Everyone was eager to know just what the 'missing link' had looked like. Click on the picture to see how the Piltdown scientists reconstructed the skull of Piltdown Man. How does it compare with the reconstruction we might come up with now?
At this time many people believed an early human would have looked somewhere in between an ape and a modern human. To fit neatly with this hypothesis, the Piltdown Man skull was distinctly human whereas the jaw was more like that of an ape. Dawson and Woodward classed Piltdown Man as a new species. They called it Eoanthropus dawsoni.
Palaeontologist, William Sollas referred to Piltdown Man as 'a creature which had already attained to human intelligence, but had not yet wholly lost its ancestral jaw and fighting teeth.'
