Piltdown Man is not so much a problem for Science, on account of it being a high-profile, historical hoax. Rather, the problem is that it took 41 years for the combined Authority & Accumen of this Institution to acknowledge what was readily within Science’s technical ability to determine, from the outset in 1912. The supposed-fossil presentation was immediately controversial, and suspect. Multiple competent professional bystanders noticed on-sight that the jaw was from an ape. “Not even ballpark”. The real failures here have yet to be laid to rest … a century on & counting.
Public school boy-level tests would show that the jaw was fairly ‘green’; it contained ‘fresh’ organic matter that decays away in old fossil bones. Removing fresh matter from bones – rendering and boiling and processing them – was a mature industry that was widely practiced, and had been for many centuries. Yet the skull – which was conventional and not suspect – was tested for age, while the outlandishly misplaced jaw-bone (from an orangatan, no less) was not tested. Suspicious oversight, much?
The skull & jaw-bone are not the worrisome component of the hoax. Rather, the pretense & artifice that these clever bones had tricked & deceived Science, is the real hoax. In fact, during the later 19th C, in the generations immediately preceding the presentation of the Piltdown bones, hoax-artifacts were almost a cottage-industry: Science knew full well it had to be on the lookout, and it routinely tested & identified bogus materials. Science willfully suspended prudent disbelief, ‘studiously’ failed to apply well-known verification-tests, in the case of Piltdown Man.
It is true that the Piltdown presentation indeed played to a popular bias of Science (that the Big-Brain led; and post-cranial evolution followed); furthermore it did flatter the egos of specific individuals. That Piltdown said what the community and some workers wanted to hear, did play a role. However, the conclusion that has to be drawn from the 41 year lapse in effective testing & examination, is that they knew all along that it was likely a fake – else they would have said (nay, insisted), “Absolutely – test it! Right now!” But nooo…
Now (since the bust in 1953), further generations have gone by in which we are obliged to support the precept of Science As Self-Correcting, in the full knowledge that the vaunted capacity for correction fell flat on its face for 41 years. Piltdown was not called-out because the process of self-correction worked, but because by-and-by the key vested interests in the deceit eventually died.
Absolute power – still – corrupts absolutely, and Science is no exception.