Difference between revisions of "Piltdown Man"

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The Piltdown Man hoax used a medieval skull combined with a lower jaw from an orangutan and teeth from a chimpanzee, which were then placed in a gravel pit in the village of Piltdown, England. The bones were stained with chromic acid and an iron solution, creating the crude appearance of an old age. The Piltdown Man was publicized as the "Missing Link" between man and ape-like species, which eluded (and still eludes) promoters of evolution.

The Piltdown Man was one of many frauds perpetrated by promoters of the theory of evolution. This particular fraud was taught to an entire generation of students worldwide from 1912 to 1953, when it was conclusively proven to the public to be a hoax. The Piltdown Man was featured in A Civic Biology, the textbook at issue in the Scopes trial in Tennessee. Darwinists officially announced the Piltdown Man to be authentic and gave it a formal name: Eoanthropus dawsoni. This name honored the person who claimed to have found it, Charles Dawson. The British scientific establishment largely supported the validity of Piltdown Man.^[1]

A rendering of "Piltdown Man", according to evolutionists in 1922.

Creationists believe that the Piltdown man was not an isolated incident of bad judgment by evolutionists and that the examples of the Nebraska Man, Java Man, Ocre Man, Neanderthals, and Flores Man can be cited. ^[2] However, many evolutionists were more than happy to see Piltdown man leave the pantheon of evolutionary ancestors, as they viewed it as an anomaly which did not fit in with the rest of their research.

The date assigned to the bones was never based on the bones at all, but rather were based on testing of older material found nearby. This is partially due to the fact that modern dating techniques, like the Fluorine Absorption test, were not yet invented (and indeed, when they were, proved essential to Piltdown man's downfall^[3]). Like similar artifacts purporting to prove evolution today, there was no independent or public scrutiny of the actual materials.

Doubts about the veracity of the Piltdown man remains can be found as early as 1922 for instance, when evolutionist William King Gregory stated in a highly technical book^[4] that he published doubts, shared by colleagues, in 1914 about whether the jaw and teeth were associated with the braincase. That 1914 journal article said that someone at the British Museum had confided to him that "a negro skull and a broken ape jaw" had been "artificially fossilized" and "planted in the gravel bed to fool the scientists." Also in 1922, a book aimed at the popular market was depicting elaborate speculation about the daily life of Piltdown Man, giving him a tool. ^[5] Yet the Piltdown Man continued to be taught children in school, as in the textbook at issue in the Scopes trial.

In 1950 it was shown by the fluorine method of relative dating that the Piltdown mandible and cranial bones were considerably younger geologically than the Lower and Middle Pleistocene fossils said to have been found at the same site.^[6] Only then did evolutionists admit that they had been teaching a fraud.

External Links

• The Piltdown Man Fraud by Dr A J Monty White

References

1. ↑ http://www.bradburyac.mistral.co.uk/tenness5.html
2. ↑ "Evolution Fraud", Northwest Creation Network
3. ↑ Annotated Biblography of the Piltdown Man Forgery
4. ↑ The Origin and Evolution of the Human Dentition, William King Gregory, 1922, p. 351.
5. ↑ Everyday Life in the Old Stone Age, Charles Henry Bourne Quennell, 1922, p. 51.
6. ↑ http://www.clarku.edu/~piltdown/map_expose/radioactivedating_piltdown.html