"Piltdown Man" may not be widely known today, but this paleoanthropological hoax truly deserves its place on the list of biggest deceptions in the whole of human history. The fossilised bones of a supposedly-unknown early species of man were revealed as having been found in a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex, in 1912 by archaeologist Charles Dawson - and were named as Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawn-man"). For the next 40 years it was believed that this was an early species of man who had yet to be discovered. However, in 1953, it emerged that Piltdown Man was actually a huge fraud - he was in fact a fully-developed modern human, believed to have died 600 years previously, whose lower jawbone had been replaced with that of an orangutan. Every scientist in the early-20th Century hoped to find the so-called "missing links" in the history of evolution, as first theorised by Charles Darwin in 1859, but it is unclear who actually made the forgery. Dawson himself remains high up the list of suspects, although it appears a young museum volunteer Martin Hinton - whose box contained fossils stained in exactly the same way as the Piltdown Man - may have been the most likely.
NUFC editor for WhatCulture.com/NUFC. History graduate (University of Edinburgh) and NCTJ-trained journalist. I love sports, hopelessly following Newcastle United and Newcastle Falcons. My pastimes include watching and attending sports matches religiously, reading spy books and sampling ales.
