Piltdown Man
A skull postulated from a group of fossils of primitive man, dramatically discovered in England in 1912, but later proved to be fraudulent.
At the time, the British journal Nature called the find "the most important discovery of its kind hitherto made in England." The reconstructed skull resembled a cross between a human and a chimpanzee.
Charles Dawson — an amateur archaeologist and the skull's discoverer — and Arthur Smith Woodward — a distinguished geologist at the British Museum to whom the findings were submitted to by Dawson — tried to fit the skull and the other fossils found at Piltdown together, but had difficulty. Anthropologists also were not comfortable with the Piltdown man, and several attempts at reconstructions to reconcile the ape-like jaw and the human-like cranium produced no advances. Several scientists finally agreed to consider it as an aberration, an error of nature, and the skull was authenticated and placed in the British Museum.
Doubts, however, were always present and in 1954 the fragments were dated by Kenneth P. Oakley (discoverer of the 500,000 year old "Swanscombe fossil") and his associates using the fluorine analysis method — developed by Oakley — and it was found out that the jawbone actually belonged to a modern orangutan, stained and abraded to look older. The cranium was found to be genuinely human, but not very ancient. Also, artifacts and relics supposedly discovered at the Piltdown site were found out to have been tampered with to appear to be contemporary with the fossils.
Until this day there is a lot of speculation at who perpetrated the hoax, but the definite answer has never been found. The list of suspects include Charles Dawson, Arthur Smith Woodward, Tielhard de Chardin (scientist and theologian who was in several of the expeditions to Piltdown), Martin A. C. Hinton (curator of zoology at the British Museum), and, believe or not, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
See Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery, Mystery of the Piltdown Skull, The Piltdown Forgery, The Piltdown Men, Hominid, Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, Stonehenge, Commanding Spirits, Unbroken Curses, Casting Black Magic Spells, The Chakra Store, The Tarot Store, Divination & Scrying Tools and Supplies, and The Pyramid Collection.
Sources: Article is scheduled to be reviewed.
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