The 1912 Piltdown Man Hoax (Episode 99)

In 1912, English geologists and archaeologists were buzzing over the discovery of an amazing set of human remains recovered from a gravel pit outside the village of Piltdown. Amateur archeologist Charles Dawson had uncovered what looked to be Darwin's "Missing Link", the proof of human evolution. Thought to be 600,000 years old, Dawson's find - a fossilized human skull and a jawbone that looked much like an ape's - was immediately controversial and fascinating.

On this episode, we're talking gravel, lost teeth, the long con, and why you should always get an expert to vouch for you.

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Sources for this episode include:

"The Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed" by M. Russell, 2012

"Study reveals culprit behind Piltdown Man, one of science's most famous hoaxes", by M. Price for Science magazine, 2016

"Solving the Piltdown Man Scientific Fraud" by I. De Groot for Scientific American, 2016

"The Problem of Piltdown Man", by M. Subramanian for Distillations, 2023 "Note on the Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus Dawsoni )" by A. Smith Woodward for The Geological Magazine, 1913