Piltdown Man Skull

3D Model

Model of skull of ‘Plitdown Man’.

The skull was pieced together in 1912 from bone fragments excavated near the village of Piltdown in Sussex. Declared to be an ancestor of modern humans, the skull was a forgery made from a human cranium and the jaw of an orangutan.

The hoax was almost certainly the work of Charles Dawson, a Sussex solicitor and amateur archaeologist who announced the find. However, the skull was not identified as a fake until the early 1950s, over thirty years after Dawson’s death.

3D model digitised by the University of Brighton’s Cultural Informatics Group from a cast in the collection of the Royal Pavilion & Museums.