Anthony Dicks: The Piltdown Men

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This talk introduces the characters who were involved in the discovery in 1912 of Eoanthropus Dawsoni the much sought-after missing link between Man and Apes and its denouement half a century later. It is now generally agreed that the architect of the Piltdown Hoax was Charles Dawson, but was he merely one of the builders? The talk will briefly provide a time-line of the fraud and introduce the characters involved both in the discovery itself and in its eventual exposure. It will propose the identity of the forger or forgers.

Anthony Dicks moved to Piltdown in 1955, just two years after Piltdown Man was finally exposed as a forgery that had deceived the scientific community for decades. He lived and worked on the estate where the Piltdown Skull had been supposedly found, where one of his fellow workers had actually worked alongside the gravel digger who first uncovered the skull; and he got to know Miss Mabel Kenward, who lived in the manor house at the time and well-remembered the events surrounding the discovery.