• Getting Down With the Piltdown Man

  • Apr 10 2021
  • Length: 29 mins
  • Podcast

Getting Down With the Piltdown Man

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  • Summary

  • Remember that time when you knew the milk in your fridge was past its sell by date, and it smelled a little bit funny, but you went ahead and poured it on your cereal anyway because you wanted your breakfast more than you wanted to not vomit? Well, the Piltdown Man is kind of like that. Not because he was a man who kept giving himself food poisoning, but because the people involved with the affair probably should have known better than to swallow it whole. I mean, they didn't literally swallow a man. There wasn't even a whole man, just some bits of skull and teeth. They were supposed to be from an exciting new human ancestor, one of the first ever discovered, and it was going to shape the science of human evolution forever. But... well... it was all a bunch of rotten milk.

    We probably should have seen it coming. But the good news is, science didn't fail us. We failed to properly do science. You see, scientists are wretchedly human, and they can succumb to the same weaknesses and flaws that everyone else can. When circumstances are right, a whole bunch of them can screw up the same way at the same time, and that's how the Piltdown Man came to be. Hear all about it on this episode of The Cliff's Edge.
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