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Piltdown Man's  Reconstructed Skull
Piltdown Man's
Reconstructed Skull
Where did the Piltdown Man get his name? Between 1911 and 1915, researcher Charles Dawson found fragments of a cranium, a tooth and some tools in a gravel deposit in Piltdown, in Sussex, England. The scientific world was agog with the findings — anthropologists believed that the fossilized remains of an ancient hominid had been discovered, a missing link between ape and man. The fossil was called the Piltdown man after the area in which he was found. However, much as the word Edsel has become synonymous with lemon, Piltdown has become synonymous with fraud. It took 40 years for the discovery to be scientifically disproved. On this date in 1953, the Piltdown man was declared a fake. The skull was found to be composed of a combination of the remains of a man and an orangutan.