For more than a generation, a shambling creature with a human skull and an apelike jaw was known to schoolchildren, Sunday-supplement readers and serious anthropologists as "the first Englishman." He was "Piltdown man," and he was supposed to have lived anywhere from 750,000 to 950,000 years ago. Last week three British scientists, armed with modern chemistry, demolished Piltdown man.
The "first Englishman" was first heard from in 1911 when Charles Dawson, lawyer and amateur anthropologist, unearthed skull fragments and part of a jaw in a gravel pit near Piltdown in Sussex. The skull was obviously human, but the apeishness of the jaw...
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