Finally, in 1953 and after nearly 40 years, Joseph Weiner and Kenneth Oakley applied the recently developed fluorine test to the bones—and found that Piltdown Man was a complete hoax. Someone had intentionally taken an ape jaw and combined it with a fragment of human skull bone, filed the teeth somewhat, and then carefully stained the entire “specimen” so that the bones looked both ancient and appeared to be a matching set.
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Tags: Academia, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Keith, Arthur Smith Woodward, Bone, British Association for the Advancement of Science, British Geological Society, British Museum, British Museum of Natural History, Charles Darwin, Charles Dawson, Darwinism, Darwinist, Darwinists, Grafton Elliot Smith, Jaw, Joseph Weiner, Kenneth Oakley, Louis Leakey, Martin Hinton, Methodological Naturalism, Oxford University, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Piltdown Gravel Pit National Monument, Piltdown Man, Royal Anthropological Institute, Royal College of Surgeons, Science, Secular Humanism, Social Darwinism, Solly Zuckerman, Thomas Huxley, United Kingdom
