The Case of the Most Famous Fake Human Fossil

Eons: Surviving Deep Time

This episode is a mystery in the most classic literary sense of the word. It’s a whodunit detective story that spans more than a century - the saga of the Piltdown Man Hoax. From a gravel pit in Sussex, we follow the faked fossils through history, to what’s now the Natural History Museum in London, where scientists are using new technologies to try to unravel the identity of the fraudster, and explore how this hoax impacted the study of human origins.

Eons: Mysteries of Deep Time is produced by Complexly for PBS.

© 2022 PBS. All rights reserved.