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Piltdown hoax |
Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Wikipedia, Hutchinson | 0.04 sec. |
Piltdown hoaxForgery of human fossil remains that impeded early 20th-century progress in the study of human evolution. The apparently fossilized skull found at Piltdown Common near Lewes, Eng., was first proposed as a new species of prehistoric man (“Piltdown man”) in 1912. Only in 1954 was the skull shown to consist of a human cranium skillfully joined to the jaw of an orangutan. The hoax may have been perpetrated by the skull's discoverer, Charles Dawson, though evidence discovered in the 1970s suggests a British Museum staff member, Martin A.C. Hinton. How to thank TFD for its existence? Tell a friend about us, add a link to this page, add the site to iGoogle, or visit webmaster's page for free fun content. |
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| In The Panda's Thumb, a collection of essays on natural history, Stephen Jay Gould attributes the longevity of the Piltdown Hoax (almost fifty years) to the imposition of strong hope on dubious evidence and to the uncritical acceptance of a strange event that reinforced a cultural bias. Here we find discussions of the Piltdown hoax and the potential dispute (actually resolved peacefully) between Darwin and Wallace concerning the credit for the discovery of evolution. Stephen Jay Gould, disgusted by Teilhard's intuition that evolution has a direction, saw him as the leader of a new "cult" and even associated him with the iniquitous Piltdown hoax. |
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