Week 5: Piltdown Hoax

       The Piltdown hoax was an archaeological area in England, in the years of 1908 and 1912 where a man, ape and other mammal fossil were discovered together in the same site. This hoax was in a little town called Sussex, in Southeast England in the early 1900s. The hoax was found at a nearby site and seen to have found a skull of an ancient human and jawbone of an ape.  Charles Dawson, an archaeologist claimed to have found these remains. He said a small piece of the skull was given to him by a workman. The effects on the community thought this would be a great way to better understand science. This hoax was a great way to show human evolution and the length of time that it had elapsed. This was known as the greatest hoax in the history of science.
       In 1953, the piltdown remains were said to be a hoax and the remains came from a museum in London. Till this day no one knows who planted these bones and why they did it.
       
       Faults scientists can have is they can believe one thing and it can end being the total opposite. It can ruin an experiment if there educated guess is completely wrong. There needs to be evidence to anything you make into a hypothesis. There needs to be a scientific method when making these assumptions. Scientists can make many mistakes, even the simplest of things where they can mix up bones that don't go together. Things need to be carefully done in order to make an honest belief.
When the scientists heard of the remains from piltdown, they tested the remains in a process in order to clarify the remains and they cannot make assumptions. Scientists want to be the first ones to discover something and they do it fast in order to be the first one to have discovered these bones. They end up doing the analysis wrong, resulting in delayed work and a bad reputation on that scientists. That's why the hoax man went to far in his lie, because scientists just assumed that the brain for example was preceding the modern omnivorous diet. Scientists got the chance to learn more about the fossil, which made them very eager to work on this.
     The positive aspect of revealing this skull being a fraud was that they tested and checked the bones. This hoax helped scientists to the belief that the human brain grew larger in size before the law got used to the new foods eaten. Scientists had a false idea of evolution all because of this hoax and ruined this idea, making it difficult to spot.There was other hoaxes done by other scientists, in which they had to make sure this wasn't another one.
     We can take out the human aspect for this to not be an error, we can live without the human remains. We can use so many other living things instead of a human and we should. We can possibly learn more without the human. It can be done in so many ways, BUT i think that human remains are so helpful and the humans are such unique species, we would want to use them. I would not want to remove the human remains.
      A lesson we can take away from this is that the theory of evolution is not a problem, We are still learning about evolution and the Piltdown hoax helped us learn that we don't know much about evolution and we can make many mistakes before finding the truth. This is the meaning of science, to learn and discover, we need mistakes done in order to grow. We can take away that we must really understand something before making accusations, we should test things to make sure they are real. We need to think behind the surface in order to get somewhere in science.