Or the Piltdown Man. For fifty years the Piltdown Man was the proof of the development of a man from an ape. They discovered the bones of a bent-over fellow who looks like half monkey and half human being. Oh, that's a proof we're descended from monkeys! And so replicas, castings of the Piltdown Man, were put in three hundred museums all over the world. All the textbooks showed pictures of the Piltdown man, half man half ape.
Then it was discovered that the Piltdown man was a hoax. It was a trick. Somebody put together some bones – it was bent over because he had arthritis – and he colored them to look old. From these bones and a filed down tooth they built up a whole story of a different kind of a person, half human and half ape. It was later discovered the tooth came from an extinct pig. Goodbye. And today nobody even mentions the Piltdown man any more. Today it's gone. No more.
