Piltdown Hoax Blog Post

     In the early 1900's in a small town in England  man named Charles Dawson an amateur archeologist said he had found a strange piece of bone that could be a skull. This finding was very significant in the aspect that it was said to be the earliest human skull found. Charles Dawson took his finding to London's Natural History Museum where Sir Arthur Smith Woodward who was an eminent geologist helped him go back to the site where he found the piece of skull as he believed this could be very important to British history. The scientific community was very excited and they wanted to prove that the British also had primitive humans. Many newspapers and other people really believed that this was a true finding and movies were also made about the earliest ape men. Other countries like Africa and Germany had primitive human findings and the British also wanted to be the birth country of a primitive human. This whole thing turned out to be a hoax, it was announced in 1953 that this whole discovery had been a hoax. Kenneth Oakley an English physical anthropologist who worked in the museum applied a chemical test to help identify if the bones that had been found in Piltdown. This test brought out that the skull and the other fragments that were found were actually younger that what had been originally thought they were.
      There are many human faults that could have come into play with this whole Piltdown Hoax scenario. Ambition, jealousy, and greed were faults that attributed to the this hoax. The negatively affected the scientific process because many people earned a name from this hoax and there were people who genuinely thought that this things were actually real and that they proved that the British also had some form of primitive human. Charles Dawson wanted to be famous and known. He brought other artifacts into the museum and they all turned out to be hoaxes as well.
     With the chemical test that was applied by Kenneth Oakley it showed that the advances that were being made in the scientific community were showing that things could now be proven to be real or not. The new scientific processes also helped identify from what kind of species was the piece of skull came from. All these aspects were positive aspects that came up from the revealing of the Piltdown skull to be a hoax.
     Removing the "human" factor from science to reduce the chance of errors to my point of view would be pretty hard. As much as people want to remove the "human" emotion we are all humans and some people still have greed and jealousy and others want to be better than others. I personally would not want to remove the "human" factor from science because this is what gives people the drive to look for something or to prove it. If people did not have emotions or things that drove them, then science would not be something that people have a passion for.
     From this event I think that the life lesson I would personally take is that even if you lie and manipulate things or events to your benefit one way or another things will always reveal themselves. Taking information from unverified sources could also affect your credibility and they way people look and respect you. People always have to make sure that they use credible sources or make sure that they can verify it themselves as well before accepting anything as the truth.

References

Kenneth Oakley. (n.d.). Retrieved November 14, 2016, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kenneth-Page-Oakley

The Boldest Hoax. (n.d.). Retrieved November 15, 2016, from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3202_hoax.html