It took nearly 40 years for scientists to wake up to {the Piltdown hoax}? How embarrassement!
The main reason why it had taken 40 years to get around to applying the fluorine dating technique to the "fossils" was that it was a new technique that had just been developed. To explain it in terms simple enough for even you to understand, you cannot use any kind of procedure, nor anything for that matter,
before it exists. Basically, you're doing the same stupid thing as criticizing Darwin for not using Wikipedia!
And yet scientists did expose the hoax and corrected it such that Piltdown Man was never again used by science; the only ones still using it are creationists making false accusations, such as yourself. Contrast that with the multitude of creationist PRATTs (Points Refuted A Thousand Times) that were soundly refuted decades ago and yet creationists continue to use them unabated and shamelessly. Quelle fromage!
The Piltdown farce demonstrates how credulous and tendencious the scientific community is when it comes to evolution.
No, rather it demonstrates cultural bias and nationalism, human failings which should have no place in science. The British national ego chafed at the Homo erectus finds being made in Germany and was repelled by the thought of humans originating in Africa, so their national pride found the idea human origins in England to be very appealing. As Wikipedia reports (
https://en.wikipedia.org/...own_Man#Scientific_investigation):
quote:
The Piltdown Man hoax succeeded so well because, at the time of its discovery, the scientific establishment believed that the large modern brain preceded the modern omnivorous diet, and the forgery provided exactly that evidence. It has also been thought that nationalism and cultural prejudice played a role in the less-than-critical acceptance of the fossil as genuine by some British scientists. It satisfied European expectations that the earliest humans would be found in Eurasia, and the British, it has been claimed, also wanted a first Briton to set against fossil hominids found elsewhere in Europe.
You are also ignoring the early critics of Piltdown. A particular problem was that the find did not fit the patterns of the other hominids being found, especially with the fully developed human cranium. As per Wikipedia: "In the decades prior to its exposure as a forgery in 1953, scientists increasingly regarded Piltdown as an enigmatic aberration inconsistent with the path of hominid evolution as demonstrated by fossils found elsewhere."
It has been pointed out elsewhere that scientists can be susceptible to hoaxes because they are used to working with evidence from Nature and do not expect Nature to be trying to deceive them.
It is also in the nature of science to constantly and repeatedly question and test and validate all findings. The purpose of science is learning how nature works.
A scientist's own research is based on the research of other scientists, so it's in that scientist's own interest to validate that other research. It is that repeated questioning and testing that exposes mistakes and hoaxes, as we see in the case of the Piltdown hoax. Science self-corrects.
In contrast, it is in the nature of creationism to avoid examining its own claims. The purpose of creationism is to promote religious beliefs and to proselytize with
convincing sounding claims, even when they are aware that those claims are false. The only test of a creationist claim is in how
convincing it sounds. That is why the multitude of mistakes and hoaxes and outright deception in creationism persist and continue to be used for many decades. Not only does creationism fail to self-correct, but it actively preserves its mistakes, hoaxes, and deceptions; that's the nature of the beast.
The scientists who expressed early doubts were probably the creationists.
Wrong again. The juxtaposing of such disparate features just didn't look right to many, nor did the circumstances of the find. The strongest criticism came from other
paleontologists who were discovering actual hominids and pointing out the obvious, that Piltdown was an aberration that did not fit in with the other hominids. And to point out the obvious to you, creationists would not be working to discover hominids.
Creationists played no role in nor made any contribution to exposing this hoax. They never do. Rather scientists did all the work, as is always the case.
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