The
Piltdown Man was a paleoanthropological hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the
fossilised remains of a previously unknown
early human. These fragments consisted of parts of a
skull and
jawbone, said to have been collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at
Piltdown, East Sussex, England. The
Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawn-man", after the collector
Charles Dawson) was given to the specimen. The significance of the specimen remained the subject of controversy until it was exposed in 1953 as a forgery, consisting of the lower jawbone of an
orangutan deliberately combined with the
cranium of a fully developed
modern human.