Piltdown Man

Hello, sonny.

Well, my Piltdown pal.

So the boss was right.

You're just a cheap, nosy reporter after all.

In the worst cases, researchers saw what they wanted to see instead of what was actually there.

The most spectacular example was Piltdown Man.

Discovered in England in 1912, it consisted of a human-like skull and an ape-like jaw.

British scientists hailed it as the ultimate missing link, proof that humans had evolved in England itself.

But even legitimate fossils were interpreted through deeply flawed frameworks.

Early anthropologists assumed that brain size was the most important marker of human evolution.

bigger brains meant more advanced more human this seemed logical modern humans have large brains compared to apes so surely the first thing that made our ancestors human was brain expansion this led to a predicted sequence first came the big brain then upright walking then tool use brain first everything else followed it made intuitive sense to scholars who valued intelligence above all else the brain the seat of reason and thought must have been the key adaptation that separated humans from animals based on this assumption scientists made predictions about what the missing link should look like something with a large human-like skull but ape-like body a creature that had evolved intelligence first but retained the physical characteristics of its primate ancestors This was exactly what Piltdown Man appeared to show, which is one reason so many experts accepted it so readily.

They were also convinced that human evolution had been relatively recent and relatively fast.

Uh, someone took a tooth and, and they said it came from a, uh, prehistoric, uh, man, only later to discover it was a pig's tooth.

And then you have, uh, Piltdown Man in 1912, and he's this supposedly prehistoric, uh, ape man, and it was discovered in 1953 to be a total hoax.

Some men took a jawbone, they filed down two teeth, and they fused it to a piece of human skull, and they said, "Here is Piltdown Man." And I have a whole sermon where I go through Java man and Neanderthal man.

Listen It's you can do all kinds of things with plaster of Paris.

You can, you can create all kinds of things to try to perpetuate your lie that you're trying to do because you are suppressing what God has taught.

One of the creatures was shown in the act of killing a whale, represented as but little larger than himself.

I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size, but in a moment decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring tribe, some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the Piltdown or Neanderthal man was born.

Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.

Then suddenly, I saw it.

Curiously enough, they seemed to have been chiseled badly out of proportion with their scenic background, for one of the creatures was shown in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than himself.

I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size, but in a moment decided they were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring tribe, some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the Piltdown or Neanderthal man was born.

Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.

Then suddenly I saw it.

It's age old.

In 1912, someone glued an orangutan's jaw to a human skull, buried it in an English gravel pit, and called it Piltdown Man.

Manufacturing this hoax took pretty amateur handiwork.

Exposing it took forty-one years, during which textbooks were rewritten and scientists were chasing a fossil that never existed.

You don't see transitional forms or missing links or anything that can connect the theory of evolution to what we see today.

The gradualism is completely destroyed and every once in a while you hear of an ape man that's being discovered, whether it's Piltdown Man or Java Man or Peking Man or Nebraska Man.

You just get weary of hearing about all these mans that end up being either a fraud fiction or fantasy.

They get the big media splash and then all of a sudden what happens? They just fall apart.