The Cardiff Giant and the Piltdown Man were hoaxes that provoked a public interest in human prehistory and archaeology. While they were similar hoaxes that made false claims about our past, they are different in means of motive, the reason for their success, and their impacts.
The Cardiff Giant was a perpetuated made by Stub Newell and his relative George Hull in 1869. This hoax revolved around a large sculpture of a man that was created then buried in a Newell’s field and later “discovered.” The motives for this hoax were to prove that people that are devoutly religious will believe anything if it is mentioned in the bible. This was spurred after Hull had an argument with a Methodist minister about religion since Hull was an atheist. A secondary motive was money. As soon as the “petrified man” was “discovered,” people began to pay to visit it and Hull and Newell made a lot of money from the Cardiff Giant and its exhibition and from renting it to certain groups.
The Piltdown Man was a hoax perpetrated by Charles Dawson in 1912. Dawson claimed that he found the missing link between humans and apes in Europe and not in Africa. Evolution was a brand new concept just being to be explored and Dawson’s discovery was considered very relevant until scientists revealed it to be a hoax. Dawson’s motive was nationalism through the claim that intelligent life, humans, originated in Europe and not in Africa. He wanted to prove that white people were more evolved than people from other races.
The reason for the Cardiff Giant’s success was that many people wanted to know about the prehistory of humans and this explanation was readily available for biblical literalism to take hold and perpetuate as the truth. People readily believed the Cardiff Giant because they took the Bible literally and did not stop to ask questions about whether or not it was real even when many scholars and even some artists could tell that it was not a “petrified giant” but rather a large statue of a man.
The reason for the Piltdown Man’s success was that the main theory for the time was that humans evolved a larger brain size before the rest of their anatomy changed, which was what the Piltdown Man portrayed. The nationalism that was the motivation for this hoax also helped it to be successful. Many scholars throughout Europe accepted that humans evolved in Britain because they wanted to believe that white people were more evolved or led to the evolution of the modern human.
The impacts of the Cardiff Giant on the scientific understanding of the human past were mostly on the general public’s belief and idea of what the human past looked like. While it did impact the scientific community breifly, it was a poorly executed hoax which the scientific community disproved rather fast.
The impacts of the Piltdown Man on the scientific understanding of the human past was much more profound than the Cardiff Giant. This hoax was executed rather well because of the involvement of respected scientists and impactful because of the nationalism that propelled and accepted it in the scientific community. Eventually, the evidence against the Piltdown man built up and scientific methods proved that it was nothing more than a hoax.
I believe that both hoaxes exemplify the self-corrective nature of science. I think this because while both hoaxes impacted the scientific community and general public’s view on human’s past, science overcame the “evidence” and disproved these hoaxes.
I really liked your post and agreed with what you were saying! In your first paragraph, when you mentioned how these hoaxes produced a public attention to archaeology, and that got me thinking a lot about how the public views archaeology. These hoaxes were early in the development of archaeology as a science and in many ways, this was the general public’s first exposure to what archaeology is. It’s sad to think that these people probably generalized all of archaeology as the study of sensationalism and weird aspects of history like giants walking the earth or ape-men. This also made me think about how much of an impact the Piltdown actually had on the public’s idea of evolution. A lot of people still believe in white people as the master race or as a more evolved human than other races, and while educated people know the truth, the general, uneducated public does not, and these racist ideals most likely still persist because of pseudoscience like the Piltdown man. The general public has a huge impact on archaeology and how its viewed, and your post really got me thinking about that! In regards to the Cardiff Giant- while I’m not the one to say whether every- or any- of the stories in the Bible are pure fact or not, I can say that a lot of it is supposed to be taken as symbolism, simply from my own experience with it and just by simply reading some of the terminology used around specific stories. The Cardiff Giant probably had a lot of people thinking that every story in the Bible is actually to be taken literally, and because society at that time was much less secular than it is today, that idea took hold, and that’s probably why it had the impact that it did and was so popular, even for a short time. Bible-humpers aside, I think I would be interested in seeing what was advertised as a real giant, just because I know that macabre and extraordinary things are often popular just because exactly that- they are extraordinary. This is probably why PT Barnum decided to copy the idea, not simply because of anything the Bible said or not.
I like that you begin by introducing each hoax and then talking about how they relate to Biblical Literalism. Since the Cardiff Giant (or the Goliath of Cardiff) hoax was designed specifically to appeal to people who were willing to believe what the Bible told them without any kind of questioning or critical thinking. It draws on the passages in the Bible that specifically mention a race of giants that existed before humans, and it was advertised to the crowds with a heaping spoonful of biblical symbolism.
On the other hand, the Piltdown man seems to have been created to dispute what the Bible says. By arguing that it was the missing link between other fossilized hominid specimens it inserts itself into the scientific world rather than the religious one. You also point out that there was a sort of scientific race going on in Europe, and that England was desperate to make an entry. The Piltdown man came in and checked a lot of boxes: satisfying a need for national pride, being the new and best scientific discovery, and acting as the agent to prove the theory that intelligent humans evolved in Europe.
I’m with you when you say that in the end, both of these hoaxes are good examples of the self corrective nature of science. Believing is easy, but proving is much harder. The Cardiff Giant was disproved quickly, in part due to the absolute lack of any sort of science involved in the hoax. I think the case of the Piltdown Man is an even better example, since it took so long for the entirety of the scientific community to reject the hoax. That being said, it would be interesting to see what would happen if someone tried to pass off a hoax like one of these today. How long would it last and what would the public reaction be?