The Piltdown Man was a hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. At a meeting of the Geological Society of London held on December 18, 1912, Charles Dawson claimed to have been given a fragment of the skull four years earlier by a workman at the Piltdown gravel pit. According to Dawson, workmen at the site had discovered the skull shortly before his visit and had broken it up. Revisiting the site on several occasions, Dawson found further fragments of the skull and took them to Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of the geological department at the British Museum. Read more
Piltdown Man - named for the village where the remains were found - set the scientific world ablaze. It was hailed as the missing evolutionary link between apes and humans, and proof that humans' enlarged brains had evolved earlier than had been supposed. It was 40 years before the find was definitively exposed as a hoax, and speculation about who did it rages to this day. Now scientists at London's Natural History Museum - whose predecessors trumpeted the Piltdown find and may be suspects in the fraud- are marking the 100th anniversary with a new push to settle the argument for good. Read more
In November 1953, Time published evidence gathered variously by Kenneth Page Oakley, Sir Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark and Joseph Weiner proving that the Piltdown Man was a forgery and demonstrating that the fossil was a composite of three distinct species. Read more
The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous paleoanthropological hoax ever to have been perpetrated. It has been prominent for two reasons: the attention paid to the issue of human evolution, and the length of time (more than 40 years) that elapsed from its discovery to its full exposure as a forgery. Read more