Piltdown Man, as a human ancestor

Also known as Eoanthropus dawsoni

Cause of death

Killed by scandal

Chemical testing proved the skull was a modern human cranium joined to a stained orangutan jaw.

Piltdown Man was announced in 1912 as the missing link between apes and humans, conveniently found in England at a moment when England had no significant hominin fossils of its own. It shaped four decades of research and sent the field down blind alleys, because a large-brained early ancestor was exactly what many scientists expected to find. Fluorine dating exposed it as a deliberate forgery in 1953. The forger's identity was not settled for another sixty years.