The main motivations behind the Piltdown Man and Cardiff Giant hoaxes are largely different yet similar. Those behind the Piltdown Man, namely Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward, were driven by Nationalism, scientific ideology, and fame. Dawson and Smith wanted to put England on the map because there hadn’t been any significant fossil findings in this time period and was the only major European country without one. They also wanted to push the ideology of the brain-centered paradigm so they created a “finding” to support this theory. Dawson and Smith also were looking for fame, which definitely followed. Because it took 41 years for the Piltdown man discovery to be proven a hoax, a large majority of the population spent those 41 years praising Dawson and Smith for their discovery.

 An argument can be made that the Cardiff Giant hoax was also created for fame, but it wasn’t the main motivator. The two men behind the Cardiff Giant hoax, George Hull and Stub Newell, were motivated by ideology and money, respectively. All of the other people involved in the making of this hoax were also motivated by money – the seller of the land Hull bought, the man who sculpted the giant, P.T. Barnum who created a replica to have in his show of oddities, even the museums that house the Cardiff Giant and one of the replicas. Hull’s main motivator was religious ideology, or more precisely anti-religious ideology. As a strong atheist, Hull believed the Bible was full of false stories and that Christians were gullible enough to believe anything that was in it. He did this by having the Cardiff Giant created, and poorly at that, to see how many people would believe that it really was a giant that the Bible claims once walked the earth. Based on the today’s equivalent of $750,000 that Stub Newell collected in under a month, it seems Hull’s theory was right and many people believed it was.

These hoaxes were successful for different reasons. The Piltdown Man was created to prove the brain-centered paradigm that scientists believed in. At the time, it hadn’t been proven but was a widely believed theory. Dawson and Smith provided the “missing link” to this theory which is what made some scientists accept it without looking too much into it. As we know now, this “discovery” was planted there for Dawson to uncover and while the fossils found were truly fossils, although the skull fragments were manipulated, they were taken out of context and not properly researched before being pushed as a major discovery. On the other hand, the Cardiff Giant hoax was successful because of the popularity of biblical literalism and anti-evolution. So many people in this time period had a very strong faith and most Christians believe everything that’s in the Bible which is why so many people believed in the Cardiff Giant being evidence that giants once walked the earth.

I believe that these hoaxes are both great examples of how no matter how objective a scientist claims to be, they can’t be trusted to challenge data that supports their own opinions and expectations. In the case of the Piltdown Man, scientists that believed in the brain-centered paradigm didn’t challenge the fossils presented to them, because it looked like what they expected to find. It took over 40 years for the people who challenged this idea to successfully disprove it. This is also evident in the Cardiff Giant hoax, although on a much shorter timeframe. The believers in the Cardiff Giant believed that they had all of the answers and that this was just a piece of evidence proving what they already knew so many people didn’t challenge it. The deception was uncovered when Newell admitted it was fake after a few weeks and a small fortune later. This is why it is important to check with multiple scientists with multiple different beliefs. Even scientists that claim to be objective have biases that influence their research.