Piltdown Man announced to the Geological Society

DEC 18 1912

Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward presented skull and jaw fragments from Piltdown, East Sussex, to the Geological Society of London on 18 December 1912 as a missing link between apes and humans. The specimen was in fact a medieval human skull combined with a roughly 500-year-old orangutan jaw and fossil chimpanzee teeth, stained with iron solution and chromic acid and filed to fit. Fluorine dating by Kenneth Oakley, Wilfrid Le Gros Clark and Joseph Weiner exposed it in November 1953; an eight-year review published in 2016 concluded Dawson was the forger.