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Speaker 1: This Day in History Class. It's a production of I

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Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hi again everyone, It's Eves and welcome to

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Speaker 1: This Day in History Class, a show where history waits

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Speaker 1: for no One. Today is November one. The day was

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Speaker 1: November twenty one, nineteen fifty three. The pilt Down Man,

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Speaker 1: the supposed fossil remains of a species of extinct comin in,

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Speaker 1: was exposed as a hoax. Charles Dawson was an amateur

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Speaker 1: antiquarian who lived in Lewis, Sussex. He claimed that in

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Speaker 1: nineteen o eight he began to find fossilized remains in

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Speaker 1: a gravel formation at pilt Down Common. Major evidence of

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Speaker 1: early humans in the British Aisles had not yet been uncovered,

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Speaker 1: so his discoveries were potentially groundbreaking. They attracted the attention

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Speaker 1: of Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of the Geological Department of

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Speaker 1: the British Museum. Woodward and Dawson continued to search the

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Speaker 1: gravel pit and discovered fragments of a cranium, jaw and teeth.

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Speaker 1: They suggested that all of the fragments belonged to one individual.

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Speaker 1: At a meeting of Geological Society of London on December eighteenth,

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Speaker 1: nineteen twelve, Woodward announced the discovery of the Piltdown remains.

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Speaker 1: He proposed that the pilt Down Man represented an unknown

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Speaker 1: species of extinct hominin that was the missing evolutionary link

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Speaker 1: between apes and early humans. He dubbed the pilt Down

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Speaker 1: Man Theoanthropist Dawson E or Dawn Man, after Dawson. From

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Speaker 1: nineteen thirteen to nineteen fifteen, more fragments were excavated from

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Speaker 1: the site and another one nearby. Dawson died in nineteen sixteen.

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Speaker 1: Many scientists accepted his view that the fragments all belonged

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Speaker 1: to the same individual, but others believed that the fragments

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Speaker 1: came from more than one source, possibly a modern man

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Speaker 1: and an anthropoid eight. In nineteen fifteen, Garrett Miller published

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Speaker 1: the results of a study that concluded that the job

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Speaker 1: was that of a chimpanzee. This conclusion was supported by

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Speaker 1: other scientists, but debate continued over the origin of the

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Speaker 1: Piltdown remains. People began to doubt the legitimacy of the

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Speaker 1: Piltdown Man in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, when

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Speaker 1: other early human remains began to be discovered around the world.

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Speaker 1: Plus it was determined that the piltd Down gravels were

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Speaker 1: not as old as they were once thought to be.

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Speaker 1: By the nineteen forties, more advanced dating technologies had been developed.

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Speaker 1: In nineteen forty nine, paleontologist Kenneth Oakley and colleagues cr.

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Speaker 1: Hoskins tested the Piltdown remains using a kind of chemical

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Speaker 1: analysis called florine testing. It was determined that all the

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Speaker 1: fragments were from around the same time period, but we're

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Speaker 1: much younger than suggested, possibly somewhere around fifty thousand years

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Speaker 1: old rather than five hundred thousand. That meant that the

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Speaker 1: pilt Down Man could not be the missing link between

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Speaker 1: apes and humans. In nineteen fifty three, after an improved

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Speaker 1: method of florine analysis had developed, Oakley physical anthropology professor

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Speaker 1: Joseph Winer an Oxford anthropologist Wilfrid Lagros Clark determined that

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Speaker 1: the jaw and teeth were not the same age as

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Speaker 1: the skull. They reported their discovery in the bulletin of

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Speaker 1: the Natural History Museum on November ninety three. The next day,

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Speaker 1: the hoax was announced in the press. The remains included

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Speaker 1: fragments of a six year old human cranium. The jaw

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Speaker 1: and teeth of an orangutan and the tooth of what

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Speaker 1: was likely a champion z. The fragments had been stained

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Speaker 1: with chromium and an iron sulfate solution, and the teeth

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Speaker 1: had been artificially rated to simulate where. On top of that,

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Speaker 1: the remains were not even from Britain. The pelt Down

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Speaker 1: Man was a hoax. A number of people have been

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Speaker 1: pegged as the perpetrator of the hoax, including Dawson and

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Speaker 1: a museum volunteer turn keeper of zoology at the museum

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Speaker 1: named Martin A. C. Hinton. In s teen, researchers published

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Speaker 1: an article that concluded new evidence suggested Dawson was responsible

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Speaker 1: for the hoax, though he may not have acted alone.

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Speaker 1: They said his quote hunger for acclaim may have driven

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Speaker 1: him to risk his reputation and mis direct the course

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Speaker 1: of anthropology for decades. I'm Eve Jeff Coote, and hopefully

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Speaker 1: you know a little more about history today than you

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Speaker 1: did yesterday. If you know you already spend too much

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Speaker 1: time on social media, spend some of that time with

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Speaker 1: and Instagram. You can also shoot us an email at

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Speaker 1: this day at i heart media dot com. Thanks for

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Speaker 1: going on this trip through history with us. We'll see

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Speaker 1: you again tomorrow with another episode Rests. For more podcasts

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