The Piltdown Man Hoax: The ‘Missing Link’ That Fooled Science for 41 Years

A skull lying on the ground, illustrating the fossil bones at the centre of the Piltdown case

About 5 min readIn 1912, Charles Dawson announced the ‘missing link’ between apes and humans, found in a gravel pit in Sussex. It took 41 years — and new chemical dating — to prove that Piltdown Man was a modern human skull joined to a filed orangutan jaw.