In 1912, the lawyer and amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson sent a letter to his friend Arthur Smith Woodward, head of geology at the prestigious British Museum. He told Woodward about a skull f ragment he had found in a gravel pit near Piltdown Common, England. The fragment resembled the “Heidelberg Man”—a Neanderthal unearthed by workmen in Germany a few years earlier. If prehistoric human-like bones were buried near Piltdown, it would not be surprising to Woodward, because many geologists at the time believed that the gravel pit had been left behind by an Ice Age riverbed (Oakley and Weiner 1955).