homme de Piltdown

OBS: Piltdown : localité de Grande-Bretagne (East Sussex) [...] En 1912, Charles Dawson et Arthur Smith Woodward y découvrirent des ossements, auxquels ce dernier donna le nom d'Eoanthropus dawsoni, connu sous le nom d'homme de Piltdown. [...] Les plus récentes études chronologiques fondées sur la méthode du fluor, ont montré que les fragments de crâne sont, tout au plus, âgés de quelques millénaires. La mâchoire, qui est celle d'un orang-outan, aurait fait l'objet d'une mystification : les dents auraient été usées artificiellement. Dawson serait lui-même l'auteur de cette fraude.

DEF: a presumed fossil predecessor of modern man found in 1912 by Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward.
CONT: On December 18, 1912, a meeting was held in ... London ... Great Britain. Two man ... Charles Dawson ... and Arthur Woodward [announced that] at Piltdown Common ..., they had discovered the first important fossil human skull ever to be unearthed in England. ... With the Piltdown skull, Britain could point to a great contribution to the study of human evolution. ... The specimen, known as Piltdown man, occupied an honored place in the catalogues of fossil hominids for the next forty years. But in 1953, thanks to some rigorous scholarly detective work, Piltdown man was revealed to be a forgery, manufactured from modern human and animal remains. ... the perpetrators of the Piltdown hoax have finally been caught, and their reputations, once honored, are now besmirched.