Piltdown Man
In 1912 the amateur antiquarian Charles Dawson announced that a gravel pit at Piltdown in East Sussex had yielded the skull and jaw of the missing link between ape and man. British science built its evolutionary tree on it for forty years and quietly set aside the finds that did not fit. In 1953 Kenneth Oakley, Joseph Weiner and Wilfrid Le Gros Clark showed the skull was human and medieval, the jaw was an orangutan's, the teeth had been filed down, and the whole thing stained with an iron solution and chromic acid. A 2016 study using DNA and CT scanning points to a single forger: Dawson himself.
The Ica Stones
From 1966 the Peruvian physician Javier Cabrera assembled more than fifteen thousand engraved andesite stones: men riding dinosaurs, heart transplants, telescopes. The collection became a mainstay of the whole literature of forgotten civilisations. They were supplied by a farmer, Basilio Uschuya, and in 1975 he told reporters he was carving them himself — the alternative was answering for trading antiquities. In 1977, for a BBC documentary, he engraved a fresh stone on camera with a dental drill and aged it with shoe polish and stove soot. Not one stone from the collection has ever been recovered from an archaeological layer.
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