This goldnode of online learning is the work of the British Natural History Museum, where the actual Piltdown artifacts are housed. The image shown with this post is from the interactive tutorial at the museum’s website, where you are invited to compare how the fossils were examined at the time of their discovery with how they would be studied today. The museum describes the history of the artifacts, which were proven to be a fraud 40 years after they were discovered in 1912 by Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward at Piltdown in Sussex in 1912:
Their discovery came 50 years after Darwin published his theory of evolution, just when many people were beginning to think about our ancestors and question what kind of creature might have bridged the gap between apes and us. The only evidence we had of early humans was the skull cap of Java Man, thought to have lived 700,000 years ago, and the jaw of Heidelberg Man, estimated to have lived about 500,000 years ago.
