Piltdown hoax

From Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium

	Main Article	Talk	Related Articles  [?]	Bibliography  [?]	External Links  [?]
	This is a draft article, under development and not meant to be cited but you can help to improve it. These unapproved articles are subject to a disclaimer. [edit intro]

The Piltdown Hoax was a paleoanthropological controversy involving the falsification of a fossil specimen to provide the missing link between apes and humans on the scale of modern human evolution. Named for the site of its alleged discovery, Piltdown, England, the specimen was found by Charles Dawson in 1911. Consisting of portions of a human-like skull and an ape-like jaw, the lone sample was presented to the world as a new species, Eoanthropus dawsoni, in 1912. It was not until the 1950s, when fluorine dating revealed a large discrepancy between the relative dates of the skull and the jaw, that the Piltdown Man was determined to be a forgery.