At the time of Piltdown finds, there were very few early hominid fossils; Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens were clearly fairly late. It was expected that there was a "missing link" between ape and man. It was an open question as to what that missing link would look like. Piltdown man had the expected mix of features, which lent it plausibility as a human precursor. Scientists were generally not as skeptical as they should have been, for this reason, though from the start there were significant numbers who objected quite vociferously to the supposed find.
The hoax succeeded in large part because of the slipshod nature of the testing applied to it; careful examination using the methods available at the time could have immediately revealed the hoax. This failure to adquately examine the fossils went unmarked and unnoticed at the time - in large part because the hoax admirably satisfied the theoretical expectations of the time. Do scientists sometimes make mistakes? Yes.
However, during the next two decades there were a number of finds of ancient hominids and near hominids, e.g. Dart's discovery of Australopithecus, the Peking man discoveries, and other Homo erectus and australopithecine finds. Piltdown man did not fit in with the new discoveries.In the period 1930-1950 Piltdown man was increasingly marginalized and by 1950 was, by and large, simply ignored. From time to time it was puzzled over and then dismissed again. The American Museum of Natural History quietly classified it as a mixture of ape and man fossils. Over the years it had become an anomaly.
The following quote comes from a "The Evolution of Man", a 1927 book by Grafton Elliot Smith:
"Yet it [the skullcap] was found in association with the fragment of a jaw presenting so close a resemblance to the type hitherto known only in Apes that for more than twelve years many competent biologists have been claiming it to be the remains of a Chimpanzee."
Piltdown man has been discussed time and time again by creationists because they seem to want us to think that because one hoax was accepted by the general scientific community for a period of time (and not by all of them, see above), that this therefore means that
all of the thousands upon thousands of fossil finds in the world could just as easily be hoaxes. Such an illogical conclusion is clearly absurd, and it would also necessitate proving that all scientists are either incompetent gullible fools, or liars who are involved in an elaborate conspiracy to hoax everyone about evolution.
As for the "500 PhDs," this claim is clearly in error. When one considers the small number of PhDs in paleontology being granted currently and the even smaller number 80 years ago and the diversity of topics chosen for PhD theses a figure of half a dozen seems generous; in all probability there were none whatsoever. John Rice Cole notes that in the 20s there were about 2 dissertations per year in physical anthropology in the entire US on ANY topic.
Robert Parson made a systematic search of the bibliographies of The Piltdown Forgery by Weiner, The Piltdown Inquest by Blinderman, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery and The Piltdown Papers by Spencer, The Antiquity of Man (1925) and New Discoveries Relating to the Antiquity of Man (1931) by Sir Arthur Keith. Spencer and Keith's works have extensive references and bibliographies of the primary research literature. There are no references to any doctoral dissertations.
The above information comes from
here. But if you think you can do better, and uncover a Piltdown man PhD, then go for it.
