The Piltdown man (Eoanthropus dawsoni) was a possible scam made by Charles Dawson and / or others against the palaeontologists from November 1912 until it was uncovered in 1953.

Dawson claimed that he had found a hominid skull in the Piltdown excavation area, near Uckfield in Sussex in England, and gave him the Latin name as listed above (meaning "Dawson Man Dusk"). This discovery is considered by British palentologists as a key to the relationship between apes and humans, due to the presence of cranium (part of the bone wrapped in the brain) that resembles humans and jaw-shaped jaws. Many doubted this discovery until the second discovery (Piltdown II) was published in 1915. Nevertheless, it is increasingly difficult for scholars to find similarities between Piltdown Man with other original hominid findings and Piltdown Man almost to be said to have been ignored by the experts in the late 1930s. After passing the florin absorption test in 1949 and the resurrection of the land in Piltdown, Piltdown Man was finally declared a fraud on November 21, 1953.

Piltdown man turns out to be (literally) half-ape, half-human: it consists of a medieval human skull, his lower jaw derived from an orangutan from Borneo (Indonesia) and his teeth fossils from chimpanzees. Age was disguised by staining his bones with iron and chromic acid solution.

There are two reasons why this fraud can last for 40 years. First, he satisfied the Europeans' desire for the earliest human beings to be from Eurasia, and secondly, the Englishman also wanted a "first man from England" after the discovery of early humans in France and Germany (Neanderthal Man). It is this jealousy that causes the fake skull and jaw to be kept and avoided from the public eye.