The Piltdown Man Hoax: Uncovering a Scientific Scandal

[Ivan Seeking]

The Piltdown Hoax
Possibly one of the most famous scandals in all of science, the Piltdown Hoax illustrates the dangerous effects a preconceived notion of what "should" be true can have on the scientific pursuit of the truth.

By the early twentieth century, Darwin's theory of inheritance of favored traits via competition and natural selection had been accepted by the scientific mainstream. Differing from how we view evolution today, the scientific thought of the time was of "directed evolution", or evolution leading to perfection of form. Under this ideology, organisms evolved, toward the perfect natural form (which, incidentally, was human). Many scientists and thinkers of the day took this notion a step further, proposing that man, too, had evolved through various stages toward a perfect human form, which just so happened to be western European (see our FAQ on the concept of race in paleoanthropology).

As such, it was thought that in this quest for perfection, early human ancestors would have evolved their large brains first to separate humanity from brute animals, and this would allow the cognition necessary for all other advances to take place. There is nothing wrong with this (the part about large brains developing first, that is). In the absence of evidence, this is a hypothesis that can be checked for truth by comparing it to evidence found later.

The scandal[continued]

http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/pilt.html

 

[mouseonmoon]

Cardiff Giant

In 1869, New York cigar maker George Hull had a block of gypsum carved in the likeness of a man over 10 feet tall. It was artificially aged, buried on the Cardiff, N.Y., farm of Hull's confederate, William Newell, and then arranged to be "discovered" by workmen. Its discovery was heralded as a great geological find of a huge petrified man, and proof of the Genesis verse: "There were giants on the Earth in those days…" People flocked to see the giant for a mere 25 cent admission charge. P. T. Barnum wanted to buy the giant and when Hull refused, Barnum had a copy made and declared Hull's to be phony. Hull finally confessed his fraud and Barnum's fake of a fake ultimately drew more people than the original. The Cardiff Giant can be visited today in Cooperstown, N.Y., while Barnum's fake is in Farmington Hills, Mich.

Footnote: This was the incident that inspired "There's a sucker born every minute" but P. T. Barnum didn't say it. One of Hull's partners, David Hannum did—and Barnum appropriated it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiff_Giant

Hannum sued Barnum and it was revealed that both giants were fake on February 2, 1870. The judge ruled that Barnum could not be sued for calling a fake giant a fake.

 

[Phobos]

Some notes...
(1) Piltdown was a hoax played on the scientific community (not by the scientific community).
(2) The specimen, although initially accepted by English scientists, was not readily accepted by scientists in other countries. Nationalistic pride was part of the reason for the rapid acceptance. But science goes beyond a country's borders.
(3) When the hoax was discovered, the Piltdown specimen was dropped from the mainstream. Good science is error-correcting.

 

[loseyourname]

The thing that's always interested me more than the Piltdown hoax itself is the investigation into who actually perpetrated the hoax.