The Cardiff Giant and the Piltdown Man have very different reasons for their existence. The Cardiff Giant was not only a massive money-maker at the time, it was also constructed to prove a petty point about the gullibility of the masses to the Church. The Giant was successful due to a highly religious population in the United States in the late 19th century. People already believed, as the bible told them, that giants once walked the earth and the Cardiff Giant was definitive proof of the legitimacy of this claim. This particular hoax doesn’t call into question the objectivity of scientists as even a sculptor could identify the Giant as a fake.
The Piltdown Man, on the other hand, had more nuanced motives. In the infancy of the study of paleoanthropology various hominids were discovered by most western European nations, such as Germany, Spain, and France. The British Empire had arguably the furthest reach in terms of territories controlled but could not seem to gain a foothold in the field of paleoanthropology. This seems to be a primary motivating factor behind the Piltdown Man. In the age of developing nationalism across Europe, Britain needed to compete in this field to prove their supremacy. It had been long believed at the time that human encephalization had been the first step in our evolution although none of the hominids discovered by other nations had supported this hypothesis. In comes the Piltdown Man, not only giving Britain a foothold in this field, but changing the course of the understanding of human evolution. I believe this set the scientific community back at least for a period of time. The Piltdown Man ultimately was a biased piece of evidence that completely contradicted all other information known by previous hominid discoveries. The scientists involved with the Piltdown controversy were anything but “objective”. As disheartening as it is to see an obvious fake take the place of eldest human ancestor, there were still quite a few dissenters in this case. Seemingly, most scientists outside of Arthur Smith Woodward, called into question the legitimacy of the Piltdown Man. I refuse to count Charles Dawson as a scientist in this case. Being an “amateur antiquarian” is a far cry from becoming an expert in matters of human evolution. So, no, I do not agree with the implication that scientists cannot be trusted because in the end, science is a thing to be constantly questioned by those who operate within the field. I will agree that both hoaxes exemplifying the self-correcting nature of science. In science, I believe that dissenting opinions that can be asserted with enough quantifiable evidence help keep the entire academic field alive.