From:    Marty Leipzig                          Rec'd
To:      Steve Quarrella                        Nov-18-93 09:34:36
Subject: Piltdown Man

Steve Quarrella, dreaming of seeing the Great Karroo, said to Fredric Rice:

 SQ> Hwaet, Fredric!

 SQ> 28 Oct 93, dixit Fredric Rice ad Steve Quarrella:

 FR> It appears to have been hoaxed by a Christian and debunked by
 FR> scientists. God Marty _did_ post a little something on it,
 FR> offering some names I have not seen before.  And, looking at
 SQ>
 SQ> I've missed it completely. 

     Do not approach 100 C, for I will, by the magic of the dancing
     ham-fingers, repost this little (if not slightly abridged)
     version of "The Piltdown-town Hoax, or, The Great English
     Gravel Pit Fossil Fraud and British Brain Fry".

     Ahem...

     "Piltdown Man" refers to a fraudulent flock of fossils "found"
     in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England, UK, Britain, in the early
     part of the heady days of the early 20th century. (Gad...I need
     to get another cup of coffee).

     Ahhh...that's much better. Anyways, these "fossils" were a
     portion of the cranial vault (which was later determined to be
     that of a medieval woman (Know her? Just a thought.) and an
     apelike mandible (which proved to be a chemically altered
     500 year old orang-utan jaw). To the scientists of BAAS (British
     Association for the Advancement of Science (British ASS to
     those less felicitous), these fossils appeared to be ancestral
     to man and were saddled with the moniker "_Eoanthropus
     dawsoni_" ("Dawson's dawn-man"...ain't latin great?). There is
     a great deal of subterfuge and consternation regarding Dawson
     (who found the fossils and later stashed them after he reported
     them to the BAAS and was taken slightly less that totally
     seriously by a large portion of the constituency.)

     Of course, the creationist crowd go all aslather about this,
     claiming intentional fraud, purposeful hoax and "those godless
     atheistic evolutionists create fossils to support that godless
     concept of evolution".

     Baloney and baloney^3.

     Piltdown was finally laid to rest as a hoax in the 1950's
     (after Dawson went the way of all flesh and the fossils were
     turned over for further study), but the identity of the
     perpetrator still remains somewhat unsolved. It probably was
     not Dawson, but the evidence points to the probability that the
     hoaxer was none other than the Jesuit scientist Pierre
     Teilhard de Chardin. Gotta watch those churchers, they be one
     sneaky bunch.

     Creationists love to cite Piltdown (erroneously, of course)
     as how scientists can be duped into believing what they "wish
     to be true". What they refuse to note is the fact that the
     Piltdown hoax was probably  perpetrated by a churchman in
     the first place, and secondarily, the fraud was exposed by
     scientists themselves, not by creationists. So when the
     creationist crowd holler about Piltdown, just gently remind
     them (with a sledgehammer, if necessary) that Piltdown is
     a classic case of self-correcting science doing the business
     of science.



... Creationists are fossils in their own time.
--- Blue Wave/Max v2.12
 * Origin: A Little Corner in Time BBS (1:106/113.0)