biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1864–1916)
|
| biography:
| Solicitor and antiquarian, born at Fulkeith Hall, Lancashire, NW England, UK. An amateur geologist, he was the victim (or perpetrator?) of the celebrated ‘Piltdown Man’ hoax, when cranial fragments, found by him at Piltdown from 1908 to 1912, together with parts of a jawbone unearthed later, were accepted by anthropologists as the ‘Missing Link’ in Darwin's theory of evolution, and named after him Eoanthropus dawsoni (‘Dawson's Dawn Man’). It was not until 1953 that the skull was formally denounced as a fake. |
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