Piltdown Putdown

The director of the Natural History Museum of London, Arthur Woodward, declared a historic discovery in 1912. A Doctor Charles Dawson unearthed a human-looking skull cap and an ape-looking jawbone from a gravel pit near Piltdown, England. It was called “Dawn Man” and proclaimed to be 500,000 years old! The scientific community was convinced. Now they had proof of a transitional creature between ape and man.

Over the next 41 years, some 500 academic dissertations were written on the famous Piltdown Man. Then in 1953, some scientists finally performed modern chemical analysis on the fossils. They confirmed serious critical reports made years earlier. They found the teeth had been filed to fit, and the bones had been stained to make them look old. The whole thing was a fraud! A Fake! They wanted to believe it so badly they taught it as fact to a whole generation of school children. By the time this hoax was exposed, teh public had gotten used to the idea that science had really proven the ape-man story.

        Dennis R. Petersen, Unlocking the Mysteries of Creation, Master Books, 2002, p. 136