Piltdown  Hoax

The Piltdown Hoax was a supposed discovery made by Charles Dawson in 1912 in the Southern town of Louis in the Piltdown village, he claimed that he had found  a piece of an ancient human skull. Dawson invited Arthur Smith Woodward a leading geologist in England and Father Pierre who was a french paleontologist, the discovery became popular very quick because nobody had found remains of primitive humans in England. Later, Dawson found a jaw bone that he argued was part of the skull he found before. Dawson's discovery was important to the scientific community because the jaw bone was similar to that of an ape but with teeth similar to those of humans, and this showed a connection between humans and apes. If this discovery would have been real it would have taught us how similar we are to apes, and the importance of fossil discoveries, how they can help us build connections between  the past and the present (which I believe they do). They started to discover there was something not quite right about the Piltdown discovery when scientist found ancient remains in Asia and Africa and the fossils were far different from the Piltdown fossils , the fossils they found were from human ancestors that lived thousands of years after the Piltdown fossils and unlike the Piltdown fossils the skulls were less human.The Piltdown hoax had many effects on the scientific community, for example, it mislead scientist to do research based on the Piltdown discovery and some others were supporting theories with this fake discovery, the model of Piltdown man dominated research of human evolution for example Arthur Keeth this was convenient because it proved his personal theory of human evolution, he believed that humans developed big brains before they walked up right.

The human faults in the Piltdown discovery were ambition, jealousy, the thirst of fame and to increase his ego by gaining scientific prestige. All of these faults negatively affected Dawson's scientific process for the Piltdown discovery, because they putted self interest first before actual an d objective science, to obtain a desired result they manipulated the objects they had like the skull, and the bone jaw and conveniently molded the teeth on the jaw to make the look familiar to human teeth and pretending to find them by digging. 

The scientific offered new and more advanced techniques in the scientific process to reveal the skull to be a fraud. The new technologies used to prove that the Piltdown discovery was a fraud were; first they ran a fluorine test, the results showed that the fossils were very young like hundreds of years instead of millions of years. They also ran a full scale analysis that gave them better datings methods, it also discovered that the stains on the fossils were artificial. they used a microscope and discovered that the teeth had beed purposely scratched and filed down to get a particular shape. 

In my opinion it is impossible to remove human factors completely to reduce the chance of this errors, we can't close our eyes to the possibility of making similar mistakes today, because scientists are also humans and make mistakes sometimes led by their egos and personal interests. I would not like to remove human factors completely because just like they mislead scientist to make mistakes it also gives them an instinct to do and discover great things, for example a scientist curiosity would lead them to make more discoveries to do more research. there is a part in the video that relates to this question and it says "good science depends on national objectivity when national pride or self interest obscure this objectivity than scientists become as vulnerable as the rest of us, to lies, cheat and deceptions."

The Piltdown discovery thought me a big lesson about how people can manipulate information to have you believe what they want you to believe. I learned that we always have to question the information and do independent research to be sure that the information we are getting is accurate. For example, before it was believed that scientist were gentleman an no one would believe that they would do something like a fake discovery, but now we know it happened so it made us aware of that too. It taught us that we can't even trust those with great knowledge or a good reputation, because they are also humans and they make mistakes.