Piltdown Man was the sensational discovery of a fossil human ancestor in southern England in 1908. It was a classic story of a dogged amateur collector, Charles Dawson, striking it rich. He fished a human-like skull and an ape-like jawbone out of a gravel quarry and took them to noted paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward at the Natural History Museum in London. Smith Woodward immediately realized their significance, accompanied Dawson to the Piltdown site and found some ancient animal teeth and more "human" bones. The word of the discovery of Piltdown spread quickly, especially in England, where fossil experts had been forced to watch enviously as fabulous fossils like Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon were discovered on the continent. Although the fossil was controversial from the beginning (as early as 1915, skeptics argued that the jawbone and the skull had come from different animals), it was accepted as England's signature contribution to the study of human prehistory and remained that way until 1953. Only then was it revealed to be a fake, the jawbone belonging to an ancient orangutan, with the teeth filed down to look more human, and the skull, although human, dyed reddish to make it appear aged.A fake! But who was to blame? Dawson was obviously the prime suspect, an amateur who needed a big discovery to secure the approval of the professionals and who had whined to Smith Woodward that he was "waiting for the big find that never seems to come along." But what made the Piltdown mystery even much more intriguing was the idea that there might have been a "second man," someone who might have provided expertise or even some of the fossils that apparently had been secreted in the quarry. But who might that second man have been?
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