Discovery of the Piltdown Man announced.
The announcement by British archeologist Charles Dawson at a conference of the Geological Society of London was received with very little skepticism in the field of paleoanthropology. The discovery of fossilized remains of an unidentified human ancestor in Piltdown, East Sussex, England, was thought to have provided valuable clues about human evolution. It wasn’t until 1953 that the Piltdown Man was discovered to be a hoax – with the skull consisting of the jawbones of an orangutan and the cranium of an adult human being.