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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Piltdown man
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One of the most successful of scientific forgeries. In 1912 an amateur geologist, Charles Dawson (1864–1916), revealed that he had found parts of the skull of an early man in a gravel formation at Piltdown, near Lewes in Sussex, together with fossil remains of extinct animals. The reconstructed skull appeared to share characteristics of both man and ape, and so was eagerly accepted by many scholars (but far from all) as the missing link in the evolution between our ape ancestors and ourselves.
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In honour of its finder, this early species of man was given the scientific name Eoanthropus dawsoni (Greek for 'Dawson's dawn man'). It was not until 1953 that improved methods of testing made the fraud unmistakable. Piltdown man exhibited the two sets of characteristics because the fragments combined a human skull and the lower jaw of an orang-utan, both of them scientifically treated to suggest fossilization.
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