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November 21, 2003
Piltdown Man Revisited
Fifty years ago today, the Piltdown Man fossils were revealed as a fraud.
First discovered in 1911, the skull remains found in Piltdown, in East Sussex, England, were held up as the missing link between man and apes. This view held for over forty years until, in 1953, it was shown that chemical treatments - and not time - were behind the apparent age of the specimens.
Amateur fossil hunter Charles Dawson claimed to have obtained the original bone fragments by workmen digging in Piltdown. More fossils were then revealed at the site by Dawson and his friend Arthur Smith Woodward, then keeper of geology at the British Museum.
Doubts of the authenticity of the fossils began to surface when anthropologists began understanding more about the evolution of the human skull, consistent with the fossil record - except for Piltdown Man.
Finally, on 21 November 1953, new tests on the fossils showed that they had been stained and treated to make them look 500,000 years old.
In one sense, though, the fragments were indeed a mix of man and ape - pieces had come from a medieval man, and the jawbone from an orangutan.