Week 5: Piltdown Hoax

     In 1912, in Piltdown Village of England, an amateur anthropologist, Charles Dawson, claimed to have found a piece of an ancient human skull. Dawson invited geologist, Arthur Smith Woodward to join him and also invited a French paleontologist, Father Pierre, to join him at Piltdown. At the grave pit, animal fossils were found that date back to around a million years old. He dug up a jaw bone and a skull, which looked as if it was an ape, and looked as if they had found the common ancestor or lineage between the humans and apes.
      This scientific find was significant because England had finally found fossils that could be the oldest human-like fossils of all. It was also significant because the fossils back up anatomist Arthur Keith's theory of human evolution that humans developed big brains before humans walked up right. Scientists now know that the opposite is true; up right walking is developed before the big brain. They had found more fossils in Piltdown, the original trio, so the controversies behind the find were not much voiced. It established nature at the time and it possibly proved Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory, and with the recognition of the first Englishman fossil, it was a significant scientific discovery at the time. After Charles Dawson's death in 1916, no more fossils were set to be found in Piltdown, but were found elsewhere in other parts of the world. Those fossils found in Asia, Africa, etc. after his death were dated hundred thousands of years after Piltdown man, which on the contrary deviated from looking human-like. It was kept on close guard, so it was not given many of the opportunities for a large study to find out the truth of the fossils and the linkages, until it was found to be a hoax through updated scientific processes later mentioned.
      Scientists and humans in general all have faults when it comes to curiosity and the desire to reach success. People have the tendency to do whatever it takes to fulfill this desire of success and their own personal satisfaction. The faults that negatively impacted this scientific process was jealousy and urge for fame and success, and competition. As humans, it is our motive to compete and outcompete others for resources and our needs, so it is possible that the drive to receive attention and outcompete others for success may have urged anthropologist Dawson to create this hoax in order to get some recognition for an "apparent" discovery, which in turn then was found out to be an hoax. People usually are jealous of others in society even to this day, so it is obvious scientist will display a sense of jealousy as well. Because the rest of the world was advancing in discoveries, the British anthropologist was jealous of this fact and since England did not have any major fossil discoveries, he felt enraged to create one is a possibility. In present society, these faults of jealousy, competition, and self-success desire does not seem inevitable because we see it in every aspect of society, whether it would be education or in families, all these faults affect us as humans and could have negatively impacted this scientific process turning it into a competitive game instead of an actual true advancement to the scientific world.
     Then a major turn point after World War II, gave scientists the technology to use fluorine to accurately date fossils. In 1949, scientists conducted a fluorine test on the Piltdown fossils, showing a shocking discovery that the fossils were pretty young dating up to one hundred thousand years old. Alas, in 1953, scientists launched the full scale analysis with better dating methods. The artifacts had been stained and were cut before of the fossil using  a steel knife. Kenneth Oakley applied a chemical test to authenticate to fossils, which also revealed the Piltdown man was much younger in age. When the scientists looked at Piltdown man's teeth using a microscope, they found that the teeth had been filed down, there had been scratch marks that had been scraped down for a particular desired shape. The jaw bone actually dated up to one hundred years, which was found to be a fossil of a female orangutan. Pieces were broken off from the jaw bone, which could have shown that jaw bone did not belong to the skull, so they had removed those pieces to make it much. The front canine tooth had been filed down and rubbed down to make it smaller, and the front part of the jaw is been broken off, to eliminate the telling signs that it actually is ape and not a human clone. Charles Dawson became a prime suspect and is now known to have forged thousands fossils and findings. It is believed that Martin Hinton may be involved as well because they had found stained artifacts in his trunk as well. However, the mystery of the suspect of the Piltdown man still remains today.
    In my opinion, it is not really possible to remove the "human" factor from science to reduce such errors because as humans we make mistakes, so as much as we would want to remove possibilities of error, we cannot because that is in our nature. That is why we create certain methods to try to eliminate the error as much as we can and with a low percentage of error, we are able to claim a discovery or answer to our hypothesis. It is not possible in my opinion, to discover an idea with no sources of error because as we experiment we account for sources of error and we repeat experiments to lower that percent to be as accurate as we can get. Having personal opinions and ideas on a theory or concept drive the science to discovery as well, so as much as we try to eliminate that, we cannot because that is how we derive these major concepts that are claimed in science today. I would not want to remove the human factor from science because I think each person's opinions may drive the experiment and theory to another level and can increase the possibilities from an infinite amount of discoveries. Lastly, human factor is needed in order to create hypotheses and test ideas that have been generated by human thought in order for us to derive theories in the scientific field.
    With regards to this historical hoax event, I learned the valuable lesson that assuming evidence from unverified sources can lead to misleading information that can impact other discoveries and other concepts later on. In general, as a college student and high school student, this lesson can be applied to using research from unverified sites and articles that may mislead us with information on a particular issue and negatively affect our understanding on an particular issue. In regards to science and experimentation, due to this hoax event, we should not assume certain discoveries from unverified sources as an amateur anthropologist in this case, instead we should test to make sure those sources are verified and then test the evidence found so we could verify the discovery as a whole.