Word: piltdown
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...most shocking and most publicized news of the scholastic year came with announcement that the Piltdown man, for 43 years a landmark of Physical Anthropology and thought to be the missing link in the evolution of man, was no older than the oldest British citizen or the ape. Dismayed anthropologists found that the Piltdown skull was the concotion of the jawbone of a modern ape with the skull of a modern man--the most colossal fraud over to be executed in the fossil world. Insisted dumfounded Hallam L. Movius, associate professor, of Anthropology: "Most people in the field are virtuous...
...about the Piltdown...
...more than a generation, a shambling creature with a human skull and an apelike jaw was known to schoolchildren, Sunday-supplement readers and serious anthropologists as "the first Englishman." He was "Piltdown man," and he was supposed to have lived anywhere from 750,000 to 950,000 years ago. Last week three British scientists, armed with modern chemistry, demolished Piltdown...
...first Englishman" was first heard from in 1911 when Charles Dawson, lawyer and amateur anthropologist, unearthed skull fragments and part of a jaw in a gravel pit near Piltdown in Sussex. The skull was obviously human, but the apeishness of the jaw made some authorities suspicious. Others accepted both as genuine. In honor of Finder Dawson they labeled Piltdown man Eoanthropus (dawn man) dawsoni. To some anthropologists, who often jump to conclusions as quickly as a monkey jumps on a banana, the contrast between the skull and the jaw all but "proved" him to be a link connecting apes...
Among the doubting Thomases about Piltdown man were the British Museum's Dr. K. P. Oakley and Oxford Professors J. E. Weiner and W. E. Le Gros Clark. They knew that when bones lie in the earth for a very long time, they accumulate fluorine. When the skeptics got around to a careful analysis, it showed that the relics of Piltdown man did not have enough fluorine to be extremely ancient. The skull fragments may be 50,000 years old, the age of many other human bones found throughout Europe. The jawbone, according to the scientists' report...