piltdown man

noun

1. a hypothetical early modern human, assigned to the genus Eoanthropus, whose existence was inferred from skull fragments that were allegedly found at Piltdown, England, in 1912 but were exposed as fraudulent through chemical analysis in 1953.

noun

1. an advanced hominid postulated from fossil bones found in Sussex in 1912, but shown by modern dating methods in 1953 to be a hoax, which was perpetrated by a student museum assistant who was refused a wage

1. A presumed early species of human, Eoanthropus dawsoni, postulated from a skull supposedly found in a gravel bed in about 1912 but determined in 1953 to be a fake constructed from a human cranium and the jawbone of an ape.