Piltdown Man Hoax (Essay Sample)

Piltdown man Hoax
Name
Institution
Professor’s Name
Course title
Date of submission
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to research on Piltdown man which was a renowned fossil skull in the world. It was declared a hoax by the authorities at the British Natural History Museum after twenty years of rumors and uneasy speculation among European paleontologists about the authenticity of the bones. For forty years Piltdown man were considered one of the archaeological finds of the century.
Piltdown man hoax.
Piltdown man is a paleoanthropological hoax in which fragments bone were presented in the form of  HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil" \o "Fossil" fossilized remains of an early man who was previously not known. The fragments said to have been collected from a gravel pit at  HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown,_East_Sussex" \o "Piltdown, East Sussex" Piltdown, East Sussex, England; had parts of a  HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skull" \o "Human skull" skull and a  HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mandible" \o "Human mandible" jawbone. Piltdown man is claimed to be the ‘Missing link” that was supposed to tie man to the ape nit. I picked this hoax I found it captivating; being termed to be the biggest scientific hoax of the century I decided to find out what it really meant, how serious scientists were cheated and their reputation spoiled forever and the years they spent researching had been wasted trying to analyze a fake fossil and fit it to the human evolution cycle; who produced the claims and why as it has remained a mystery over time.
The context Piltdown Man revolves around “missing link”; the scientists were finding a missing link in the theory of evolution, after Charles Darwin’s publication of his theory on origin of species in 1859 the scientists were searching for clues the ancient ancestor that linked the apes to the humans. The scientists were desperate to justify that Britain also played a role in the human evolution theories, and Piltdown Man was their only answer as it was for him that Britain could be claimed to be birthplace of mankind.
It was argued that science was correcting its own errors. Anthropologists refer this hoax as to be an instance of desire for fame that lead a scholar into dishonesty when they took a long time; a period of over forty years to discover and differentiate between an ancient fossil and a modern chimpanzee. Apart from the hoax being a triumph of Science, it points to some common and dangerous faults. Somehow the hoax partially succeeded in a large part due to the slipshod natured tests applied to it. Careful examination with assistance of the methods available at the period would have revealed the hoax. This failure of inadequate examination of the fossils went unnoticed at that time because the hoax partially satisfied the theoretical expectations then. This hoax illuminates two pitfalls that we be wary in the scientific process. The first being inadequately examining and challenging of results that confirm the currently accepted scientific interpretation and the second being once a result is established, it should not be uncritically accepted and at time relied upon without further reconsideration. <...