[cookcounty]

"Ooooooookay...there was the Piltdown Hoax, and then there was...your turn! Name another..."

Ah but you miss the point.

The point is not that there have been hoaxers......

The point is that the vast preponderance of people in this field are easily taken in, whether by very crude hoaxes or by sloppy "science."

The follow-on to Piltdown is Hesperopithecus, in which a dim-witted goofball named Osborne, who ran the presigious Museum of Natural History in New York, lifted a pig's tooth to the light and testified in rapturous tones that it was obviously a hominid fossil. From this hogstooth was construed a whole industry of hogwash, including "scholarly" papers, touring lectures and reconstructions. This from the "best and brightest" paleontologists in the world.

And there is more.... I would continue with, uh, so much to choose from, how about with Ramapithecus?
.....But I have to get to work, with all my fellow yahoos, so I'll let y'all figure that one out.

[Pharmboy]

Well, "fraud" was the term used; the fact that science takes missteps until it corrects itself (e.g., Ramapithecus) is PART of science and its methodology. This is what is particularly confusing to the religionists and theists since faith and beliefs without testing is part of their (and evidently your) dogma.

The study of human evolution is very hard and admittedly often directed by persons with liberal agendas; but that does not make emerging facts incorrect or give the lie to the whole issue of evolution. We cannot convince people of faith that there was no Garden of Eden; we understand that. And you need to understand that we cannot be swayed by myths and stories.

[Stultis]

The point is that the vast preponderance of people in this field are easily taken in, whether by very crude hoaxes or by sloppy "science."

Not true. It wasn't easy at all. While granted that no one suspected (or at least openly suggested) fraud, the fact is that the "preponderance" of anthropologists concluded that Piltdown was not a single creature, but a chance association of a human skull and ape jaw. The hoaxer had to engineer a second find (Piltdown II) to quell the critics.

The follow-on to Piltdown is Hesperopithecus, in which a dim-witted goofball named Osborne, who ran the presigious Museum of Natural History in New York, lifted a pig's tooth to the light and testified in rapturous tones that it was obviously a hominid fossil.

Actually I don't think either Osborne or any of the Americans ever claimed it was a hominid (in the human family). They claimed it was a hominoid, specifically an anthropoid ape. It was an Englishman, Elliot Grafton Smith, IIRC, who elevated Hesperopithecus to human ancestry, in text accompanying that picture in the Illustrated London News that all the creationists reproduce (and which Osborne immediately dismissed as unscientific fantasy).

The claim that an ape had been found in the Americas was extraordinary enough in itself. Whatever you may choose to believe about the credulity of scientists, the fact is that there was no way in the world such a claim would ever achieved general acceptance on the basis of a single worn and eroded tooth. Further evidence was necessary, and when the researchers at the American Museum sought it out they uncovered their own error.