The village of Piltdown, scene of the infamous hoax find of a prehistoric skull in 1912, is in which English county?
Piltdown Man Piltdown Man The Piltdown Man was a paleoanthropological hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. In 2016, the results of an extensive scientific review established that amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson had very likely perpetrated the hoax. In 1912, Charles Dawson claimed that he had discovered the "missing link" between ape and man. In February 1912, Dawson contacted Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum, stating he had found a section of a human-like skull in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown, East Sussex. That summer, Dawson and
Piltdown Man investigations suggest that the hoax involved accomplices rather than a single forger. In 1912, the majority of the scientific community believed the Piltdown Man was the “missing link” between apes and humans. However, over time the Piltdown Man lost its validity, as other discoveries such as Taung Child and Peking Man were found. R. W. Ehrich and G. M. Henderson note, “To those who are not completely disillusioned by the work of their predecessors, the disqualification of the Piltdown skull changes little in the broad evolutionary pattern. The validity of the specimen has always been questioned.” Eventually, during the 1940s