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Piltdown man

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed. | 2011 | Copyright

Piltdown man name given to human remains found during excavations (1908–15) at Piltdown, Sussex, England, by Charles Dawson. The find led to much speculation and argument. Since they were found with remains of mammals of the Lower Pleistocene epoch, they were supposed to belong to a "Piltdown man" who lived 200,000 to 1,000,000 years ago. Many scientists doubted the whole proposition. They were justified when fluorine tests showed in 1950 that the Piltdown fossil was no more than 50,000 years old. X-ray analysis proved that the jaw was from a chimpanzee; further tests demonstrated conclusively that the jaw and tooth were of modern origin.

There has been much speculation concerning who was responsible for the hoax: Dawson; Arthur Smith Woodward, the paleontologist who identified the fossils as hominid remains; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was present during some of the excavations; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived nearby and knew Dawson; and others. In 1996, on the basis of evidence found in a trunk in the British Museum, it was suggested that the zoologist Martin A. C. Hinton planted the remains to embarrass Woodward.

Bibliography: See J. S. Weiner, The Piltdown Forgery (1955); R. W. Millar, The Piltdown Men (1972); F. Spencer, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery (1990).

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Piltdown Man

A Dictionary of World History | 2000 | Copyright

Piltdown Man Supposed fossil remains ‘discovered’ by Charles Dawson in 1908–13 in gravels in the hamlet of Piltdown in East Sussex, England. The association of a modern-looking skull, ape-like jaw, and extinct animal bones provided just the missing link in human evolution being keenly sought at the time. It was not until 1953 that ‘Eoanthropus dawsoni’ was shown by scientific tests to be a forgery.

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Piltdown man

A Dictionary of Biology | 2004 | Copyright

Piltdown man Fossil remains, purported to have been found by Charles Dawson (1864–1916) at Piltdown, Sussex, in 1912, that were named Eoanthropus dawsoni and described as a representative of the true ancestors of modern humans. The skull resembled that of a human but the jaw was apelike. In 1953 dating techniques showed the specimen to be a fraud.

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Piltdown man

The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable | 2006 | | Copyright

Piltdown man a fraudulent fossil composed of a human cranium and an ape jaw, allegedly discovered near Piltdown, a village in East Sussex, and presented in 1912 as a genuine hominid of the early Pleistocene, but shown to be a hoax in 1953.

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ELIZABETH KNOWLES. "Piltdown man." The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 2006. Encyclopedia.com. 1 Jun. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

ELIZABETH KNOWLES. "Piltdown man." The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 2006. Encyclopedia.com. (June 1, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O214-Piltdownman.html

ELIZABETH KNOWLES. "Piltdown man." The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 2006. Retrieved June 01, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O214-Piltdownman.html

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Free newspaper and magazine articles

	The Piltdown Man: not "the missing link". Magazine article from: The Forensic Examiner; 3/22/2006
	The creator of Sherlock Holmes and the strange case of the Piltdown Man... Newspaper article from: Daily Mail (London); 3/2/2009
	Inside Hoax Manor... where the Piltdown Man myth was born; Fifty years after... Newspaper article from: The Mail on Sunday (London, England); 11/9/2003