Both of these hoaxes had different motives – but both similarly involved tricking people into believing something false. For the Piltdown man, there were a few reasons they decided to do this. One was nationalism. Another was supporting scientific ideology. Dawson wanted to make it seem like the idea of a brain centered ideology was correct. For the Cardiff Giant, it was definitely a religious centered motivation. Hull had an argument with a Methodist minister and wanted to prove that the biblical literalism was not the way it should be. He decided to pick a giant because the story of David and Goliath in the bible is one that is widely known even by non-religious people. Once this was exposed he thought people would start to see through the bible. Also he did it for money as well. He put the giant on display and charged money for people to see it like an attraction. He almost made a theme park out of it. I think back in the time that this happened, people would be very attracted to something like this, an event like this. People wanted parts of the profits by investing in it, Barnum even asked to rent it from him for a large sum of money. According to Professor Watrall it is still making money even today because it is in a museum that you have to pay to enter. People believed both of these incidents because as humans we love seeing things out of the ordinary. We see this in many parts of human history, people being interested in things that can be seen as strange. Things like “freak shows” when people who had peculiar things about them would be put on display for money (which is totally unethical, I may add). We discussed in lecture that perhaps people could be primed to believe in giants, or other things similar to this. And as for the Piltdown man, that incident was a long time ago and maybe the public was not educated enough just to see that the skull was that of an orangutan. The Cardiff Giant affects the scientific understanding of the human past because biblical literalists were probably thinking this helped prove their theories. The Piltdown man shows that scientists can and will fake things to get their point out there. I think I agree with the first implication of these hoaxes that both of them show that “objective” scientists cannot be trusted to apply a skeptical eye to data when that same data can fulfill their expectation and desires. I think that we always need someone on the outside looking into an archeological discovery, or an experiment. I know in psychology and other disciplines, there are peer reviews for certain studies to be published. These help eliminate bias and also can prove helpful in the future, for when experiments are going to be replicated. As we discussed in class, objective science is inherently flawed. Observation by a human is really not all that trustworthy. As organisms, human’s do not have the greatest eyesight, nor do we have the best hearing. An example I can think of this is during a crime situation with gunshots. Police officers can never trust eyewitness reports about how many shots were fired because of human error. We can only figure out truly how many shots were fired through forensic evidence and investigation. This proves true is science also. When doing observations, we need multiple people who are not biased, and recording devices like cameras to prove these observations. There are other ways to do observational science but these are just the ones I could think of.