Piltdown Man
Piltdown man forgery was such a splendid
hoax that there is even a pub named after it
Essay by Graham Moorhouse
(with alnowledgement to Ann Coulter)
For
fifty years, Piltdown man was for those of the Darwinic
faith, the equivalent of the Resurrection for Catholics;
it proved beyond all reasonable doubt the truths of their
one true religion.
Piltdown man mysteriously turned up
in Piltdown quarry, a gravel pit in Sussex, in 1912. It
was "discovered" by an amateur palaeontologist,
Charles Dawson. It was a skull with a human like
head and an ape like jaw. It was a creature not
quite ape and not quite man, rather like some of our
more militant trade union leaders. It gave the
Dalwinic faithful a possible link between apes and man
that they could now triumphantly pin onto their entirely
made-up "tree of life." This militant
trade union leader like fossil could not of course prove
evolution. Nevertheless, the secular press carried
headlines on the Piltdown man proclaiming, "Darwin's
theory is proved true."
For the more perseptive, it was a little
funny-peculiar just how precisely Piltdown man matched
what science fiction had taught us to believe that the "missing
link" would look like, rather like a space ship
landing with little green men inside. However,
it would seem that such healthy scepticism is not something
encouraged in Darwinian circles - far too cynical for
the scientific mind.
The Piltdown fossil had been "peer-reviewed",
so it must be fact, and was consequently embraced with
gusto by Scientific America, still flushed at
the time with their success in exposing the "Wright
brothers’ 1906 flight hoax". To be fair, Scientific America is
consistant: they have repeatedly refused to publish any
of the papers from eminent scientists exposing the global
warming scam as a pile of the brown stuff because they
have not been "peer-reviewed". Evolutionary
experts were queuing up to confirm the age and origin
of the Piltdown bones; Arthur Smith Woodward, the leading
geologist at the British Natural History Museum gave
them his unequivocal support.
Dawson was given celebrity status, and
showered with praise and prizes. He was made a
fellow of the geological Society and a fellow of the
Society of Antiquaries. He was even offered a position
writing editorials for Scientific America. We
could all now happily pen Eoanthropus dawsoni (Dawson's
dawn-man) into our family tree - along presumably with
earth worms and slugs.
For more than 40 years, Piltdown man
was taught as scientific fact - rather like safe sex
is taught today. Then, in 1953, it all blew up;
it was revealed as a total scam - paradoxically, it was
in large part exposed by a scientific process that so
impresses Scientific Periodicals like Scientific
America: radiocarbon dating.
Carbon dating revealed that the Piltdown
man's skull was from a human a mere thousand-years-old,
and the jaw was from a recently deceased orangutan! The
jaw had been stained with potassium bichromate to make
it look old and the teeth had been filed down to make
them look a little more human - this was before you could
get your teeth seen to on the National Health. Notwithstanding
the fact that it was not even a good fake, the perpetrators
of the hoax had easily managed to dupe the leading Dalwiniacs
for half a century! Nothing can dent the
faith of the true believer.
