Printer Friendly
Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Thesaurus - The Free Dictionary
3,920,379,030 visitors served.
forum Join the Word of the Day Mailing List For webmasters
?
Dictionary/
thesaurus
Medical
dictionary
Legal
dictionary
Financial
dictionary
Acronyms
 
Idioms
Encyclopedia
Wikipedia
encyclopedia
?

Piltdown hoax

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Wikipedia 0.01 sec.

Piltdown hoax

Forgery 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.
Want to thank TFD for its existence? Tell a friend about us, add a link to this page, add the site to iGoogle, or visit the webmaster's page for free fun content.
?Page tools
Printer friendly
Cite / link 		Feedback
Mentioned in?  References in periodicals archive?   Encyclopedia browser?   Full browser?
No references found
 
In 1953, he assisted in unmasking the infamous Piltdown hoax.
Fossil sparks: new finds ignite controversy over ape and human ... by Bower, Bruce / Science News
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.
Frauds, Hoaxes and Pseudoscience: a course in argumentation by Patton, Martha D. / Academic Exchange Quarterly
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.
STILL A CLASSIC by Haught, John F. / Commonweal
 
 
 
Encyclopedia
?

Terms of Use | Privacy policy | Feedback | Advertise with Us | Copyright © 2012 Farlex, Inc.
Disclaimer
All content on this website, including dictionary, thesaurus, literature, geography, and other reference data is for informational purposes only. This information should not be considered complete, up to date, and is not intended to be used in place of a visit, consultation, or advice of a legal, medical, or any other professional.