Piltdown

                  The Piltdown hoax happened in the early 1900s and had fooled many scientists for over 40 years. In 1912 in Luis, by the village of Piltdown Charles Dawson had been digging in a gravel pit. He had claimed to have found a piece of a human skull. Dawson had asked three other scientists to join him with his future searches in finding more fossils. Soon after a jaw bone was found although it was nothing of what anyone had ever seen before. The jaw line had an ape structure yet the teeth were example of human teeth because they were flat. This was an extreme find at that time because no fossils had ever been found in Europe before. The hoax was discovered by a full scale analysis that was launched in 1953. They discovered that there were scratches on the teeth giving them evidence that the teeth had actually been filed down. The jawbone was less than 100 years old and it was from a female orangutan giving them evidence that someone had actually forged the fossils. The forgery of these fossils cause scientists to believe that there were earlier findings that they had not yet found before.

                In this situation any scientist can get ahead of themselves in trying to be the best. Yes they are only human but when it comes to being the best, most humans try there hardest no matter what. Just in this situation, of whoever faked the fossil, tried to prove something to be the best and he turned out to be fraud. Faults like this effect the scientific process in multiple ways starting from the results. If people keep attempting to fake all of these fossils imagine the devastation in multiple situations.

                A scientist named Kenneth Oakley had ran a test called a fluorine test. The fluorine would accumulate calcium that would contain organic matter like bones and teeth. But what Oakley had discovered from this test was that the fossils had to of been less than 50,000 years old. From what they had claimed that this was from an ape like specie, that is definitely not true because it was not even old enough to be qualified as an ape like species. Two more scientists names Joseph Weiner and Wilfred Le Gros Clark had teamed up to further along the investigation to prove that the fossils were not what they had been said to be. The two fossils had been proved that they were actually 2 separate species not even of the same kind. The part of a skull was from a human and then the jaw was from an ape. The scratched proved the teeth were filed down in order to make them look like a humans. Other findings that Dawson had claimed to have been found were also proven to be artificially stained in which made to match the local gravels.

                In certain situations I believe it is possible to remove the human factor just to make it so certain situations like these do not happen. Although most of the time humans are how we find out certiana aspects of life. So that would be one hard thing to change. Never take anything or judge a book by a cover. Mainly because you can’t always prove everything just by looking at the cover. That is one thing that I learned from this scandal.