Piltdown excavations. Arthur Smith Woodward (1864-1944,left),English palaeontologist,and Abbe Henri Breuil (1877-1961),French geologist at Piltdown,Sussex,UK. Between 1908 and 1912 Charles Dawson,an amateur geologist,claimed to have found bone fragments at Piltdown. Smith Woodward catalogued and reconstructed the fragments. They claimed that Piltdown Man was the link between modern humans and their ape ancestors,combining the large human skull with an ape-like jaw. In 1953 Piltdown Man was shown to be a fraud. The skull fragments were human,the jaw came from an orangutan and the teeth from a chimpanzee |