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ShareOn 21 November 1953, one of the most fascinating puzzles in science was finally solved.
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Three scientists--Joseph Weiner, Kenneth Oakley, and Wilfrid Le Gros Clark--described their investigations into the important fossilized human remains found at Piltdown in Sussex in the early 1900s.
Their conclusion was stunning: the remains, and the accompanying materials that supposedly verified them as ancient fossils, had all been faked.
The discovery of Piltdown Man had been announced to the world in 1912 by an amateur fossil hunter, Charles Dawson, and the Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum in London, Arthur Smith Woodward, who had found fragments of a thickset skull and an ape-like lower jaw, along with other bones and stone tools.
These fragments pointed to a species of early human who had lived in England a million years ago-a 'missing link' between apes and modern man.
But, as Weiner and his colleagues were to reveal in 1953, the skull was a recent one, and the jaw had belonged to an orang-utan.
These and many other 'finds' from Piltdown had been deliberately stained and tampered with to make them appear ancient, and the scientific establishment had been well and truly fooled.
For more information about the title The Piltdown Forgery, read the full description at Amazon.com, or see the following related books:
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