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The Piltdown Man is one of the greatest scientific hoaxes. This is how it might have looked.
The Piltdown Man was supposed to have inhabited the area of present-day Great Britain. His alleged remains were found by Charles Dawson. However, it turned out that the hominid unknown to science was a hoax.
In the era of ubiquitous fake news, so-called fact-checking is one of the most valuable skills. Not just while surfing the internet. Challenging scientific authorities is, of course, not a new phenomenon. Alongside successive discoveries by researchers over the centuries, there have also been reports of other pseudoscientific achievements. Fortunately, all of these are eventually verified.
The same was true in the case of the Piltdown Man. However, his non-existence was not immediately recognized. For almost 40 years, many believed that the unidentified hominid inhabited the western periphery of Europe thousands of years ago.
Who was the Piltdown Man?
However, the story of the Piltdown Man began not before Christ, but in 1912. It was then that a British amateur archaeologist announced to the world that he had made an important discovery in Piltdown Village…
