Pildown Man-IAC Training Library

Genesis Apologetics

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This here is a replica of the Piltdown Skull that was first brought to scientific light in 1912 by a man named

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Charles Dawson and as you probably know Piltdown Man was one of the most famous scientific frauds in history.

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Piltdown Man was nothing more than a human cranium and an orangutan jaw that had both been stained to look like they were old fossils.

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The dark parts of this particular replica are what was actually discovered.

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The white was all imagined by the scientists and this particular find was accepted by the scientific community in Britain at the time as being a half human half ape transition.

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Hundreds of books and papers were published on this skull explaining that it was a transition between an ape and a human, but later it turned out to be a complete hoax.

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This is the Antiquity of Man written by Sir Arthur Keith who was one of the primary experts on Piltdown Man.

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As you can see on the cover here we have Piltdown Man embossed in gold and if you open up the book you can see very detailed measurements and detailed drawings of the

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Piltdown Skull describing it in scientific terms. And it's just interesting to see because when we look back on it now we know that it was a complete hoax, but the scientists at the time really did believe it was a real missing link between apes and humans.

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It wasn't until later in 1953 when the scientific community eventually rejected Piltdown Man because they recognized that it was a hoax.

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And the main way you can use Piltdown Man when talking about the origins of humans is to point out that scientists are human.

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Scientists can be fooled and the easiest way to fool a scientist is to show them something that they're expecting to see.

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And that was certainly the case with Piltdown Man. British scientists at the time seemed to be jealous of scientists in Germany because there was a skull discovered in Germany called

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Heidelberg Man and it was claimed to be an early human. Now the British wanted their own transitional fossil to show that humans had actually come from Britain.

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So when Piltdown Man came on the scene it was exactly what they were expecting to see and so they were fooled into thinking that it was a real ape to human transition.

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Now that mistake was eventually corrected, although it took about 40 years for it to happen.

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But today it stands as a warning to scientists that they can be fooled into seeing what their minds are expecting to see.

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So when we look at other fossils like Lucy we need to take that into consideration that our beliefs shape how we interpret the evidence.