Piltdown man

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?

2. Skull reconstruction | The debate

No one knew what Piltdown Man looked like and there was much debate about how the pieces of skull and jaw fitted together. Anatomist Arthur Keith, from the Royal College of Surgeons, disagreed with the reconstructed skull Woodward came up with. Believing he could create a more accurate representation of what Piltdown Man looked like, Keith painstakingly examined and matched up the patterns of the blood vessels inside the skull pieces to determine how they fitted together.

Here are the reconstructions that Woodward and Keith made of Piltdown Man's skull.

Comparison of Woodward's (left) and Keith's reconstruction of the skull of Piltdown Man
©The Natural History Museum

Question

Whose reconstruction would you trust the most?

References

• Human Evolution:
  Walking with Cavemen at the BBC
• Becoming Human:
  an interactive journey through human evolution from the Institute of Human origins
• Hunting Hominids:
  human evolution from the Discovery Channel
• Human origins:
  the Smithsonian Institution Human origins Program