The discovery of fossil stays of “Piltdown man” – a purportedly extinct species that was claimed to be a relative of contemporary people – was introduced on December 18, 1912.
Charles Dawson, an English lawyer and newbie geologist, discovered the stays, together with the pictured cranium, and took them to the British Museum’s paleontology division, the place Arthur Smith Woodward claimed they have been from a species that was the lacking evolutionary hyperlink between apes and people.
However, it turned out to be an enormous scientific fraud. Investigations in 1926 and 1930 discovered they have been far more moderen than claimed, and, in 1953–54, reexamination confirmed the stays included a roughly 600-year-old human cranium and the jaw and enamel of an orangutan, and that they’d all been fraudulently buried.
However, it is by no means been confirmed who was behind the fraud. Many suspected both Dawson or Woodward, however some additionally contended they might have been caught up in another person’s play.
A examine in 2016, nonetheless, claimed Dawson was the perpetrator.
