Crossword clues for piltdown man
piltdown man
Wikipedia
thumb|upright=1.6|Group portrait of the Piltdown skull being examined. Back row (from left): F. O. Barlow, G. Elliot Smith, Charles Dawson, Arthur Smith Woodward. Front row: A S Underwood, Arthur Keith, W. P. Pycraft, and Ray Lankester. Note the portrait of Charles Darwin on the wall. Painting by John Cooke, 1915 The Piltdown Man was a paleoanthropological hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human.
In 1912 amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed he had discovered the "missing link" between ape and man. After finding a section of a human-like skull in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown, East Sussex, Dawson contacted Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum. Dawson and Smith Woodward made further discoveries at the site which they connected to the same individual, including a jawbone, more skull fragments, a set of teeth and primitive tools.
Smith Woodward reconstructed the skull fragments and hypothesised that they belonged to a human ancestor from 500,000 years ago. The discovery was announced at a Geological Society meeting and was given the Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawn-man"). The questionable significance of the assemblage remained the subject of considerable controversy until it was conclusively exposed in 1953 as a forgery. It was found to have consisted of the altered mandible and some teeth of an orangutan deliberately combined with the cranium of a fully developed, though small-brained, modern human.
The Piltdown hoax is prominent for two reasons: the attention it generated around the subject of human evolution, and the length of time, 45 years, that elapsed from its alleged initial discovery to its definitive exposure as a composite forgery.
Usage examples of "piltdown man".
He had cited famous historical frauds from the Loch Ness monster to the Piltdown Man.
I suppose a Piltdown man, gazing from under his eye-ridges at the face of a Toynbee or an Einstein would realize only very remotely that this was the face of an evolved member of his own species.
Paleontology had been plagued by fraud, misinterpretation, and personal feuds ever since its beginnings: the Piltdown man, the legendary rivalry of Marsh and Cope, the faked “.
They might easily be dismissed as chimera, counterfeits like Earth's Piltdown Man, if they hadn't been so real.
They were mostly lower than the Piltdown man in the scale of evolution, but in every case definitely human.
Every child knows that the skull of the Piltdown man differs from that of the Cromagnard.