The Missing Link: Assessing the significance of the Piltdown Man hoax.
Once cited as the ‘missing link’ between man and beast and definitive proof of the theory of evolution, the Piltdown Man was exposed as a hoax in 1953. Eoanthropus Dawsoni was ‘excavated’ in 1912 by amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson from a shallow gravel pit in Piltdown, Sussex. Great excitement greeted his find, as at the time fewer than five human fossils had been discovered and most of those were incomplete, their dates uncertain and - almost worst of all at a time of intense imperial rivalry - they were foreign. France and Belgium had long boasted Neanderthal skeletons. Germany had Heidelburg Man. Now here, at last, was the first great British palaeoanthropological find. The Piltdown Man, as he was immediately dubbed, was the ‘first Englishman’ and he caused a world sensation.
The initial remains that Dawson discovered comprised human-looking calvaria - the upper domelike portion of a skull - and the broken right half of an apelike mandible. Over the next few years, as the site was further excavated by Dawson and his team, more prehistoric fauna were unearthed - teeth from a mastodon; bits of a hippopotamus, a beaver, a stegodon; and flint implements thought to have been used by enigmatic Piltdown Man.