fake. There is no good reason why Dawson could not. He had been a fossil hunter for thirty years before he made the first Piltdown claim, and anyone can read an anatomy textbook. Thirty years is long enough to get a good knowledge of anatomy, medical students do it in a fraction of that time. (Well we hope they do.)

As for the American creationist blather about how it fooled all scientists, at least four scientists of the day regarded the association of the cranium and jaw as mistaken and by 1927 Grafton Elliot Smith, (standing at rear, second from left in the painting) who had originally been fooled wrote that the jaw was probably from a chimpanzee. By the mid 1930s most scientists, British included, regarded the Piltdown material as anomalous and one did not include it in his writings. But we already know that creationists leave Dawson in the shade for deliberate and persistent fraud.

For a detailed examination of the case, see

[Codenwarra]

See "Unravelling Piltdown" by John Evangelist Walsh, who was a Wisconsin based historian.  Published about 20 years ago.