PILTDOWN MAN FOOLS ARCHAEOLOGISTS
In December 1912, newspapers across Britain declared that the ‘missing link’ – an unknown species between ape and man – had been found, therefore proving Darwin’s evolutionary theory Charles Dawson, an amateur archaeologist, claimed to have stumbled across a skull and jawbone in Piltdown, Sussex, which he believed belonged to a human ancestor more than 500,000 years old. It would take 40 years for the ‘Piltdown Man’ to be proved a hoax – testing revealed that the jawbone was a filed-down specimen from an orangutan, while the skull was an unusually thickened human skull coloured to look older. The identity of the forger is a subject of some debate: over the years several names have been linked to the false find, though many believe that it was a ploy envisaged by Dawson himself.
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