Joel Kontinen
This week marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Charles Dawson, the man who gave us Eoanthropus dawsoni, better known as Piltdown Man.
A new paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science coincides with the anniversary. The research suggests that a single forger manufactured the apeman-like skull.
Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) inspired evolutionists to find the assumed missing link between apes and humans.
German scientists found a fossil jaw belonging to an early man dubbed Homo heidelbergensis.
Surely the British could produce something better?
Eoanthropus dawsoni looked like the perfect solution. Some of the best British fossil experts examined the skull in 1915 – and none of them suspected it was a fraud.
Writing in The Conversation, Isabelle De Groote, the lead author of the recent paper, issues a warning:
“Solving the Piltdown crime is still important now as it stands as a cautionary tale to scientists not to be blinded by preconceived ideas but to remain objective and to subject even their own findings to scientific scrutiny.”
Alas, evolutionists have seldom heeded sound advice. All too often they have seen that what they expected to see.
Some of the worst scientific frauds have a Darwinian connection: Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man and Archaeoraptor liaoningensis that was assumed to be a feathered dinosaur.
Assumed human evolution has seen the rise and fall of several skulls once thought to be our ancestors, such as Australopithecus africanus, better known as Taung Child, Ardipithecus ramidus (Ardi), Toumai or Sahelanthropus tchadensis and Paranthropus boisei a.k.a. Nutcracker Man, for instance.
Source:
De Groote, Isabelle. 2016. Solving the Piltdown Man crime: how we worked out there was only one forger. The Conversation (10 August).
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