Today in History: Piltdown Man acknowledged to be a hoax, 1953 (Great Britain) (one of my favorites!)

The saga of Piltdown started in 1907. That year, a sand mine worker in Germany discovered the jaw bone of Homo heidelbergensis—a 200,000-to-600,000-year-old hominin now recognized as a likely common ancestor to both modern humans and Neandertals. The find, compounded by rising national tensions that would eventually lead to World War I, sparked something of an inferiority complex among U.K. naturalists. So it seemed fortuitous when, 5 years later, Charles Dawson, a professional lawyer and amateur fossil hunter in Sussex, U.K. (now East Sussex, U.K.), wrote to his friend, paleontologist Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, announcing that he had uncovered a “thick portion of a human(?) skull which will rival H. heidelbergensis in solidity” near the Sussex village of Piltdown.

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As more and more hominin fossils were discovered over the next few decades in Africa, China, and Indonesia, however, Piltdown Man lost its significance as a singular missing link. The hoax came to light in 1953 when scientists at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, using the then-new technique of fluorine dating—which relies on the fact that older bones absorb more fluoride from groundwater over time—revealed that Piltdown Man’s bones were not all the same age. Further analysis revealed they were an amalgam of carefully carved and stained human and ape bones.

[snip]

Dawson was able to fool the experts of the day by employing the same trick used by successful con artists since time immemorial: He showed them what they wanted to see. “Dawson really played a very clever card,” De Groote says. “With the findings coming out of Germany, and Britain wanting to be at the forefront of science, there was this sense that, ‘We must have these fossils in Britain, as well.’”

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/study-reveals-culprit-behind-piltdown-man-one-science-s-most-famous-hoaxes