"Solving the Piltdown hoax is still important now," De Groote and her colleagues write. Piltdown Man met turn-of-the-century researchers' preconceived notions for what an archaic human fossil would look like — so they were far less skeptical than they ought to have been. To figure out who was responsible, paleoanthropologist Isabelle De Groote and more than a dozen other researchers reexamined the Piltdown skull and attempted to retrace how it was made. The Piltdown forgery was the work of one man — solicitor and amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson, who first "uncovered" the remains. "The Piltdown hoax stands as a cautionary tale to scientists not to be led by preconceived ideas, but to use scientific integrity and rigor in the face of novel discoveries."

Source: Washington Post August 11, 2016 12:28 UTC