Who was Piltdown Man?
On 18 December 1912 newspapers throughout the world ran some sensational headlines - mostly along the lines of: 'Missing Link Found - Darwin's Theory Proved'.
That same day, at a meeting of the Geological Society in London, fragments of a fossil skull and jawbone were unveiled to the world. These fragments were quickly attributed to 'the earliest Englishman - Piltdown Man', although the find was officially named Eoanthropus dawsoni after its discoverer, Charles Dawson. Dawson was an amateur archaeologist, said to have stumbled across the skull in a gravel pit at Barkham Manor, Piltdown, in Sussex.
Some 40 years later, however, on 21 November 1953, a team of English scientists dramatically exposed Piltdown Man as a deliberate fraud. Instead of being almost a million years old, the skull fragments were found to be 500 years old, and the jaw in fact belonged to an orang-utan. So what had really happened?
Published: 2003-11-14
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