Caption

Piltdown Man reconstruction. Sculpted head reconstruction (based on Piltdown 1 and 2) by Maurice Wilson created for the Exhibition of Britain in 1950. Charles Dawson (1864-1916), an amateur geologist, claimed to have found bone fragments at Piltdown between 1908 and 1912. It was claimed that Piltdown Man was the link between modern humans and their ape ancestors, combining the large human skull with an ape-like jaw. In 1953 Piltdown Man was shown to be a fraud. The skull fragments were human, the jaw came from an orangutan and the teeth from a chimpanzee.