Piltdown hoax

In the early 1900’s in Sussex, England bone fragments were discovered by an amateur archaeologist named Charles Dawson and that discovery would change the scientific community forever. The skull and jawbones that were discovered by Dawson was the first of many strange discoveries at Piltdown. Since little was known about human remains that were as old as these bones were thought to be this discovery was thought to be the missing link between apes and modern man. Although many scientists were excited by this discovery many questioned the validity of the discovery due to the fact that the jaw bone and skull did not seem to be an exact match. There was no way to be sure if the jaw came from the skull because the area that would normally connect the skull and jaw was broken off. The find at Piltdown affected the way scientist looked at the history of man and how man might have changed over time starting as apes and slowly evolving into modern man. Piltdown man remained a top discovery for the next 40 years until technology finally caught up with the man that decided to play this cruel joke on the scientific community. At Britain’s natural history museum an employee, Kenneth Oakley preformed a test to authenticate and find a more accurate age for the bones and it was discovered that they were not very old at all. The bones has been boiled and stained with chemicals to make them seem older and a canine tooth that was once thought to be the linchpin in the legitimacy of Piltdown man was quickly filled down and painted to give it an aged appearance. When the announcement was made that Piltdown man was a hoax the science community was shocked.
At the time of Piltdown many other countries were finding very old human remains and the science community within England wanted to find something too. They did not want to be the country with no evidence of their ancestors or to have no clues to help uncover mans past. This could easily lead someone to creating the fake bones and planting them at Piltdown. The drive to find their own remains also affected how scientist reacted to the discovery; even though many were skeptical they did not challenge the find outright nor did they stop to look at the things they found odd about this skull. They were more excited by the fact that their home country had an amazing discovery that could be added to the history of man.
As time went on many advances were being made in the scientific community and out of these advances came fluorine absorption dating. The fluorine abortion test is used to determine how long something is underground; ground water contains fluorine ions that bone fragments will absorb and from that the age of the bones can be estimated.
It is not possible for the human factor to be removed from science and no I would not want to remove it either because without the human factor scientist would not have the drive and passion to work so hard to make all the advanced they have and will make. If you take the human factor out sure you might have less incidents like Piltdown but we didn’t have the human factor in this field, or any field for that matter, we could not have advanced enough to have discovered that Piltdown was a hoax.
You can never take information at face value because you never know where the information came from or if the person giving it to you it trustworthy. People can be selfish and create a discovery like with Piltdown just so they can be well known and sometimes people can just be wrong when they think they are right. There is always a way to find out was is right and wrong whether it involves doing a lot of research or just reviewing a person’s findings and discovering a flaw in their work.