The skeleton presented as Piltdown Man was nicknamed the “Missing Link.” In 1912, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed to have found human-like skull fragments in gravel near Piltdown in Sussex, England. The discovery was promoted as evidence of a transitional ancestor between apes and humans.
Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum helped reconstruct the remains, combining a human-looking braincase with an ape-like lower jaw. The arrangement seemed to support a then-popular theory that human evolution proceeded toward a larger brain while retaining primitive jaw features. The specimen was given the scientific name Eoanthropus dawsoni and was widely treated as a major evolutionary discovery.
The story collapsed in the early 1950s. Scientific tests showed that the skull and jaw came from different species: the skull was human, while the jaw belonged to an orangutan, with animal teeth added and the bones artificially stained and aged. Piltdown Man is now remembered as one of science’s most notorious hoaxes. “Missing Link” was the historical nickname, not a valid scientific classification.