Blasphemy

Our modern day high priest, the sciencist, the oracles on matters ranging from the origin of the species to the future of the planet have been known, on occasion, to get it wrong.

Could this scandal be the 21st century's own Piltdown Man hoax?

The similarities are there:

Piltdown Man: The "Piltdown Man" is a famous hoax consisting of fragments of a skull and jawbone collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, a village near Uckfield, East Sussex. The fragments were thought by many experts of the day to be the fossilised remains of a hitherto unknown form of early human. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawn-man", after the collector Charles Dawson) was given to the specimen.

The Hobbit: University of New England archeologist Mike Morwood, announcing the discovery in October 2004, said the Hobbit was 1.06m tall, weighed about 25kg and had a brain the size of a chimpanzee's. Professor Henneberg and others have already aired doubts about the claims of Peter Brown, also of UNE, who described the fossil for science and declared it a new species, Homo floresiensis.

But there is a problem with our Homo floresiensis:

THE Hobbit, the tiny human fossil found in a cave on an Indonesian island in 2003 and claimed as a new species, was a modern human whose teeth had been worked on by a dentist, possibly in the 1930s, according to a scientist whose new book is set to inflame debate.

University of Adelaide professor of biological anthropology and comparative anatomy Maciej Henneberg says in his new book, The Hobbit Trap, that a lower left molar had a filling, a claim that threatens to blow out of the water conjecture by the fossil's describers that the Hobbit is 18,000 years old.

Mistakes are made when scientsts are so keen to prove their hypothesis, that they refuse to listen to any counterpoints.

-- Nora