Published: 10.10.2021.
In its over 150-year history, evolutionists have made up/fell for many a fraud. Although the two frauds in this article, Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man, are both from the first half of the 20th century, I think it’s still important not to forget history.
Piltdown Man
This very famous fraud originated in Britain of the 19th century. Piltdown is a village in England’s East Sussex county.
The amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson “found” the bones (skull fragments and half of the lower jaw) some time before 1912 in a gravel pit near Piltdown. He presented the find to Dr. Arthur Smith Woodward, a paleontologist curator of the Geology Department of the British Museum of Natural History. The scientists were thrilled and the press immediately jumped on the story, because they finally wanted a “missing link” for the then relatively new theory of evolution. They named the “ape-man” “Eoanthropus dawsoni” and made the usual imaginative drawings.
In the 1910s, there were multiple skeptical voices and warnings about the case. Vance Ferrell reports in his book that a dental anatomist reported in 1916 that the teeth of “Piltdown Man” had been filed down by someone. Also, while the upper skull was clearly human, Aleš Hrdlička, a Czech anthropologist living in the U.S., said in 1922, that the skull and the jaw did not belong together.
These statements were ignored at the time.
The fraud was exposed in 1953 by the British anthropologist and geologist Kenneth Page Oakley, the British anatomist and palaeoanthropologist Sir Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark, and the human biologist and environmental physiologist Joseph Weiner. They carried out a flourine content test, also known as fluorine absorption dating on the Piltdown man. In a flourine content test, one measures the flourine content of the bones in question, based on the premise that they absorb flouride ions from the groundwater while resting in the ground. The test can determine whether individual bones are of the same relative age. The result: “It consisted of a human skull of medieval age, the 500-year-old lower jaw of an orangutan and chimpanzee fossil teeth. Someone had created the appearance of age by staining the bones with an iron solution and chromic acid.” (English Wikipedia)
According to a 2016 report, the main perpetrator was likely Dawson himself.
Wikipedia is quick to say that the “creationists” use this case “as evidence of an alleged dishonesty of paleontologists who study human evolution, despite the fact that scientists themselves had exposed the Piltdown hoax.” Of course it were scientists who exposed the hoax. However, the scientific establishment chose to ignore the warnings from the 1910s and used this fraud for about 40 years in media and books as “proof” for evolution, also used at the famous Scopes “monkey” trial in 1925 as evidence that human evolution was true. This is a real story of dishonesty and the bias of many scientists when they find something that seems to prove their theory.
“When preconception is so clearly defined, so easily reproduced, so enthusiastically welcomed and so long accommodated as in the case of Piltdown Man, science reveals a disturbing predisposition towards belief before investigation.” (John Reader, Missing Links, 1981, quoted in Vance Ferrell, Evolution Disproved, 2. book, p. 646)
Nebraska Man
This is a short and weird story. Nebraska Man (“Hesperopithecus haroldcookii”) was “found” by the rancher Harold Cook in 1917 – that is, a single tooth of it. He sent the tooth to Henry Fairfield Osborn, the then-president of the New York Zoological Society, who announced the find in 1922. In 1925-1926, researchers performed excavations at the area where Cook found the tooth. They concluded, that the tooth belonged to an extinct wild pig species called Prosthennops serus. (English Wikipedia) What is often left out of the story, however, is that it seems like the animal species to which the tooth belonged is still alive in South America, a species known as Catagonus ameghino. (see article of Answers in Genesis on the topic)
Resources
Answers in Genesis article about the Piltdown Man: https://answersingenesis.org/human-evolution/piltdown-man/the-piltdown-man-fraud/
Aleš Hrdlička report: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.1330050410
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
2016 BBC report: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37021144
Answers in Genesis on Nebraska Man: https://answersingenesis.org/human-evolution/piltdown-man/nebraska-man-revisited/