Three suspects behind the Piltdown Man fossil hoax

Francis Thackeray, Honorary Research Associate, ESI

The “Piltdown Case” relates to an English hoax or joke in which someone at Piltdown in Sussex buried an unusual human skull (stained brown) with a modified orangutan jaw (also stained brown), to look as if the relatively modern specimens represented a fossilised “ape-man”, apparently associated with the fossilised bones and teeth of animals known to have existed more than a million years ago. This Piltdown Man “fossil” was discovered in 1912, and announced with much acclaim at the end of the year in London as Eoanthropus, the “Dawn Man”, otherwise referred to as “The Earliest Englishman”. 

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