Piltdown hoax: Difference between revisions
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Revision as of 03:10, 28 February 2008
The Piltdown Hoax was a paleoanthropological controversy involving the falsification of a fossil specimen to provide the missing link between apes and humans on the scale of modern human evolution. Named for the site of its alleged discovery, Piltdown, England, the specimen was found by Charles Dawson in 1911. Consisting of portions of a human-like skull and an ape-like jaw, the lone sample was presented to the world as a new species, Eoanthropus dawsoni, in 1912. It was not until the 1950s, when fluorine dating revealed a large discrepency between the relative dates of the skull and the jaw, that the Piltdown Man was determined to be a forgery.