Piltdown Man

Stone Museum of Geology

The announcement in 1912 of the discovery of fossil remains near Piltdown, Sussex of a "missing link" between apes and man, rocked the scientific world. Very few human fossils had been found at that time but Darwin's theory that man had evolved from apes was universally accepted and it was thought only a matter of time before fossil evidence of this transition came to light. The problem was that no one knew what such evidence would look like, simply that it would probably display characteristics of both human and ape. The Piltdown Man remains fitted this criteria perfectly. In 1953 however, an international congress of paleontologists, using dating techniques that had not been available 40 years before, determined that the skulls were from medieval humans and that the jawbone was actually from an orang-utan. Microscopic examination of some of the teeth also showed that they had been deliberately filed down. In September 1990, the Natural History Museum in London finally solved the hoax, ascribing the anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith as the mastermind. This local pub sign remains as a legacy to the greatest palaeotological hoax of the 20th Century.