December 1, 2013
1 min read
Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAmAn Early Skeptic of the Piltdown Hoax
This letter was written by David Waterston, a professor of anatomy at what was then called University of London, King's College. It is republished in its entirety
By Nature magazine & David Waterston
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A letter published in Nature on November 13, 1913, shows that a strong strand of skepticism ran parallel with the widespread credulity in the fraudulent fossil that had been supposedly "found" near Piltdown in 1912. The skeptics accumulated enough solid evidence that by 1953 it was possible to definitively prove the fossils had been faked in modern times.
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