The Piltdown Hoax

In 1912, in a small village named Piltdown located in England, a scientist named Charles Dawson found a piece of an ancient human skull. The human-like skull is what Dawson claimed to what connects ape to humans are connected more closely. Arthur Smith Woodward soon joined Dawson and together they found a set of teeth, a jawbone, more skull fragments and primitive tools, which they suggested belonged to the same individual. These fossils were ground breaking for the time, being the very first ancient human ancestor artifacts to be found in England. Woodward created a facial reconstruction of the million year old fossils , revealing a theory that humans developed "big brains" before walking on two legs. In the 1920's, more human ancestor remains were being discovered in other countries that revealed an opposite theory to Piltdown man, that humans evolved to walk upright before developing "big brains". This discovery lead the science community to question the Piltdown man remains and its inconsistencies to other remains that post dated England's remains. But in 1953, dating technology had advanced enough for scientist to date the Piltdown remains and the results revealed that the artifacts were not the same age, and through more investigating scientists learned that the skull and jaw fragments actually came from two different species, a human and an orangutan. A closer look at the teeth under a microscope, revealed that the teeth had been filed down to make them look human. They also discovered that most of the finds from the Piltdown site had been artificially stained to match the local gravels. Thus the discovery of the Piltdown man was deem a scientific hoax. 

Human error plays a role in this hoax because the scientists t took the evidence shown to them as fact, instead of being able to  conducting their own research on the fossils to be able to determine their own conclusions and theories to the bones. The bones were such a huge discovery for the time that England  kept the fossils under lock and key not allowing other scientists to test or even view them. Human error in this case made scientist believe that human evolution began with the development of "big brains" then upright walking.So when competing evidence was found that proved the opposite, scientist had to go back and figure out how one ancestor was so different from all the others. Thus forces scientists to question  other discoveries rather than move forward on human evolution research. 

Advancement in technology in the scientific community lead to the unveiling of the hoax. Fluorine absorption dating was one of the advancements, this is a method used to determine the amount of time an object has been underground. Another method of technology advancement that helped proved the hoax was a microscope; microscopes had advanced to resolutions as small as 2mm in the 1940's. 

I do not believe it is possible to remove "human factors" in science to prevent another hoax to happen again. As technology advances so does the human brain right alongside it, and another person in the future who is even more clever could be able to deal another hoax to science. And just as the Piltdown ma hoax, the next hoaxer would be solved by forever advancing technology. I personally would not want to remove human factor from science because although technology would prove certain aspects such as age more accurate than a human could, machines do not have the thought process of a human so it would eliminate the experience of being able to test personal theories. 

 A life lesson one could take away from this experience is to research into a topic and try to gain as many actual facts and real evidence before taking information as fact at face value from unverified sources. Especially with the internet, there are many things that are posted that are false or fake that spread like wildfire because people share everything on the internet before cross checking fiction for facts.