Piltdown Man exposed as a forgery

JUN 1953

Kenneth Oakley, Wilfrid Le Gros Clark and Joseph Weiner demonstrated that the Piltdown skull, hailed since 1912 as the missing link, was a modern human cranium combined with an orangutan jaw whose teeth had been filed down and stained. Fluorine absorption dating showed the mandible contained far less fluorine than the skull. Time magazine carried the evidence in November 1953 and Piltdown vanished from the evolutionary charts almost overnight, after 41 years. The forger's identity was disputed for decades, with suspects including Arthur Conan Doyle and Teilhard de Chardin. An eight-year review reported in 2016 pinned it on Charles Dawson alone, matching a tooth he 'found' in 1915 to the same jaw.