Chase Livingston

9/17/21

In humans past history, there have been known to be false accusations about big findings all the time. people usually looking for fame money or to be a historian themselves. Both the tale of the Cardiff Giant and the Piltdown Man are both hoaxes made to create a certain point. The Cardiff Giant was discovered in a part of land that was being dug up for a well. When Stub Newell found the Cardiff Giant he thought he found a huge discovery and started selling tickets to see the discovery. PT Barnum later found out these people were buying tickets to see the giant. He then trued to buy the giant for a few months for $60,000 which is $750,000. When Stub declined the offer, PT Barnum then created his own replica of the giant to sell his own tickets. As time went on, people started to get more and more suspicious about the legitimacy of the giant. With the other hoax, there were bones found in a sight that resembled human bones. These bones were discovered and then thought to be the connection between ape and human. The bones were then never found at other sites and were found right before carbon reading in technology to tell us whether or not bone matter is real bones or what species it came from. Both hoaxes were set up and proven false later on. The Cardiff Giant was created by a man, the giant was made made out of a soft stone quarries in Minnesota, chiseled in Chicago, then buried in New York about a year before Stub Newell “discovered” it in Cardiff. A man named George Hull was in an argument with his pastor. Hull was a known atheist and was trying to prove the point that people are very easy to trick and that religion was all a scam. Being a wealthy atheist, he thought that he could bury this big stone man that he got specially sculpted, so that when a person eventually digs it up will believe that it will be a religious figure of some sort, like in the biblical tale David and the Goliath. People started to believe this story for a while until people started hearing rumors about how Stub Newell was bragging about how much money he made off of it. His plan worked. Everyone believed that it was indeed from the biblical tales of David and the Goliath. The Piltdown man was actually made of fake bone to make the skull seem more similar to an actual human skull. People started doubting the bones and wondering whether there was actually another kind of ape that was closer to us than a chimp. With later development in technology, there was an easy way to tell that someone manipulated a real skull with bone like material to create this hoax. With both of these hoaxes becoming huge news was the pint for both of these making money and showing people that they can be put down as real historian artifacts for the attention they brought.