Anthropology’s Greatest Hoax

Have you ever heard of Eoanthropus dawsoni? That's the species name assigned to an early specimen of man discovered by Charles Dawson in England in 1912. The fossils came to be known as Piltdown Man. It was a sensational discovery that caused a rift between scientists who couldn't see how Piltdown Man fit in with other human fossils from around the world and British scientists who welcomes the discovery as evidence that Europeans were superior to other humans even millions of years ago. It wasn't until the 1950s that Piltdown Man was proven to be a complete fraud, as some had suspected for decades. The lesson is that scientists have to be both open to new and changing ideas and skeptical of evidence until it is repeated or confirmed in some way.