The Greatest Hoax Ever? Piltdown Man--

I have just been glancing at the website for WNYC, the Public Radio station here, and see they are doing a special show on that fantastic archaeological hoax, "Piltdown Man:..

Actually, if you had asked me off the top of my head about Piltdown Man I would just have said, oh yeah, another one of those set of bones found in Siberia or Spain or somewhere and revered by scientists as being part of the search for "the missing link" in the evolutionary chain, as it used to be called.

I have never had any problem with the theory of evolution, which has the force of logic and overwhelming scientific evidence for it...a shame that only 38% of Americans believe in it! What a comment on the state of science education in this country...

But I remember when I was in high school and our biology teacher, who taught evolution as he taught everything else, in his own quirky way, was very defensive and strident about it because one of his students had once been from a born again Christian family and they had made a raucous row with the high school head about it...

One of the reasons I love listening to the science segments on BBC's "Up All Night," is for the interviews with the Australian Dr. Karl, who is always revealing some facet of science like this...or how some new discovery has set everyone on their ear, or may! He has a very droll wit and tries to live out an ecologically correct lifestyle at his house near Melbourne ( I gather he is close to the Ocean) and has great reports when he comes back from another scientific expedition somewhere...

Anyway, when I read this Guardian article I noticed the name Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was involved, all I could do was shake my head sadly...

Conan Doyle must have been one of the most imaginative (and frustrated) men of his day, a doctor who became famous for his character Sherlock Holmes--whom Conan Doyle grew to despise-- because he wanted people to value his "serious" work. ( Oh yes, speaking of  "feudal values," poor Conan Doyle was really attracted to them and all sorts of romantic ideals of a time he thought had once existed but had disappeared ( he was pretty much alone in his day even with this..." Sir Conan of the White Plume" joked one of his fellow writers about these mock historical novels).

Well, I bring this up because after his brother --who had barely survived World War I-- died in front of his eyes after Doyle took a turn in his souped up motor car too hard and the car flipped over as they entered his property in England...and also saw his beloved wife die--, and then all sorts of people fall victim to the terrible influenza epidemic...

Poor Doyle became fascinated with, and then a convert to, spiritualism and started organizing seances so he could get in touch with all these people he had lost...aided by his second wife.

So when I read that Conan Doyle had been equally credulous about the Piltdown Man hoax, I was not, unfortunately, surprised.

(Sir Arthur --above-- also believed one spiritualist photographer who claimed to have taken pictures of fairies... lurking in the English woods. It was like after some point in his life he was rejecting the reality of the past so strongly that he would believe in anything that would help him have some kind of faith in something that would make it all OK).

Here follows just some of the Guardian article of a year ago about the whole ornate Piltdown Man hoax: 

Piltdown Man: British archaeology's greatest hoax

When the find was revealed to be a 'cheap fraud', several eminent men – including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – were put in the frame. Now scientists aim to put an end to the mystery once and for all

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• • Robin McKie
  • The Observer, Saturday 4 February 2012
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Bodies of evidence: John Cooke's 1915 painting of the Piltdown men – see large image for details. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Features

In a few weeks, a group of British researchers will enter the labyrinthine store of London's Natural History Museum and remove several dark-coloured pieces of primate skull and jawbone from a small metal cabinet. After a brief inspection, the team will wrap the items in protective foam and transport them to a number of laboratories across England. There the bones and teeth, which have rested in the museum for most of the last century, will be put through a sequence of highly sensitive tests using infra-red scanners, lasers and powerful spectroscopes to reveal each relic's precise chemical make-up.
The aim of the study, which will take weeks to complete, is simple. It has been set up to solve a mystery that has baffled researchers for 100 years: the identities of the perpetrators of the world's greatest scientific fraud, the Piltdown Hoax. Unearthed in a gravel pit at Piltdown in East Sussex and revealed to the outside world exactly a century ago, those shards of skull were part of a scientific scam that completely fooled leading palaeontologists. For decades they believed they were the remains of a million-year-old apeman, an individual who possessed a large brain but primitive jawbone and teeth.

The news of the Piltdown find, first released in late 1912, caused a sensation. The first Englishman had been uncovered and not only was he brainy, he was sporty. A sculpted elephant bone, found near the skull pieces and interpreted by scientists as being a ceremonial artefact, was jokingly claimed by many commentators to be an early cricket bat. The first Englishman with his own cricket bat – if nothing else it was one in the eye for French and German archaeologists whose discoveries of Cro-Magnons, Neanderthals and other early humans had been making headlines for several decades. Now England had a real fossil rival.

It was too good to be true. As decades passed, scientists in other countries uncovered more and more fossils of early apemen that differed markedly from Piltdown Man. "These had small skulls but relatively humanlike teeth – the opposite of Piltdown," says Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, who is leading the new study. "But many British scientists did not take them seriously because of Piltdown. They dismissed these discoveries which we now know are genuine and important. It really damaged British science."