Claim CC001:
In 1912, Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward announced the discovery
of a mandible and part of a skull from a gravel pit near Piltdown,
England. The mandible was apelike except for humanlike wear on the
teeth; the skull was like a modern human. These bones became the basis
for Eoanthropus dawsoni, commonly known as Piltdown Man, interpreted as
a
500,000-year-old British ape-man. But in the early 1950s, it was found
that the jawbone was stained and filed down to give its appearance and that
the skull was a recent human fossil. In short, Piltdown Man was a fraud.
British scientists believed it because they wanted to. The failure to
expose it sooner shows that scientists tend to be guided by their
preconceptions.
Source:
Gish, Duane T., 1985. Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record.
El Cajon, CA: Creation-Life Publishers, pp. 188-190.
Response:
- Piltdown man was exposed by scientists. The fact that it took forty
years is certainly no shining example of science in action, but it does
show that science corrects errors.
Preconceptions are an unavoidable
problem
in just about any
investigation, but they are less so in science because first, different
scientists often have different preconceptions, and second, the
physical evidence must always be accounted for. Many scientists from
America and Europe did not accept Piltdown Man uncritically, and the
hoax unraveled when the fossils could not be reconciled with other
hominid fossil finds.
- One hoax cannot indicate the inferiority of conventional archeology,
because creationists have several of their own, including Paluxy
footprints, the Calaveras skull, Moab and
Malachite Man, and others. More telling is
how people deal
with these hoaxes. When Piltdown was exposed, it stopped being used as
evidence. The creationist hoaxes, however, can still be found cited as
if they were real. Piltdown has been over and done with for decades,
but the dishonesty of creationist hoaxes continues.
Links:
Harter, Richard, 1996. Piltdown Man: The bogus bones caper.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/piltdown.html
created 2003-6-2, modified 2004-3-5
