Piltdown Man
December 18, 1912
In 1912 amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson announced that he had found the fossil skull of an early human ancestor at Piltdown in England. For four decades many scientists accepted it as a 'missing link'. In 1953 tests proved it was a fake: a human skull combined with an orangutan jaw, stained to look old. The forger has never been conclusively identified, though Dawson is the main suspect.