Piltdown Hoax

The story of the Piltdown hoax began in the early 1900's, in Sussex a county near southeast England. In 1908, amateur archaeologists Charles Dawson, wanting to join the Geological Society of London; in which he claimed that he received from a laborer, a strange piece of skull fossil, which was dug up at the Barkham Manor near the village of Piltdown. Dawson met up with Sir Arthur Smith Woodard; who is a geologist. The British scientist were "swelled with pride", but some scientist doubted that the jawbone and the skull were from the same creature. In 1953, an announcement was made that the Piltdown Man was a fake. When Piltdown was first revealed as a "fake" people felt embarrassed of the British science. Kenneth Oakley did a chemical test to help date the fossils; the results of the test came out to say that Piltdown Man seemed much younger then what was said to be. The Piltdown's jaw was from an Orangutan, and the teeth had been filed down flat. All the fossils have been boiled and stained carefully to give them old age.  The skull was stained, the teeth filed down.

The human fault that first influenced these findings was to find the earliest and first Englishmen. The British science community, wanted to have pride and to be the center of attention, on finding the 'missing link' on British land. People were convinced that the Piltdown Man was the first human like, but without the technology, scientists couldn't really do tests and other stuff to find out how old the fossils are; a majority of the scientific community remained unconvinced. 

The positive aspects of the scientific process that was responsible for revealing the skull to be a hoax was a chemical test, that was done by Kenneth Oakley. By doing chemical tests on the fossils you can date them back to when the originally occurred. 

I do no think you can remove the human factor from science to reduce the chance of errors. I do not think it is possible because humans change, get better educated and we can propose new theories. This means humans are evolving and are learner newer and helpful ways of learning about fossils, and other stuff. 

The life lesson I'm taking from this historical event is not to trust everyone and everything you hear or see. Not everything you hear or see may be true. It can be a fake, a phony, or a lie.