A quiz question · hard
When were the Piltdown skull and jaw conclusively proved to be a forgery?
Kenneth Oakley's fluorine-dating work with Joseph Weiner and Wilfrid Le Gros Clark published in November 1953 demolished the case. The cranium was modern human; the jaw was a filed-down orangutan jaw, iron-stained to match.
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The Sussex Gravel-Pit Skull That Was the Missing Link for Forty Years and Was Actually an Orangutan Jaw Stained with Iron and Filed Down The Piltdown skull was unveiled by Charles Dawson at the Geological Society of London on 18 December 1912 as *Eoanthropus dawsoni* — the missing link between ape and human. It dominated British palaeoanthropology for forty years. The 1953 fluorine and chemical testing proved it was a modern human cranium combined with an orangutan jaw, stained with iron and chromium, with the teeth filed flat.
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