The 100-year mystery of Piltdown Man

摘要

Nine years ago, the Natural History Museum in London, where I work, celebrated the 50th anniversary of the disclosure of one of the most successful scientific hoaxes in history. In 1953, scientists from the museum and the University of Oxford, UK, showed that specimens unearthed in the early twentieth century from the village of Piltdown in Sussex, UK, were an elaborate forgery-not evidence of a primitive human, as their discoverers had claimed in December 1912.